Janez Drnovsek, 57, Slovenian president

JANEZ DRNOVSEK (Denis Sarkic/Associated Press/File 2005)

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia - Janez Drnovsek, who helped lead Slovenia to independence from Yugoslavia and later enthralled many of his countrymen by adopting a New Age lifestyle, died yesterday, his office said. He was 57.

Mild-mannered but resolute, Mr. Drnovsek became a political icon, in part for working to keep violence at a minimum when Slovenia gained independence in 1991. He later led the country to European Union and NATO membership.

In recent years, as he battled cancer, he made a radical transformation to a holistic lifestyle and wrote several New Age-influenced books. His office said he died overnight at his home, but gave no specific cause.

Mr. Drnovsek was the Slovenian representative of the Yugoslav federation's collective presidency when his region declared its independence. Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic sent tanks to Slovenian borders, triggering a brief war.

But Mr. Drnovsek used his position to push for negotiations, eventually orchestrating a deal for the peaceful withdrawal of the Yugoslav Army and sparing Slovenia from bloodshed that later engulfed Croatia and Bosnia.

Mr. Drnovsek was Slovenia's prime minister for a decade before being elected president in 2002. He did not run for a second presidential term in elections late last year and was replaced by Danilo Turk in December.

Mr. Drnovsek had a cancerous kidney removed in 1999. In 2005, he acknowledged that doctors had diagnosed what he described as formations, apparently cancer, on his lungs and liver in 2001, a year before he was elected president.

Nevertheless, he generally carried out his duties without disruptions.

He said he realized in 2005 that doctors could not cure him. Instead, he insisted that he had cured himself by changing his diet, lifestyle, and way of thinking.

After many years as a strait-laced and stodgy politician, Mr. Drnovsek turned into something of a New Age guru.

"It is hard for me to say if the change was only caused by the illness," Mr. Drnovsek said in an interview last year. "It is true that the illness acts as a shock; it awakens one."

He moved from Ljubljana, the capital, to the remote village of Zaplana, where he lived with his dog. He baked his own bread and ate only organic fruit and vegetables. He had no television.

He considered some of the daily political give and take a waste of time and focused on the fight for the poor and weak, even offering to mediate in Sudan's troubled Darfur region.

Some criticized him for trying to take on global issues that seemed outsized for the ceremonial president of a small eastern European country. He also ruffled feathers by reversing himself on some key issues.

Once an important supporter of the European Union, he grew critical of it, complaining about the bloc's agricultural subsidies. In 2005, he angered Serbia, a valued trading partner, by openly supporting Kosovo's independence-seeking Albanians.

Born in the northeastern city of Celje on May 17, 1950, Mr. Drnovsek earned a degree in economics at Ljubljana's Faculty of Economics and then worked as a banker.

In his youth and early adulthood, he was a member of the Communist Party, the only political force in the former Yugoslavia. But he never was a Communist at heart, going off to ski whenever the party held a congress.