Hudič [the Devil] buys Slom and becomes Slomšek

The discovery of Bishop Slomšek’s first ancestor at Slom pri Ponikvi

Abstract

The contribution draws on and further develops Maks Goričar’s study (1938) on the lineage of Blessed Bishop Anton Martin Slomšek (1800–1862), which Goričar already had difficulty reconstructing until 1700 due to destroyed civil registers of the parish of Ponikva. The most important findings enabled by the discovery of the previously unknown sources on the origin of the bishop’s great-grandfather Matija Novak–Slomšek, who also bore the name Hudič and at the end of the seventeenth century moved to a hide that he had bought at Slom from the neighbouring village of Brezje. The hide was therefore not purchased years later by his son Štefan Novak–Slomšek. The sources preserved portray Matija as a rather violent man, whose surnames Novak and Hudič can be traced back to the second half of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth century, respectively.