May 11th this year marked exactly 80 years since Radio Maribor first went on air in 1945. Plans for establishing a radio station in the Slovenian northeast were emerging two decades earlier, but the idea faced better and worse moments. Unfortunately, very little archival material from that period has been preserved, so the main sources are surviving testimonies and newspapers from that time. More archival material and literature on the development and operation of Radio Maribor are available from the end of the Second World War onwards.
The question of establishing a radio station in Maribor was already a relevant topic immediately after Radio Ljubljana started operating in 1928. Consequently, residents in the Slovenian northeast could only listen to the Ljubljana radio without major disruptions during the day and only with very good radio sets. People could not listen to Radio Ljubljana with “cheap” radio sets or with detectors alone. Therefore, the number of radio subscribers grew slower than it could have.
The campaign to establish a radio relay station in Maribor particularly gained momentum in the mid-1930s.
It was accelerated by the fact that Austria significantly increased the power of its radio stations in 1935, making the reception of Yugoslav radio programs nearly impossible, even with better equipment. As was written in the newspaper Slovenec on February 18, 1938: “From that moment on, our cultural and national defence interests also demanded that our border population be given the opportunity to listen to our stations, as they were otherwise subjected to the harmful influence of the neighbours.” The powerful transmitting stations in Klagenfurt and Graz were especially strong.
In the mid-1930s, Radio Ljubljana broadcast several events from Maribor and the wider surrounding area.
These broadcasts once again encouraged the residents of Maribor to consider their own radio station and also demonstrated “how much such interesting national treasure could still be collected in Štajerska (Styria), especially along the northern border.”
The establishment of a radio station in Maribor was strongly supported by the mayor, Dr. Alojzij Juvan. On the tenth anniversary of Radio Ljubljana’s launch, he justified his position as follows:
“Slovenian Maribor already has such a developed cultural movement that it could adequately relieve the Ljubljana station with its own educational lectures, concerts, and theatre broadcasts. /…/ The new station is particularly necessary from a national point of view. National propaganda via radio is even more necessary today than educational programs. We are all aware of how systematically neighbouring countries use the radio to propagate ideas harmful to our national and state life. Day after day, our people listen to this propaganda, and the poison of foreign countries, foreign mentality, and unnecessary respect for neighbours enters the souls of our people. For the national and state idea and consciousness to penetrate and deepen to the last village, it is necessary to eliminate the listening of foreign radio stations and offer good domestic national propaganda via our own station in Maribor.”
He also justified Maribor’s demand for its own station with the number of subscribers: Maribor had 1,376 subscribers in 1933, and five years later, that number had already reached 2,880.
This year (2025), historian Dr. Andrej Rahten informed us that a document was discovered in the Belgrade archive in which the then Minister of the Interior, Dr. Anton Korošec, calls on the Prime Minister, Dr. Milan Stojadinović, “to accelerate efforts for the construction of a relay station in Maribor.”