Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Time and social networks
Destinies of the post-war colonists in the village of Trate 107 Socialising differences based on the judgements of taste What was important for the village in the second half of the century were venues of the newly emerged local "public culture”, i.e. public places where people - especially youth - would meet, communicate, socialise and participate in common activities. There were two castles in the village inherited from the feudal era. Both offered enough space for public activities. In April, 1948, young women who belonged to the village branch of a women organisation (the so-called Anti-Fascist Women’s Front) reconstructed and adapted the existing reception room in the Upper Castle. It functioned as a public hall for organising local leisure and cultural activities. The socalled Communal House {Zadružni dom) soon became the centre of the new village public culture. The village youth organised educational lectures, public celebrations, dance parties and theatre shows. Thus, in the fifties, extraordinarily lively and attractive amateur theatre scene developed in Trate and in the surrounding villages. Occasionally, in the venue of Zadružni dom, they also organised public consumption of radio, and later television programmes (the Slovene national television started to broadcast in 1958). Therefore, the emerging village "public culture” was essentially shaped both by post-war popular culture and by the “official" cultural policy of the authorities, which were striving to “improve” the general level of local culture. It can be said that the majority of villagers who grew up in the late forties and the early fifties, was socialised in quite a different "society” than their parents. Their leisure-time activities provided an opportunity to establish close ties with other individuals from their peergroup. These close relations - resulting in generational networks - still play an important role in the life of the village. They were important in the eighties, when community members decided to build a common water system and persuaded other villagers to join, or even more recently, when they organised celebrations within the framework of the local pensioners’ organisation.
