Lena Kocutar

Alexandrinke

An estimated 10.000 women left Slovene Littoral, the Western region of Slovenia, for Cairo and Alexandria from the second half of the 19th century up until the second world war. In Slovenia these women were called Aleksandrinke, in Egypt les Goriciens, les Slaves, les Slovenes. They were protagonists of a generations long wave of economic migration. They worked as nannies, wet nurses, and governesses for affluent, often European merchant families in Egypt, highly coveted because of their language skills and good education.

“You don’t know how many tears were shed here on Sunday afternoons; we saw the suffering of the young mothers, who in order to save their homes, in most of the cases deep in debt, gave their milk and healthy body to an unknown child and when they gave birth for the second, third time, they always came back to Egypt, as the job of wet nurses was the highest paid job available to women, and with every child the family farm became larger, but the suffering of these women as well.” (School Sister Franka Martelanc, Cairo 1974, quoted from Dorica Makuc: “Aleksandrinke — The Alexandrian Women”, Gorizia 1993.)

As part of this female migration movement, Potica, a traditional Slovenian festive pastry, found its way into a Middle Eastern cookbook by Claudia Roden, who grew up in Cairo with her Slovene nanny, Maria Koron. She writes: “The recipes are a part of history, the record of history, the documentation of civilisation. I’m not exaggerating. They are our memories and our identity, every recipe holds a story.” While the Potica is being celebrated nowadays as a national Slovenian food, it was passed down generations of women across the cultures, in the kitchen, the traditionally female space, where the taste of a migrant’s home can be (re)produced and shared with others.

Video and Installation, 2018

The voices in the video were sourced from the interviews conducted by Metod Pevec for his 2011 documentary film Aleksandrinke. The audio was integrated in the video with Pevec’s permission.