2020 Slovenia

General

Slovenia is a country of 20,271 square kilometres and about 2.1 million people in Central Europe, bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the north-east and Croatia to the south, with a coastline of 46.6 kilometres on the Adriatic Sea. Four of the great geographical regions of Europe meet inside its borders: the Alps, the Dinarides, the Pannonian Plain and the Mediterranean. Roughly 90 per cent of the land lies more than 200 metres above sea level, the average altitude is 557 metres, and Triglav, at 2,864 metres, is both the highest mountain and the national symbol, carried on the flag and the coat of arms.

The climate is as layered as the relief. The north-east has a continental climate with wide differences between summer and winter, the coast a sub-Mediterranean one whose influence reaches up the Soča Valley, and the high mountains a severe Alpine climate, and the three systems interact across most of the country. Precipitation comes mainly from the Gulf of Genoa and ranges from over 3,500 millimetres a year in the west to around 800 millimetres in Prekmurje. Snow is frequent in winter, and the deepest cover recorded in Ljubljana was 146 centimetres, in 1952.

Slovenia is the second most forested country in Europe after Finland, with 60.4 per cent of its territory under trees, mostly beech, fir-beech and beech-oak forest, and one of the largest surviving remnants of primeval forest in the Kočevje region. Around 12.5 per cent of the land is protected and 36 per cent lies in the Natura 2000 network, the largest share of any European Union state; brown bears, lynx, chamois and Alpine ibex live in the forests and the high valleys. In 2017 National Geographic Traveller named the country the world’s most sustainable tourism destination.

Ljubljana lies near the centre of the country and is its political, cultural and economic capital, followed by Maribor, Celje, Kranj, Koper and Novo Mesto. Slovene is the official language, and on the coast Italian is spoken as well. The towns carry the Central European Baroque of the Habsburg centuries beside the work of the Ljubljana-born architect Jože Plečnik, and the countryside is given to vineyards in the hills around Maribor and in the west, to orchards and to the thermal spas that fill the north-east.

The state is young and small, and its variety is the point: alpine lakes, a limestone karst full of caves, a Mediterranean coast and a flat Pannonian east all lie within a day’s drive of one another. Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia in June 1991, joined the European Union and NATO in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2007. Tourism has stayed nature-centred rather than large-scale.

History

The country has been inhabited for an extremely long time. Human traces go back some 250,000 years, and the pierced cave-bear bone found in 1995 in the Divje Babe cave near Cerkno, dated to about 43,100 years ago, is thought to be a flute, possibly the oldest musical instrument known. The remains of pile dwellings more than 4,500 years old, discovered in the Ljubljana Marsh in 2002, are a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with the wooden wheel found with them, the oldest in the world. In Roman times the region was divided between Venetia et Histria, Pannonia and Noricum, with towns at Emona, Poetovio and Celeia.

Slavic tribes settled the eastern Alps after the Lombards left in 568, under pressure from the Avars, and from 623 the kingdom of Samo united the Alpine and western Slavs against the Avars and the Germans. By the fourteenth century the lands that are now Slovenia belonged to the Habsburgs, who held them, apart from one French interruption, until 1918, governing them as Carniola, Styria, Carinthia and Gorizia. The Slovenes were a people without a nobility of their own, held together by language and by the church, and the Reformation gave them their first printed books.

The First World War turned the Soča Valley into one of the bloodiest fronts in Europe: twelve battles were fought along the river between 1915 and 1917, ending with the Austro-German breakthrough at Caporetto in October 1917, the retreat that Ernest Hemingway described in A Farewell to Arms. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed in December 1918 and renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. In 1941 the territory was partitioned between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Hungary and the Independent State of Croatia, and after 1945 Slovenia became one of the six republics of socialist Yugoslavia.

Modern Slovenia emerged in June 1991, when the republic declared independence; after the brief Ten-Day War it became a sovereign state, recognised internationally in 1992. It joined the European Union and NATO in 2004, introduced the euro in 2007 and held the presidency of the European Union in 2008. The two old border regions tell the rest of the story: the Littoral, taken by Italy after the First World War and returned to Yugoslavia after 1947, kept its Italian-speaking towns and its Venetian architecture, and the Soča Valley, which had lost much of its population to the fighting and to emigration, rebuilt itself after 1945 on tourism and livestock.

In the mountains the twentieth century left different marks. The Kobarid museum, in the town that the Italians call Caporetto, documents the front of 1915 to 1917 and won the Council of Europe’s museum prize in 1993; the paths and fortifications of the Isonzo front, the so-called Walk of Peace, run through the hills above the Soča. Tourism arrived on the same ground: Bovec and Kobarid became centres of rafting and walking, and the waters of the river, which supplied the front with bridges and trenches, are today the reason most visitors come to the upper valley.

Geology

Slovenia lies on the small Adriatic plate, which is squeezed between the Eurasian plate to the north and the African plate to the south and rotates slowly anticlockwise, and it therefore sits in an active seismic zone: sixty destructive earthquakes have been identified in its history, and a network of seismic stations watches for the next one. Three geotectonic units meet here, the Alps in the north, the Dinarides in the south and the Pannonian basin in the east, and much of the country stands on carbonate bedrock, which is why it has one of the densest concentrations of cave systems in Europe.

The Karst Plateau of the Slovenian Littoral gave its name to karst topography in the languages of the world. It is a limestone region between the Vipava valley and the Gulf of Trieste, rising on average 334 metres above the sea and covering 429 square kilometres with about 19,000 inhabitants in exactly 100 settlements. Water that falls on it disappears through sinkholes and swallows and returns to the surface elsewhere: the Reka river sinks at Škocjan and flows 34 kilometres underground before it rises again near Monfalcone, where it supplies about a third of the flow of the Timavo.

The caves are the substance of the region. Postojna Cave is a system 24.34 kilometres long, the second longest in the country and one of its most visited places, cut by the Pivka river, with rails and a cave train since 1872 and electric lighting since 1884. The Škocjan Caves, explored for 6,200 metres and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986, have formed in a layer of Cretaceous and Palaeocene limestone 300 metres thick and contain one of the longest underground wetlands in Europe. The oldest show cave on the continent is at Vilenica, on the same plateau.

The Alps in the north are limestone too, and they carry the marks of the ice. The Julian Alps, a range of the Southern Limestone Alps covering some 4,400 square kilometres, rise to 2,864 metres at Triglav. Lake Bled is of mixed glacial and tectonic origin, 2,120 metres long and up to 29.5 metres deep, and is fed in part by a warm spring of about 23 degrees, which brings its surface to between 22 and 26 degrees in high summer. Lake Bohinj, at 318 hectares the largest permanent lake in the country, was dammed by a moraine.

The rivers leave the mountains in every direction. The Soča is an Alpine river 138 kilometres long, rising at 876 metres in the Trenta valley and reaching the Adriatic near Monfalcone, with a snow-and-rain regime in its upper course; the emerald colour that has made it famous comes from the fine limestone particles it carries. Most of the country drains not to the Adriatic but to the Black Sea through the Sava and the Drava, and the coast itself is short, 46.6 kilometres between Italy and Croatia, with the salt pans of Sečovlje behind it and the bora, the cold gusty wind, blowing off the plateau.

Things to See

Ljubljana is a small capital with a river through the middle of it and a castle on the hill above. The old town along the Ljubljanica has Baroque and Vienna Secession façades and a set of bridges that the architect Jože Plečnik rebuilt in the inter-war years, among them the Triple Bridge, where a central crossing is flanked by two footbridges, and the Dragon Bridge, whose four dragons are the emblem of the city. The riverside cafés, the colonnaded market and the walk up to the castle are the centre of its life, and the Roman city of Emona lies under the streets.

Lake Bled is the best known of the country’s lakes: a small basin of green-blue water with an island in it, a castle on the cliff above, and a shore of hotels and villas. Bled Castle was built in 1004 by the Emperor Henry II and now holds a museum, and the island carries the pilgrimage church of the Assumption of Mary, rebuilt at the end of the seventeenth century over Gothic frescoes of about 1470, whose bells are rung by visitors. The lake is 2,120 metres long and 1,380 wide.

Lake Bohinj lies an hour further into the mountains, inside Triglav National Park, and is the quieter of the two: 318 hectares of clear water 4.2 kilometres long, dammed by a moraine and fed by springs and streams, among them the Savica, which comes down from the Black Lake in the Triglav Lakes Valley. Its waters hold brown trout, burbot, chub and Arctic char, and on the shore stands a statue of the Goldhorn, the white chamois of Slovene legend. The valley above it, with its wooden houses and hayracks, is the starting point for walks into the national park.

The Vintgar Gorge, four kilometres north-west of Bled on the edge of the national park, is a kilometre and a half of the Radovna river cut between walls fifty to a hundred metres high. It was inaccessible until 1891, when the mayor of Gorje explored it, and since 1893 wooden walkways and bridges have carried visitors to the Šum Falls, thirteen metres high and the largest river waterfall in the country. Above the gorge stands a stone arch of the Bohinj railway, built in 1904 and 1905, sixty-five metres long and thirty-three metres high, the largest of its kind preserved in Slovenia.

The Soča Valley is the heart of the western Julian Alps. Bovec, Kobarid and Tolmin lie along the emerald river between the Kanin massif and the Trenta valley, and the water that gave the valley its name is also its business: rafting, kayaking and fishing for the marble trout, which survives in the upper reaches. Beside the water the valley keeps its war: the museum at Kobarid holds the story of Caporetto, the Italian ossuary stands above the town, and the Walk of Peace follows the trenches and the mule tracks of the front through the hills. Small gorges such as the Šunik water grove near Tolmin, a wooded ravine with a chain of waterfalls, are the quieter version of the same landscape.

The caves under the karst are the other half of the country. Postojna Cave is entered by train and walked for kilometres past stalactites, curtains of flowstone and a great chamber; it is home to the olm, the blind cave salamander that is the largest troglodytic amphibian in the world, first described in 1689 by Valvasor. The Škocjan Caves are wilder, a collapse doline where the Reka disappears into the ground and a path crosses the canyon on a bridge high above the river. Predjama Castle, eleven kilometres away, is built into the mouth of a cave and was the seat of the robber baron Erasmus of Lueg.

Triglav National Park, established in its modern form in 1981 and the only national park in the country, spreads over the south-eastern Julian Alps with Mount Triglav almost in the middle of it; the valleys that radiate from the peak feed both the Soča, flowing to the Adriatic, and the Sava, flowing to the Black Sea. The Triglav Lakes Valley was first proposed for protection in 1906 or 1908 by the seismologist Albin Belar, leased as a conservation park in 1924 and protected permanently from 1961. The Vršič Pass, at 1,611 metres the highest road pass in Slovenia, crosses the range between Kranjska Gora and the Trenta valley.

South of the mountains the country turns to the Karst and the sea. Štanjel sits on the northern rim of the plateau with its houses packed around the hill, Sežana and Divača are the market towns, and Lipica is the home of the Lipizzaner stud farm. Piran, on the coast, is a Venetian Gothic town of narrow streets and compact houses on a peninsula, with the salt pans of Sečovlje behind it and the vineyards of Brda and the Vipava valley in the hills. The food is a mix of alpine and Mediterranean: potica, kranjska klobasa, štruklji, the cream pastry of Bled, and the wines of the western hills.

References

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