What Did Europe Ever Do Before The Invention of Spray Paint?

For that matter, what did Europe ever do before felt-tip markers? My wild guess is that this place didn't always have graffiti, or such that did exist wasn't so fiercely ugly. Whatever the applicable esthetic rating, I do believe that defacing a streetside charging station is takin' it to the next level:

Is nothing sacred? Good heavens, what's next - windmills?

That was in downtown Ljubljana. A couple of blocks away, I also got a snap of a political campaign display where the word "Slovene" had been overblasted - is that the word? - by "Hungarian" (this in relation to what songs your grandson might sing). Not sure why the word "Hungarian" itself was in Slovene. You don't want to overthink these things. But like everyone with a STEM degree, I am full of ideas for what someone with a liberal-arts degree should study, and surely graffiti is fair game. It has got to mean something.

Especially in Europe, which either immensely enjoys it or utterly helplessly tolerates it. It never goes away, as far as I can tell. It just gets more superimposed upon itself.

Riding the train from Ljubljana to Kočevje, I found a profusion of the stuff on one building near the railway station in Škofljica. Big letters, many colors, and in there, “Hitler.” I was unable to discern whether that was grammatically a subject or an object, and maybe it wasn’t either and didn’t have to be either. In Europe, you just say “Hitler.” But there was also, and some distance away and surely unrelated, “Ja nisam mogao.” This is Serbo-Croatian and means “I couldn't.” Couldn't...what? There was more to this, but it was obscured by further graffiti...Later graffiti? Can layers of paint-splats and dye-pukes be reliably dated? I’d thought that in information theory, besides time and frequency domains, there was something called a code domain. Which, if there is, ought to be helpful here: I do not know how much Serbo-Croatian was spoken in Slovenia before the breakup of Yugoslavia, but I can count on the fingers of one hand, if not the lobes of two ears, how many times I’ve seen it hereabouts post-independence.

I wonder how remarkable such a linguistic survival is. Not just to a tourist like me, but to people who have to live here and work here and send their kids to school here. Maybe any sort of Yugo-throwback is just odd, not ominous. (The website Titoville had looked damned old two decades ago when I first saw it, and it looks downright ancient now.) If this stuff is only on the surface, maybe citizens can ignore it, but otherwise it might require examination or at least monitoring. I just hope that in what passes for scholarship in this area, the words “recondite” and “vandalism” are widely separated.