Doctor and humanitarian Ninna Kozorog gets Spade of the Year
Maribor, 26 January - A statement encouraging people to seek role models in themselves and to believe they can help others with small acts has won physician and humanitarian worker Ninna Kozorog the Spade of the Year award, presented by the publisher Večer for the statement that its readership believe best captured the zeitgeist of last year.
Ljubljana
Physician and humanitarian worker Ninna Kozorog.
Photo: Daniel Novakovič/STA
"The most important role model is the person who looks at us in the evening from the mirror, when we wash away the mask of the day," is the most apt statement from 2019 selected by the readers of the Maribor-based newspaper.
Receiving the award at a ceremony in Maribor on Saturday evening, Kozorog said that Slovenia had unfortunately become a society in which the main values were "likeability, clickability and likes [on social media]".
She is thus actually glad that her statement has been selected the statement of the year, as this means that there are at least some people left who think that they could be real role models in a different way, with small acts.
"It is very difficult for me to look at my peers and people younger than me who only two years ago named as their role model a football player who paid EUR 37,000 for a dinner, a few pizzas and champagne," Korozog said.
"This happens in a world where 759 million people are starving and three billion people live under the poverty threshold," she added.
Večer has conferred the award since 1999, with many known Slovenians having received it. In recent years, the award has been going into hands of people who have been warning about the increasing social distress in the country.
Kozorog, who is heading an association which has campaigned for assistance to retirees living in poverty, also recently received the 2019 Woman of the Year 2019 award by the women's magazine Jana/Zarja.