The number of students from Muta Primary School who took part in the Surname Challenge was second only to Gornja Radgona. Some posed for us in front of the school. Thanks for the photo! What cool T-shirts you have! :)

The students from Muta discovered that the most common surname in Muta is Krajnc. But … can we really trust this data? How well does it represent Muta?

0.1618 % of Slovenians (3,414 out of 2,100,000) live in Muta. The proportion of Mutians in our database (of the 200 most common surnames) is only 0.0598 % (61 out of 103,530). Mutians are underrepresented by three times! The problem goes beyond having an unstratified sample: it indicates that Mutians have “unusual” surnames. This is unsurprising: the municipality is small, it may be influenced by the nearby Austria, and it is squeezed between mountains - the beautiful Pohorje in the south and the even more beautiful Kobansko in the north. (I can’t help it, here are two photos from my cycling trips: Lonhtar above Dravograd, and the church of St. Primož and Felicijan above Muta.)

How to find the typical Mutian surnames then? Here is a nice way: take a walk through the cemetery. There is one by the church of St. Marjeta, and another not far away. One could discover that there are only a few graves - or perhaps none - with surname Kranjc. There may likely be another, more frequent local surname that did not make it to the Slovenian top 200.

There’s one thing, though, that we can know for certain. Krajnc is not some typical surname that can only be found around here. Every Slovenian would agree to that: yes, of course, you can find the surname Kranjc everywhere. But, ha! This was a trap! See, in Slovenia, we have Krajnc and Kranjc; an old spelling of the region called Kranjska was Krajnska, hence also different spelling of surnames. The border between people (sur)named Kranjc and Krajnc - as for everyhing else in Slovenia - is a road pass Trojane. Everything changes there, from informal greetings (on the eastern side you’re supposed to say zdravo, not živjo) to the favourite football team (don’t mention Olimpija on the wrong side of Trojane; or wear too much green, for that matter) and the favourite beer (for some reason that I can’t fathom, people living on the eastern side of Trojane pretend to prefer Laško over Union 🤷‍♂️).

Enough about beer, what about doughnuts? Didn’t I promise doughnuts in the title? Where are the doughnuts! Right here, on Trojane. The pass used to be a chokepoint for all traffic between the western and eastern parts of Slovenia, so a local restaurant made a big business by selling doughnuts. Even now, many still keep with the tradition and exit the highway to buy one or, more likely, a box of six. So, among people with surnames Krajnc and Kranjc, the one who comes for a doughnut from the direction of Vransko is a Krajnc, while the one who comes from Blagovica is a Kranjc.

If you don’t take my word for it, see the picture. And if you’re still not convinced, open Orange and see for yourself.