Dialogi closes after 60 years, Maribor turns away

Dialogi closes – After publishing its final issue at the close of 2025, the Maribor-based cultural journal Dialogi—running for 60 years and part of Eurozine since 1999—ended its run. Editors wrote their reflections together, while the journal’s chief explained the shutdown as

When Dialogi’s final issue appeared at the close of 2025, it didn’t arrive as a quiet retirement. It landed as a full stop on a journal that had been arguing—publicly, persistently—for 60 years in Maribor. The Maribor-based cultural journal, one of the oldest periodicals of its kind in Slovenia, had joined the Eurozine network in 1999. Its editors used the last issue to look back together: not with nostalgia alone. but with the dilemmas. labor. and costs of keeping a space for critical thinking alive.

The closing issue carried contributions from all of the editors. Emica Antončič—editor-in-chief—wrote about the magazine’s direction and what it took to professionalize it. Boris Vezjak addressed critical thought, citing Hannah Arendt. Matic Majcen contributed on film. Igor Bašin on music. Nataša Kovšca on visual arts. Meta Kordiš on independent culture. Jasmina Založnik on feminist approaches. Primož Jesenko on performing arts. Ciril Oberstar on social sciences. and Petra Kolmančič on literature. Each returned to the same central question from a different angle: what it means to make room for culture and society to think out loud.

Dialogi, Antončič reminds readers, was never meant to be a literary magazine in the way local mythology sometimes suggests. When it was founded, its conceptual starting point was a magazine of culture and society. That original ambition was shaped by the realities of an industrial city. Maribor historically lacked a critical public and humanistic intellectuals. and the first editorial boards beginning in 1965 set ambitious aims: critical treatment of local and broader social and cultural issues; openness to different genres; and dialogue between generations of writers and intellectuals.

Yet the magazine’s path was not linear. During the socialist era. there were periods when Dialogi mainly featured literature. earning it the nickname “the Maribor literary magazine.” For Antončič. brief returns to the original concept were enough to prove the magazine’s purpose wasn’t accidental. Those pauses cleared the ground for the editorial model she and her editors later built—wider in scope. sharper in critique.

When Antončič took over editorial and publishing duties in 1994. a new state was being founded. civil society was taking shape. and industry was declining. Maribor, in that moment, was searching for a new identity and for ideas on how to build the future. Dialogi became a space for analytical and in-depth debate on cultural and social issues. and it gave space to independent culture.

That ambition required professionalization. “Dialogi grew into a large organizational machine, with which around a hundred authors collaborated annually,” Antončič writes. The editorial board expanded slowly and eventually comprised ten members. Unlike older periods of the magazine, board members came from different parts of Slovenia. The board was also gender-balanced. Antončič credits these choices with helping Dialogi become a reference humanities journal at the national level and beyond. while also pushing subscriber numbers upward.

Her account includes another kind of professional friction: being a female editor with one of the longest tenures in this position in Slovenia, at a time when such roles are still mostly held by men today.

If Antončič describes a structure built to keep thinking going, Boris Vezjak explains what thinking was meant to do. He held the longest tenure on the editorial board after Antončič. and he emphasizes cultivating critical thought at a time of social normalization of non-thinking. In his view. the goal was “intellectual culture” that isn’t elitist—“a rationally supported analysis of everything that affects society. that can enable the best possible understanding of the world and humanity.”.

For a small country such as Slovenia and for the post-industrial city of Maribor. Vezjak argues. ongoing analysis is even more necessary. Both have a complex history filled with traumas. and they need “maps of thinking about life. the specificities of the nation and the state.” The loss of Dialogi. in his account. isn’t only an editorial change but a shrinking of space and power for critical thinking. “Without a human-focused. humanistic view. we are becoming more of a statistical unit in Slovenia’s reports at the national level or in the almanacs of the European Union. and much less of a nation that thinks about its essence. identity or destiny.”.

That idea—critical thought as a kind of common ground—runs through Jasmina Založnik’s recollections. For her. writing and editing thematic issues on feminism was activism that grew from intellectual necessity. concern for community. and the obligation to keep an open space for dialogue and argumentation. Editorial work, she writes, was about collaboration: exchanging ideas, listening, and learning.

“Being part of the editorial team of Dialogi meant working on the boundary between public and reflective space. between theory and practice. between the necessity and the desire for the magazine to remain a place where thought is constantly evolving. ” Založnik says. “And in this collective process. I learned that editorial work is never an individual act. but the work of many who transform their differences into a shared direction of thought.”.

Thematic issues co-edited over the past ten years matter. Založnik writes. precisely because today’s pressures can be felt in the direction of “re-patriarchization and re-traditionalization.” She ties this to battles fought for reproductive rights. to femicide rising. and to societies sliding into authoritarianism. In her reading. the issues “preserve a community. even if it is a fragile but persistent network of people who believe that reflection still changes something.”.

Ciril Oberstar gives the shutdown a different weight—one that arrives through a thought experiment. He imagines a scenario in which his middle-aged son has to prepare a speech for his father’s jubilee. When the son searches for information about Dialogi. he discovers that the last thematic issue edited by his father was entitled Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

From there, Oberstar’s picture of 2064 turns bleak. People are practically cyborgs coexisting with androids. Privacy is “effectively nonexistent or prohibitively expensive.” There is no public space. Originals of songs. articles. and films from the past are “a rarity. ” mutated greatly as they are stored and transferred from various platforms. Authorship and originality become outdated concepts, and everything is controlled and managed by corporations.

At the end of that imagined world, Oberstar recalls Brecht’s poem about a drowned girl. “Death. ” he thinks. “we can somehow endure. but being forgotten is much harder.” He says he feels the same when hearing that Dialogi has been shut down. The editors will survive the end of publication, but he asks whether they will endure being forgotten.

Why did Dialogi close?. In her editorial, Emica Antončič lays out the mechanical, institutional reasons—then lets them land like something personal. “Two and a half years ago. ” she writes. “I did everything I could to enable the legal transfer of Dialogi to a new publisher. but it quickly became apparent that there simply is no functioning organization in the city of Maribor that would be capable of taking over such a professional programme as Dialogi has become in the last three decades.”.

The issue, Antončič continues, is not only organizational capacity. “Above all, there is not even a minimal group of young intellectuals who would be interested in creating critical media and willing to take on the job.”

She then points to the major reason for the cessation: “the steady decrease in the share of co-financing from the City of Maribor.” The budget. she says. was made up of state co-financing from the Slovenian Book Agency (formerly the Ministry of Culture). local co-financing from the Maribor City Council. and its own funds obtained through activities on the market. The municipal share, she writes, has been steadily shrinking since 2012.

The first problems began in 2008, and “more precisely,” the crises “coincide with the period of Franc Kangler’s mayoralty.” New problems were added in recent years.

Antončič’s phrasing is blunt about the effect. “So we can say that the city slowly weakened and destroyed us. gave priority to other programmes. and in the end managed to spit us out …” She challenges what she calls a platitude in literary circles—that Maribor must have its very own magazine. “If the city is not willing to co-finance a magazine to the extent required to produce a quality professional publication. then this simply means it does not want one and will not have one. Anyone can create an amateur magazine at any time.”.

Her editorial also describes a broader pressure inside the Slovenian cultural space in recent years: organizations and programmes that paved the way for Slovenian independent culture and civil society in the 1990s are retreating. The reason. as she writes. is that their systematic and in-depth way of working cannot keep up with “today’s extreme hyperproduction. ” which produces a vast volume of sloppy. fast. and unpolished cultural products created in ruthless competition for public funding.

In recent years, she says, “quite a few interlocutors in Dialogi’s Interview section have warned of this.”

Taken together, the last issue reads like more than a farewell to a magazine. It is a record of how culture can be built—or dismantled—by the resources a city is willing to sustain. and by whether a critical public can be kept from shrinking into silence. When a journal that once held dialogue between generations ends, it doesn’t just leave empty shelves. It leaves a public space smaller, and the question of who will fill it becomes immediate.

Dialogi Maribor Slovenia cultural journal Eurozine Emica Antončič Boris Vezjak Jasmina Založnik feminist approaches critical thought independent culture film music visual arts performing arts social sciences literature Dialogi final issue cultural identity