EDUCATION & SCIENCE

Slovenes value education incredibly highly. Qualifications provide much more status than employment, and this leads to some remarkable statistics. The literacy rate is 99.6%, and there are three universities with over 75,000 students in total. It is very common to continue studying after university, to masters or even PhD level.

Every visitor to Slovenia finds him or herself looking at the beautiful banknotes, and the faces on the back are all artists, scientists and musicians. Slovenia's finest scientists include Janez Vajkard Valvasor, who is most famous for his geographical study "The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola", and his explanation of how Lake Cerknica disappears every spring and returns in the autumn (it is Europe's largest intermittent lake). Jurij Vega (1754-1802) calculated pi to 140 decimal places, and Friderik Pregl won the Nobel Prize for organic chemistry (1923). Perhaps this rich tradition of invention explains why the oldest wheel in the world, estimated to be 5,100 - 5,350 years old, was found in Slovenia.