PTUJ TOWN SMELL LATEST (NON-NATIONALIST VERSION)

So the Ukrainian food group MHP has acquired 90.69% of Perutnina Ptuj, a Slovenian chicken factory.

As an outsider to Ptuj you may have a different perspective to the natives and I am writing to ask for your help.

There has been a lack of significant progress in eliminating poultry waste rendering odours, and the associated dolorous atmosphere enveloping everything, diminishing political authority, destroying social cohesion, stinking out concerts, culinary, wine and other events, domestic, retail, and visitor areas, and everything else. It's really not very sexy. The fish rots from the head. Ptuj is full of fear and hate.

“Phwooar, someone should start a people’s action group,” declared a naïve, innocent UK visitor in 2018 upon his first sampling of our Town Smell. But questioning the wisdom of Ptuj’s Town Smell usually elicits from locals the kind of reaction you might expect for slagging off Tito or the Virgin Mary. Better to keep your head down, right?

During the tenures of the two previous owners, and for over a dozen years, the situation has been extensively documented and afforded a variety of positive public approaches, beginning in 2008 with http://www.ptuj.co.uk, continuing with some Facebook, then via NPOSIALPU on www.television.si and latterly https://twitter.com/turizemptuj (presently censored for unknown reasons - partial archive here) in association with #ppmlabs, to no avail.

All these services have been provided voluntarily in a civic duty-sort-of-a-way which the Slovenians themselves do not seem to expect and have been slow to comprehend. Instead, key opinion leaders in the employee flock (generally the taller, more intimidating and less prostrate drunk men in bars) have informally publicised it as foreign enemy activity, rather than a mild if rather long-running request for the sort of common decency you might expect from a normal-sized neighbour. https://si.linkedin.com/in/julian-bohan-a035203a

But this neighbour, Perutnina Ptuj, thinks it is something special, thinks it owns the town and its air, and is not minded to take lessons about its lack of freshness, especially from foreigners.

Their propagandas have taken some unusual forms http://www.a2z.si/h http://www.maria.si resulting in one less customer for many an establishment, and exacerbating what is already an uphill struggle for aliens in non-metropolitan Slovenia, including yours truly.

But do not go thinking defending the Town Smell is just a hobby for aggressive racist thugs in bars. Separately, in one of Ptuj's more entertaining days, I was detained by Special Forces during a visit by the Presidents of Slovenia and Serbia, and PM of Croatia, for standing in the town square getting ready to hold up a sign saying "Kaj pa vonj?"

In some proper Yugothink, I was a "demonstration", me and my A2 placard, requiring permission from, I think, the same people I would have been "embarrassing". I was released without charges as soon as the bigwigs went off to dine. No smell flopping across the Drava from Perutnina that day...funny that.

Now look, this is a successful business and not some accountancy fairytale. Employs a lot of people. Nice chicken. It would be wrong to say, at least speaking anecdotally, that the overall stink situation has not improved somewhat since 2005. This shows it can be done.

But there are still a lot of let-downs in what I understand to be a mostly continuous process. I suspect they have faffed around trying with weather and timing, but some of us want to open our windows on summer nights, without the grease.

Wind direction and atmospheric stratification will not matter if nothing is released in the first place.

Perutnina Ptuj's rendering emission source is in a completely inappropriate location, literally 200m away from the tourist centre, including the restaurant where the visiting dignitaries too important to hear about the smell dined that night.

As it doesn't honk all the time, they must be doing something wrong when it does. Recapitalisations aplenty have not eliminated the problem. I understand conditions inside the factory are super-hygienic. Now we just need to take care of the three or four square kilometers outside where everything else in Ptuj takes place.

For humanity's sake please do something to save the shat-on victims of this business i.e. the entire town of Ptuj, or at least the low-lying parts. In case you don't know, Ptuj is Slovenia's oldest town.

Relieve the local burghers and their marketing folks of having to live and career in denial of a preposterous lie.

Make Ptuj smell like it looks in its tourism photos.

Make any cash injection conditional on continuous public and independently verifiable targeted emissions results for all the relevant pollutants http://www.ptuj.co.uk/rendering - that means not verified by somebody's Slovenian cousin. And in several and representative locations, not on top of the castle, which is usually above the Perutninosphere. Of course if there aren’t any emissions in the first place, you won’t need to measure anything.

Make a decision. Nobody is arguing with the concept of rendering. If it really is impossible to do it cleanly then do it somewhere else. Remember that Slovenians (and I'm guessing Ukrainians too) nearly all smoke tobacco to begin with, while hydrogen sulphide also damages the olfactory system, so don't be surprised to find people in Ptuj who argue it isn’t a problem. It is a problem. A very big problem. And the future is nearer than you think https://twitter.com/turizemptuj/status/1099788513632010241

Perutnina has relied on its grip over public discourse. In a Slovenian-speaking theo-oligarchy with no internet it could expect to continue stinking out Ptuj indefinitely, unnoticed. The generalized apathy of Ptuj blends seamlessly with some ridiculous management esprit de corps, in lieu of investment in effective pollution control. Eventually, though, the perpetrators are going to get sued and/or fined, and if it takes much longer, I hope not in a small way.

End this selfish and one-sided economic idiocy now. Whilst their relatives are trying to sell street food and declaring Ptuj an oenological paradise (for one family at least), the Ptuj shitterati are sitting outside bars in the chicken factory's fug winter and summer unfazed by this dubious gluck and acting like Nebuchadnezzar. Like a mad dictator’s henchmen, colleagues will be watching for cues that it’s safe to suggest doing something.

Are Perutnina’s fumes poisonous? In a way they have poisoned the entire space by lowering what for many are already rather basic conditions. Perutnina’s performances deliver a message. If you can get away with that you can get away with anything, is that message. We’ll piss on your front door if we want to, is the message. Having drunk deeply of the cup over multiple generations, some sons and daughters of the town, however sophisticated and educated they think they are, do not display moralities which would be recognized in more pleasant societies, and are reduced to bickering, through this flavorsome fug, over who gets to exploit those ones who are born every minute https://www.tednik.si/tednik/14479-kurentovanje-ptuj-je-ekskluziva-za-vina-gnc-v-dvorani-narocena

They need a helping hand, to enlighten them about the delights of fully functioning senses, and honesty.

In summer 2018 I met a Taiwanese tourist on a Monday and showed him the way to the top Tripadvisor recommendation he had chosen. He had booked for a week, and it's possible with motivated guidance (or if he was an alcoholic) he might have found enough around Ptuj to keep him occupied that long.

By the time I saw him sweating and clawing his way through the Town Smell on Wednesday he had already decided to abandon his room and pay all over to go somewhere else because of the air.

In Slovenian accountancy terms a tourism win, then. But really, these greedy farmers are their own worst enemies.

Now that previous owner SIJ has missed its chance I would ask MHP to consider introducing civilization in Ptuj, so that I can turn my talents elsewhere. Thank you and good fortune.

For those who rely on multibillion dollar corporation Google to understand Slovene, its role in chicken quality includes Slovenian language traps for the unwary, e.g. the power of namreč on meat quality regulations.