Sights in Slovenia
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Bled Castle
Perched atop a steep cliff more than 100m above the lake, Bled Castle is how most people imagine a medieval fortress to be - with towers, ramparts, moats and a terrace offering magnificent views on a clear day. The castle, which is built on two levels, dates back to the 11th century (although most of what stands here now is from the 16th century) and for 800 years was the seat of the Bishops of Brixen.
The baroque southern wing houses a museum collection that traces the history of Lake Bled and its settlements from the Bronze Age to the mid-19th century. None of the furniture is original to the castle, but it helps give you an idea of how the leisured class lived in the…
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Lake Bled
Lake Bled is not a very large body of water - it measures only 2km by 1380m - and the second-best way to see it is from the shore. A walk around the lake (6km) shouldn't take but a couple of hours at the most, including the short (but steep) climb to the brilliant Osojnica viewing point. Along the way, you'll pass linden, chestnut and willow trees hanging over the water, boat slips, wooden walkways, anglers, the start of several hikes and a couple of interesting sights.
On the south shore of Lake Bled you'll pass through the hamlet of Mlino, then leave the main road for a path that passes beneath the grand edifice of the Hotel Vila Bled. Around the far end of the lake,…
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Celje Old Castle
The largest fortress in Slovenia, the Celje Old Castle, is perched on a 407m-high escarpment about 2km southeast of the Old Town; the walk up via a footpath from Cesta na Grad takes about half an hour. The castle was originally built in the early 13th century and went through several transformations, especially under the Counts of Celje in the 14th and 15th centuries.
When the castle lost its strategic importance in the 15th century it was left to deteriorate, and subsequent owners used the stone blocks to build other structures, including parts of the Lower Castle and the Old County Palace. A surprisingly large portion remains intact, however, and has been restored,…
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Prešernov Trg
The centrepiece of Ljubljana's wonderful architectural aesthetic is this marvellous square, a public space of understated elegance that not only serves as the link between the Center district and the Old Town but as the city's favourite meeting point. The square itself is dominated by a monument to the national poet France Prešeren.
Immediately south of the statue is the city's architectural poster-child, the small but much celebrated Triple Bridge (Tromostovje). The original Špital Bridge (1842) was nothing spectacular, but between 1929 and 1932 superstar architect Jože Plečnik added the two pedestrian side bridges, furnished all three with stone balustrades and lamps…
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Abbey Church of St Daniel
A few steps to the northwest of the Water Tower is the Abbey Church of St Daniel, dating from the early 14th century. The church has some magnificent frescoes and tombstones, but its greatest treasure is a 15th-century carved wooden pietà in the Chapel of the Sorrowful Mother to the left of the sanctuary. The chapel has carved stone walls and vaults with remnants of frescoes from the early 15th century and carved effigies of the Apostles.
Parts of Celje's medieval walls and ramparts can be seen along Ulica na Okopih, west of the church.Contiguous with Slomškov trg is Glavni trg, the heart of the Old Town. It is filled with lovely townhouses dating from the 17th and 18th…
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Ljubljana Zoo
The 20-hectare Ljubljana Zoo, on the southern slope of Rožnik Hill (394m), contains 580 animals representing more than 150 species. There's also a petting zoo for children. It's an upbeat and well-landscaped menagerie.
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Proteus Vivarium
Two hundred species of fauna (including cave beetles, bats, hedgehogs, and the 'human fish') found in the cave are studied at the Proteus Vivarium, which is part of a speleobiological research station located in the cave. It is open to visitors and has a video introduction to underground zoology. A 45-minute tour then leads you into a small, darkened cave to peep at some of the shy creatures you've just learned about.
Proteus anguinus is one of the most mysterious creatures in the world. A kind of salamander, but related to no other amphibian, it is the largest known permanent cave-dwelling vertebrate. The blind little fellow lives hidden in the pitch black for up to a…
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Predjama Castle
Situated in the gaping mouth of a cavern halfway up a 123m cliff just 9km northwest of Postojna, Predjama Castle has one of the most dramatic settings. Although a castle has stood on the site since 1202, the one you see today dates from the 16th century. Then - as now - the four-storey fortress looked unconquerable.
The castle's eight rooms contain little of interest - oil paintings, weapons, a 15th-century pietà - but the castle does have a drawbridge over a raging river, holes in the ceiling of the entrance tower for pouring boiling oil on intruders, a very dank dungeon, a 16th-century chest full of treasure (unearthed in the cellar in 1991), and an eyrie-like hiding…
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Municipal Museum
The excellent Municipal Museum is housed in the enormous Gewerkenegg Castle on top of the hill to the west of Mestni trg. The collections, which deal with mercury, lace and local history, are exhibited in three wings centred on a courtyard. The rococo frescoes of plants, scrolls and columns framing the windows and arcades date from the 18th century.
Mercury (Hg) is the only metal that exists in a liquid state at room temperature. The silvery metal is extracted from the mercury ore - a bright-red mineral called cinnabar - by smelting at a high temperature. Mercury is a very heavy metal, much denser than iron, and in the castle's north wing, amid a jungle of minerals and…
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Postojna Cave
Visitors get to see about 5.7km of the cave on 1½-hour tours; some 4km of this is covered by an electric train, which runs as far as the Big Mountain (Velika Gora) cavern. Here you stand under one of the five signs identifying your language, and a guide escorts you through halls, galleries and caverns.
These are dry galleries, decorated with a vast array of white stalactites shaped like needles, enormous icicles and even fragile spaghetti. The stalagmites take familiar shapes - pears, cauliflower and sand castles - but there are also bizarre columns, pillars and translucent curtains that look like rashers of bacon.
From the Velika Gora cavern you continue across the…
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Church of St John the Baptist
The Church of St John the Baptist, on the northern side of the Sava Bohinjka just across the stone bridge, is what every medieval church should be: small, on a reflective lake and full of exquisite frescoes. It is the most beautiful and evocative church in all of Slovenia, with the possible exception of the Church of the Holy Trinity at Hrastovlje in Primorska. Unfortunately it was under renovation at the time of research.
The nave of the church is Romanesque, but the Gothic presbytery dates from about 1440. A large portion of the latter's walls, ceilings and arches are covered with 15th- and 16th-century frescoes. As you face the arch from the nave, look for the frescoes…
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Beekeeping Museum
Although it might not sound like a crowd-pleaser, the Beekeeping Museum is one of the most interesting in the country, and there's not a whole lot you won't know about things apiarian after buzzing around for an hour or so inside. The museum is housed (together with a music school) in Thurn Manor, which began life as Ortenburg Castle in the early Middle Ages but was rebuilt with a large hall on the ground floor after the earthquake of 1511.
The cream-and-white structure has interesting reliefs and stucco work on its facade. The museum's exhibits take a close look at the history of beekeeping in Slovenia (which was at its most intense in the 18th and 19th centuries), the…
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Lake Cerknica
Since ancient times periodic Lake Cerknica (Cerniško Jezero) has baffled and perplexed people, including the Greek geographer and historian Strabo (63 BC-AD 24), who called the mysterious body of water Lacus Lugeus (Mourning Lake). It wasn't until Valvasor explained how the water system worked at the end of the 17th century that it was fully understood.
Cerknica is a polje, a field above a collapsed karst cavern full of sinkholes, potholes, siphons and underground tunnels, which can stay dry for much of the year but then floods. From the south, the polje is fed by a disappearing river, the Stržen, and to the east and west it collects water underground from the Bloke…
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Ljubljana Castle
Known as Ljubljana Castle (Ljubljanski Grad), there have been fortifications of one kind or another on Castle Hill (Grajska Planota) since at least Celtic times, but the existing Ljublijana Castle mostly dates from a 16th-century rebuilding following the 1511 earthquake. It was a royal residence in the 17th and 18th centuries and a prison and barracks in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.
About 80% of the castle has been renovated in recent years, and it is now frequently used as a venue for concerts and other cultural activities, and as a wedding hall on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
The castle was a royal residence in the 17th and 18th centuries and a…
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Sergej Mašera Maritime Museum
Located in the Gabrielli Palace on the waterfront, the Sergej Mašera Maritime Museum is named in honour of a Slovenian naval commander whose ship was blown up off the Croatian coast in WWI. The mid-19th-century palace, with its lovely moulded ceilings, parquet floors and marble staircase, is worth a visit in itself.
The museum's excellent exhibits focus on sea, sailing and salt-making - three things that have been crucial to Piran's development over the centuries. The salt pans at Sečovlje, southeast of Portorož, get most of the attention on the ground floor. There are some old photographs showing salt workers going about their duties in coolie-like straw hats, as well…
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Anthony Mine Shaft
The Anthony Mine Shaft, a 'living museum' in the Šelštev building south of Trg Svetega Ahacija, allows you to get a feeling for the working conditions of mercury miners in Idrija.
The tour, lasting about 1¼ hours, begins in the 'call room' of an 18th-century building where miners were selected each morning and assigned their duties by the obergutman (supervisor). There's an excellent 20-minute video in several languages (including English) describing the history of Idrija and the mine.
Before entering the shaft, which was sunk in 1500 and led to the first mine measuring 1.5km long, 600m wide and 400m deep, you must don green overcoats and helmets with the miners'…
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Celje Regional Museum
The museum places much emphasis on Celeia and the Counts of Celje, right down to exhibiting 18 of the nobles' skulls in glass cases. (They were taken from the Minorite Church of Mary on Prešernova ulica in 1956, and the one belonging to Ulric is particularly gruesome.) The museum has a dozen rooms, many of them done up in styles from different periods (eg baroque, neoclassical, Biedemeier, Secessionist), painted with various scenes and filled with fine furniture.
Don't miss the 18th-century cabinet with hunting scenes inlaid with ivory, the 20-drawer 'bank' desk with a secret compartment and the neoclassical combined clock and music box that still works. But the museum's…
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Liznjek House
One of the very few sights in Kranjska Gora, the endearing late-18th-century Liznjek House contains quite a good collection of household objects and furnishings peculiar to this area of Gorenjska. Among the various exhibits here are some excellent examples of trousseau chests covered in folk paintings, some 19th-century icons painted on glass and a collection of linen tablecloths (the valley was famed for its flax and its weaving).
Antique carriages and a sledge are kept in the massive barn out the back, which once housed food stores as well as pigs and sheep. The stable reserved for cows below the main building now contains a memorial room dedicated to the life and work…
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Snežnik Castle
Just south of the village of Kozarišče (population 240), in the secluded Lož Valley (Loška Dolina) some 21km southeast of Cerknica, stands 16th-century Renaissance Snežnik Castle. Surrounded by a large and protected park, it is one of the loveliest and best-situated fortresses in Slovenia.
The entrance to the castle, formerly the property of the Schönburg-Waldenburg family, who used what they called Schneeberg as a summer residence and a hunting lodge until WWII, is through a double barbican with a drawbridge and moat. Unfortunately the castle is currently undergoing massive renovations and remains closed to the public.Snežnik Castle's isolation makes it tough to…
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Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia
The Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia, housed in the 18th-century Cekin Mansion (Grad Cekinov) just northeast of the Tivoli Recreation Centre, traces the history of Slovenia in the 20th century through multimedia and artefacts. Note the contrast between the sober earnestness of the communist-era Room G and the exuberant, logo-mad commercialism of the neighbouring industrial exhibit in Room H.
Its multimedia story begins on the eve of WWI, leading you through a surprisingly effective reconstruction of a typical trench into the quieter days of the postwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It gets pretty turbulent in Room E, which deals with WWII and the Italo-German…
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Maribor Regional Museum
The Maribor Castle also contains the Maribor Regional Museum, one of the richest collections in Slovenia, which is arranged in 20 rooms. Be advised that at the time of research the museum was undergoing extensive renovations and parts (or all) of the permanent collection may be closed.
On the ground floor there are archaeological, clothing and ethnographic exhibits, including 19th-century beehive panels painted with biblical scenes from the Mislinja and Drava Valleys, models of Štajerska-style hayracks, Kurent costumes and wax ex voto offerings from the area around Ptuj. Upstairs there are rooms devoted to Maribor's history and its guilds and crafts (glassware, wrought…
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National Gallery
Slovenia's foremost collection of fine art, the National Gallery offers works from the 17th to 19th centuries (check out works by 'national Romantics' Pavel Künl, Marko Pernhart and Anton Karinger), copies of medieval frescoes and a wonderful Gothic statuary (1896). Although the subjects of the earlier paintings are the usual foppish nobles and lemon-lipped clergymen, some of the later works are remarkable.
Take a close look at the works of the impressionists Jurij Šubic (Before the Hunt) and Rihard Jakopič (Birches in Autumn), the pointillist Ivan Grohar (Škofja Loka in the Snow) and Slovenia's most celebrated female painter Ivana Kobilca (Summer). The bronzes by…
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Predjama Castle Cave
Below Predjama Castle, is a 6km network of galleries spread over four levels. Much of it is open only to speleologists, but casual visitors can see about 900m of it. Longer tours to the end of the cave's Eastern Passage or Erazem's Gallery are available by prior arrangement only. Erazem Lueger was a 15th-century robber who, like Robin Hood, stole from the rich and handed it over to the poor. During the wars between the Hungarians and the Austrians, Lueger holed up Predjama Castle.
In the autumn of 1484 the Austrian army under Gašpar Ravbar, the governor of Trieste, attacked the castle, but it proved impregnable for months. All the while Erazem came and went as he pleased…
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Dormouse Museum & Hunting Collection
In the 19th-century dairy building adjacent to the Snežnik Castle, resides the rather esoteric The dormouse or loir (polh) is a favourite food in Notranjska and the hunting and eating of it is tied up with a lot of tradition, which the museum explores. The fur is used to make the polhovka, the distinctive fur cap worn by Božiček, Slovenia's version of Santa Claus, and dormouse mast (fat) is a much-prized machine oil.
According to popular belief, the dormouse is shepherded by Lucifer himself and thus deserves its fate in the cooking pot.The hunting part of the museum is a nightmare of stuffed animals, antlers and other 'trophies' from the Snežnik-Javornik Massif and…
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Parish Church of Our Lady
Sitting atop a gentle slope 200m north of Cesta 4 Maja, the Parish Church of Our Lady (Župnijska Cerkev Sv Marije) is the only real attraction right in Cerknica. To reach it, walk up the street called simply Tabor, which runs to the east of the shopping centre.
The church sat in the middle of a fortified settlement - the ramparts and two towers, built to withstand Turkish raids in the late 15th century, remain intact. On the Latin plaque in the wall, the number 4 of the year 1472 is written with a loop - the top half of an 8 - because 4 was considered unlucky in the Middle Ages, as it still is in much of Asia.
Completed in the early 16th century, this is a hall church -…
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