Our days in Ljubljana (Aug. 27 to Sept. 3, 2022)

August 27, 2022 to September 3, 2022

This is Dave handling journaling duties from Jill who has earned a well deserved rest.

We’ve been enjoying the past week exploring Ljubljana, Slovenia. For years Jill has been hoping to take me to Slovenia, a country I now too have become smitten with. By now you know that Slovenia has beautiful mountain vistas (Slovenian roads only go in one direction—uphill!) but there are many other regions we want to visit -ie: Istria and Lake Bled - that will have to wait for another time.

Jill and I are staying in an apartment along the Ljubljanica River in the heart of downtown. Here you see the mix of tourists (very few Americans), business people, ordinary town denizens and lots of students with several nearby universities including the University of Ljubljana (39K students), Slovenia’s oldest. The area is wonderfully vibrant with myriad cafes and an excellent food and wine scene.

Farm-to-table isn’t so much a movement here as a way of life, what with farms located literally in the suburbs. The quality of food at the cafes and restaurants is universally good. Similar to, say, Paris, you can walk into any café and get excellent food, farm fresh produce, seafood from the Adriatic and locally raised meat. And, boy, do the Slovenes love their confections! (Ice cream in Slovene is “sladoled”).

One of the big culinary surprises for me has been the Slovenian wine scene. The variety and quality of their wines is outstanding. Most of the wines made here remain in Europe with few making their way to US, but I will now be on the lookout for Slovenian malvasia, robusto and most definitely orange wines. Neither Jill nor I had much experience with orange wines before and what we had tried left us underwhelmed. Well, here in Slovenia, they’ve taken the making of orange wine to a whole new level.

Orange wines are skin-fermented white wines where the skins and sometimes the stems stay in contact with the juice for days and up to months. The length of time the juice stays in contact with the skins along with the the aging results in an amazing variety of orange wine styles.

When we dined at Gric (roughly pronounced, “Greech”), our waiter recommended we visit a Michelin rated tapas restaurant (TaBar) here in Ljubljana. Their wine list had dozens of Slovenian orange wines. Our knowledgeable waiter gave us an orange wine tour and we had everything from crisp wines to elegant, soft wines to full bodied offerings which paired beautifully with our meal.

Oh, yeah. TaBar has some great food to go along with all that wine!

We arrived in Ljubljana on Saturday the 27th. We got settled into our apartment and took it easy the next day.

Our apartment was roomy and comfortable.

With relatively safe storage area for our bikes. In addition to locking the bikes, we took the extra precaution of removing the batteries.

The interior of our apartment building showed it's age.

Early in the week we left our bikes and boarded a train to Postojna, after figuring out how to purchase our tickets online with a plan to visit Postojna’s famous cave system and to see the (almost) impregnable Predjama castle.

We stayed at the Hotel Jama located on the Postojama Cave Park grounds. The hotel has a fascinating history (more later) and was first opened to guests in 1971.

The park itself is very Disney-like. We arrived at the end of the August tourist season so we missed the worst of the crowds, but it was still plenty busy. They do crowd management pretty well, like Disney, and offer tours in multiple languages.

You enter the cave system by way of electric rail car. I confess to being quite skeptical as I felt as though I was on a e-ticket ride (You might have to be of a certain age to appreciate that particular Disneyland reference. Jill didn’t get it…..)

As we rode though two kilometers of the cave system I kept wondering if we were going to be able to get out of our cars at all. However, the train eventually stopped and our guide took us for an hour long walk through an amazing cave system full of stalagmites, stalactites, curtains and white salamanders. They’ve done a superb job of lighting the formations. It really was an amazing experience.

After the cave tour, we shuttled to the Predjama Castle, built into the cliffs. It was easy to imagine how hard it would have been to breech so castle enemies with only the option of a lengthy siege; because the castle had a hidden entrance it could be resupplied in secret.

The view from the tower. Yeah, good luck storming this baby!

The castle is literally built into the cliffs.

The next morning we toured the Hotel Jama’s Secret Rooms” discovered during the 2016 renovation of the hotel. We were taken into the bowels of the hotel where we were shown secret entrances leading to rooms that were filled with electronic eavesdropping equipment and transcription machines. During their day, the existence of these rooms was kept secret, even from the hotel staff. Although our guide never said so directly, she certainly meant for us to believe that these rooms were used by the former Yugoslavian secret service (Udba) to listen to private conversations of the hotel guests. The ruler Tito used to take diplomatic and celebrity visitors to the caves and they would stay at the hotel. Udba spied on these guests and ordinary citizens who were persecuted for anti-Tito leanings. It reminded us of the importance of our country staying away from any similar totalitarian tendencies. The tour ended by exiting one of the secret passages that went into the cave system, specifically to where the electric trains for the cave tours are stored and maintained.

Our guide at one of the secret entrances.

Back in Ljubljana Jill mapped out a bike ride on the Trail of Remembrance and Comradeship (signed the POT). In 1941 Ljubljana was occupied by Italy and to prevent resistance activity the Italians built a barbed wire fence around the whole city. After the war and liberation the city built a biking and hiking trail on the route with monuments commemorating people that died in the war. As part of that ride we climbed Goluvec Hill, which has a pretty stiff grade and isn’t really set up for road bikes. (Bike tip if you go: ride the gentler-grade gravel road rather than the formal POT route over Goluvec Hill).

Like most of Europe’s main cities, Ljubljana is a bike-friendly place where almost every street and sidewalk has designated bike lanes physically separated from traffic and and where motorists and pedestrians are willing to tolerate cyclists.

At the Notional Museum of Contemporary History in Tivoli Park we learned the story of Slovenia from the beginning of WW1 to the current day. It is complex and messy. We ended the ride returning home in a light rain, the first real precipitation we have seen on our bikes. We keep waiting to see how our new rain gear works.

We also visited Ljubljana Castle atop the highest hill in the city. Unlike Predjama castle, which was stark and forbidding, Ljubljana Castle has been significantly renovated and provides modern amenities such as concert and event venues as well as describing earlier versions of the castle.

The view from the top of the castle looking down at our apartment building.

Our final tourist stop in Ljubljana was the home of Slovenia’s most famous architect, Jozef Plecnik. The house which Plecnik lived in from 1921 until his death in 1957 had been sealed up after his passing and the museum offers an intimate look at his life and work which includes the Zacherl house in Vienna, Prague Castle and the National and University Library in Ljubljana.

His kitchen and dining room. Notice how spare it is which is typical for the man's personal style.

Last night we went to the symphony! Earlier in the week we saw an ad for the concert and I actually figured out how to buy the tickets online (in Slovene!) It was the tail end of the Ljubljana festival of arts and culture. The concert hall had excellent acoustics and every seat had a great view of the proceedings.

They hosted the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra who put on quite a show. Prokofiev's Symphony #1 opened the show followed by a spirited version of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola. The soloists were excellent (a Slovene women and Ukrainian man). The full auditorium went wild at the end and insisted upon and received an encore from them. The concert then ended with the famous Beethoven Symphony #5 (ta-ta-ta-dum!) and the conductor, Vasily Petrenko, built the tension up in the finale and brought the house down. They too offered a lovely counterpoint encore with a beautiful presentation of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, quite the quiet juxtaposition to the bombastic Beethoven finale. (Jill: good thing David wrote this part, I would not have gotten all those musical details!)

Jill: we were mortifyingly underdressed for this event but excited to share live music with a crowd.

Tomorrow we and our bikes board a train to Zidani Most followed by a 30k bike ride to the town of Celje where we will spend the night before heading to Maribor, Slovenia’s second largest city, and this will mark the end of the Slovenian part of our tour. Then it’s on to Hungary.

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