Svetina, a small settlement in Slovenia’s eastern Styria region just south of Štore, is known regionally for two things: its parish church which dates back to at least the early 15th century, and as the final resting place for Alma Karlin, Slovenia’s most renowned female traveler of the early years of the 20th century.

Karlin was born in nearby Celje, today Slovenia’s third largest city, in 1889, the daughter of Jakob, a major in the Austro-Hungarian army and Vilibalda, a teacher. Among other things, she had an apparent knack for languages. After completing her secondary education in Graz, she went to London where she studied languages and by the time she returned to Celje in 1919, then a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and barely into her twenties, she know more than a dozen.

She opened a local language school, put in long hours, tucked away some cash and then, beginning in November 1919, spent the better part of the next decade on a solo journey around the world with an Erika typewriter, a ten-language dictionary that she had compiled herself, a small suitcase and US$130 and 950 German marks. She visited North and South America, Australia, several Pacific Islands and various locales in Asia. She was in India when she returned home in early 1928, at the request of her dying mother.

She returned exhausted, ill and suffering from depression, and never traveled again. But she did write, a lot, work that’s part reportage, part memoir, part philosophical and spiritual exploration.

She wasn’t the first woman to travel solo around the world, but she was likely among the first to do so while supporting herself. Like most of her predecessors, she was not independently (or dependently) wealthy. From Orientations:

Karlin was by no means the first woman to travel around the world alone, but according to Barbara Trnovec, curator of the archive of materials and documents Karlin accumulated during the course of her journey at the Celje Regional Museum in Slovenia, she was one of the first women to travel on her own for such an extended period. Unlike other, more famous travellers, she could not count on personal wealth to finance her journey—in fact, after paying her first sea passage from Genoa to Peru, she was left almost entirely without funds. During her journey, Karlin supported herself through work as an interpreter and journalist, but was often compelled to take other jobs in order to survive.

Hundreds of accounts from her travels appeared in local and regional journals and newspapers. A three-part travelogue —Samotno potovanje or ‘The Lonely Journey’, Doživeti svet or ‘The Experienced World’, and Urok južnega morja, ‘The Spell of the South Sea’– was followed by other works, both fiction and non, which were well regarded in German cultural circles in the 1930s. (Karlin wrote in German her entire life.)

That ended with the outbreak of World War II, a period during which she spent under house arrest and shuttled around various parts of northern Yugoslavia. She died of breast cancer and tuberculosis in 1950 at age 60 and is buried in Svetina.

More? Check out:

• the Alma Karlin virtual home, with an expanding English section
• Alma Karlin on Culture.si
• Alma Karlin on Wikipedia
• and an 83-minute documentary produced in 2009.

Ten more images below, mostly of and in the St. Mary of the Snows parish church, home to several somewhat creepy cherubs, reason enough to make the 13km trip from Celje. So are the views of the hills that roll out in each direction.

Originally published in July 2010 on a previous blog, which no longer exists, and updated and republished here 28 April 2026.