Jurij Souček, an Honorary Citizen of Ljubljana, a great theatre artist and one of the most recognizable voices of cartoons and fairy tales that generations of children grew up with, passed away. We will say goodbye to Jurij Souček at the commemoration session of the City Council of the City of Ljubljana, which will be held on Monday, 22 January 2024, at 13:00 in the Great Hall of the City Hall.

Jurij Souček received the title Honorary Citizen of Ljubljana in 2022. In the justification of the award, we wrote at the time: »Jurij Souček worked all his life in Ljubljana and for Ljubljana. He first graduated from a commercial college, and after the Second World War, he was among the first graduates of the Academy of Performing Arts. Already as a student, he clearly and loudly defended the position that art is individual and not collective, which was not very appropriate in the period of socialist realism. He is a drama actor, occasionally also a director, and was a permanent member of the Ljubljana Drama Theatre from the 1953/54 season until his retirement in 1993. He has a vast and valuable oeuvre in dubbing cartoons on Radiotelevision Slovenia, and the children's performances at the Ljubljana Castle, where he collaborated with the actor and director Robert Waltl, are unforgettable. He played over 150 roles in the Drama Theatre and directed more than ten of the most exciting plays. He could not agree with the stereotypes and the institutional traditional routine even later and could not stay with it. In addition, he had 600 appearances in radio plays and double the number of character portrayals in dubbing cartoons. He also recorded many songs for adults and even more songs for children. The first and final breakthrough of his style, his modern play, was Creon in Smole's Antigone on Stage 57, where he managed to »speak his mind«. Here, his theatrical fate was announced with the synchronicity of the sentence that Antigone utters in the play: »A man is what he has done in life.«. He also played in Draga Ahačič's Ad hoc theatre and founded his own theatre groups; with the group »312-860« they staged Gantar's translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus in Chains and the famous play Darijan Božič's Iago, directed by Jurij Souček, was created in the Side Entrance theatre. He is a pioneer and pillar of the Slovenian contemporary theatre. He not only brought his exceptional acting skills to the Slovenian stage, he invested immense organizational energy to establish the Left Stage and the Little Drama in the Drama Theatre, where he performed authors such as Fernando Arrabal, Eugene Ionesco, Ronald Dubillard, Bernard da Costa. He also addressed translators, collaborated with painters, sculptors and Vinko Globokar at the International Music Biennale in Zagreb with the contemporary musical theatre. His work in the theatre and for the theatre is actually fundamental material for understanding and getting to know the entire historical period, which Jurij Souček had a key impact on. Already in the former Yugoslavia, he received several important awards for his roles (e.g., the Golden Laurel Wreath). In 1994, he received the Borštnik Ring, and in 2018 the Ježek Lifetime Achievement Award.«

Honorable Citizen Jurij Souček will be kept in respectful memory.