High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Valentin Vodnik was a Slovene priest, journalist and poet from the late Enlightenment period. He was born in i ka, now a suburb of Ljubljana, then part of the Habsburg Monarchy. He was raised in a relatively well-to-do peasant-artisan family. He became a Franciscan and studied in Ljubljana, Novo Mesto and Gorizia, finishing his studies in 1782. He worked as a priest in Ljubljana, in the Upper Carniolan village of Sora, in Bled, and in Ribnica. In 1793 he returned to Ljubljana and joined the intellectual circle of Sigmund Zois, in which several figures of the Slovenian Enlightenment gathered. Zois remained Vodnik's sponsor until his death. In 1797, Vodnik became a teacher at the local Lyceum.