Slovenia · Old Town
Ljubljana
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Ljubljana is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Ljubljanski grad 1,500 points
The one uphill stretch in this level, and there is no way round it. A lane up there is named Ulica na grad, and the name is the whole promise. Whatever is waiting on the terrace, you will have earned it a step at a time. This is the one I take in small bites.
Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica 500 points
From outside this is the plainest thing on the walk: a brick box with rough blocks shoved out of the wall at random, except none of it is random. It sits in the far south-west corner of the level, which is the quietest end of it. Go in the front way and lift your head before you do anything else.
Prešernov trg 500 points
Everything in this level hinges here. Three bridges leave the square shoulder to shoulder as one crossing, the Tromostovje, and every route through the Old Town wants to use them. Stop in the middle and count the ways out.
Robbov vodnjak 500 points
It sits in front of the town hall and everybody points a camera at the upper end of it. Look down instead. The outline of the basin repeats the old seal of the town, so the plan at your feet is older than anything above it.
Cerkev sv. Jakoba 250 points
The far south end of the walk, and the reason to go is the lane that takes you there. From Stari trg the roofline steps down and the way gets tighter, and Gornji trg is the oldest slice of the Old Town left. Then the belfry is opposite you, across the road.
Konjički 250 points
The northernmost pin, and the easiest one to walk straight past. Whatever you are looking for is at knee height, not at eye height, and that is the whole trick of it. Knee height I know about. It is where I live.
SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana 250 points
The north-west pin, out past the ring, and the loneliest bit of this level. Wide road, long straight run, then a pale facade with a pointed gable comes up on your right. Look at it from a block away rather than from the pavement underneath. It was drawn to be seen from far off.
Vodnikov trg 250 points
A market fills this square most mornings, so you smell it before you see anything. Come early. The stalls reach right in under the arcade by the river, and from here the whole level runs downhill in every direction I care about.
Žitni most 250 points
The east end, the last pin before this level runs out. Cars never got a say here. Go out onto it and turn back toward the ridge: the covered market arcade runs along the bank in one unbroken line, which you cannot see from the bank itself.
Name origin
Why it is called Ljubljana.
Nobody has settled this one, and the city's own list of explanations runs to four. Laburus, an ancient city god of the old Slavs. Aluviana, Latin for a river that floods. Laubach, German for the marshes. And ljubljena, beloved, which is the one people who live here prefer. Before any of those the place was called Emona, and that name is probably Celtic. I have had six centuries to chew on this and it still has not given.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si, www.ljubljana.si
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
This is a gap in the land, and the gap has a name: the Ljubljanska vrata, the Ljubljana Gate. Its position has always mattered enormously, and peoples moved through it early and in numbers. At the end of the sixth century Slav settlers stopped moving and built in the shelter of the castle hill. The ridge is up one side and the river runs down the other, and everything you walk is pressed into the strip between the two. I approve of a narrow place. Narrow is where things happen.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si, www.ljubljana.si, giskd2s.situla.org
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Two answers, and they do not join up. The Romans held a walled town on this ground called Emona, and it went down with the western empire. What is under your feet is not its continuation: Slav settlers arrived at the end of the sixth century and started again, in a different spot, under the hill. The name Ljubljana is first written down in a document from somewhere between 1112 and 1125, in which a nobleman called Rudolf of Tarcento hands a small holding near the castle to the chapter at Aquileia. So this town has a founding date and a starting-over date, and the second one paid no attention at all to the first.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si, www.ljubljana.si, giskd2s.situla.org
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1000–1270
Noble families. The land was divided among them around the year 1000, and after that they passed it round among themselves. Somewhere between 1112 and 1125 one of them, Rudolf of Tarcento, gave a small holding by the castle to the chapter at Aquileia, and the document that records it is the first time anyone wrote the name of this place down. After that the basin belonged to the Spanheim dukes of Carinthia. In 1220 the town got town rights, and coin was struck up at the castle. The people down the hill were mostly craftsmen, sorted into guilds.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si
- 1270–1278
Bohemia. The Bohemian king Ottokar Přemysl held the town from 1270, and it was his for eight years. Eight years is not a long time to hold anything. For me it is roughly one good afternoon.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si
- 1278–1809
The Habsburgs, for five and a half centuries, from 1278 as part of Carniola. They handed out a full thirty-nine trading and other privileges, which brought merchants and craftsmen here from all over Europe. In 1461 a diocese was founded and the church of St Nicholas became the cathedral. Privileges are the reason this Old Town is as dense as it is: everybody wanted a front door on it.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si, www.ljubljana.si
- 1809–1813
France, briefly, and it counted. Under the French the city was the capital of the Illyrian Provinces. Slovene became one of the official languages, and the first higher school opened here. Four years, one lasting result. Efficient.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si
- 1813–1918
Austria again, and this is where the map you are walking gets fixed. In 1821 the city hosted the congress of the Holy Alliance, several European rulers turned up, and one of the central squares has been called Kongresni trg ever since. In 1849 the first train came in from Vienna and eight years later the line to Trieste was finished. In 1869 there were 22,593 people here. Somebody counted them one at a time, which is how I count dots.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si
- 1918–1991
Yugoslavia, in two versions. From 1918, after Austria-Hungary came apart, Ljubljana was the administrative, political and cultural centre of Slovenia inside the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The National Gallery opened that year, the University followed in 1919, the Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1938. Later the city was the capital of one of the six republics of socialist Yugoslavia, and it spread out a long way past anything I would call an Old Town.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si
- 1991–
Slovenia. On 23 December 1990 the people voted for a state of their own. It was declared on 25 June 1991, and Ljubljana became its capital. In May 2004 the country joined the European Union. After nine hundred years of the question being settled somewhere else, it got settled here.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si
The emblem
What the shield means.
Not the shield, no. The shield is a red field with a green triple hill along the bottom, a silver wall on the hill with seven merlons and a gate with the portcullis raised, a silver tower above that with five more merlons, and a green dragon sitting on top of it with its wings up and its tail curled once, holding the second and the fourth merlon with its claws. Fit that into the space of a fingernail. So the icon keeps the castle on its hill and lets the dragon go, which is roughly the older reading anyway: the dragon began as a small ornament above a shield that showed nothing but the town wall or the town gate, dropped down into the shield in the baroque, and then outgrew everything else in it. A thing that starts out as decoration and ends up eating the whole shield has my full respect.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si, giskd2s.situla.org
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
For a long stretch this was not one town but three, sitting side by side. Stari trg, Mestni trg and Novi trg, each of them walled on its own, five gates into the lot, and two bridges holding the pieces together: the lower one, the Špitalski, and the upper one, the Čevljarski, which used to be called the Mesarski. Walk those three squares in a row and you have eaten the whole medieval town, wall lines and all.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si, giskd2s.situla.org
In 1550 Primož Trubar put out the first two books ever printed in Slovene, a catechism and an alphabet primer, and Jurij Dalmatin translated the Bible. Around the same time a town of five thousand people, about seven in ten of them Slovene-speaking, got its first secondary school, its first public library and its first printing house. There is a street on this walk called Trubarjeva cesta and a small park called Park slovenske reformacije. Now you know what they are for.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si
The ground here has knocked this town over twice. After the earthquake of 1511 it was put back up in the Renaissance style and given a new wall. After the catastrophic one of 1895 it was put back up mostly by Austrian and Czech architects, who cut new streets and filled them with Art Nouveau. So the two handsomest layers of the city are both repairs. I have been dropped a few times as well. It does wonders for the surface.
Sources: www.ljubljana.si, www.ljubljana.si
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- trg
- A square, and this town runs on them. Stari trg, Mestni trg and Novi trg were three separate towns once. Then Gornji trg, Mali trg, Ribji trg, Dvorni trg, Kongresni trg. Count the trgs and you have counted the town.
- ulica
- The ordinary word for a street. Mačkova ulica, Rožna ulica, Mala ulica, Prečna ulica. If a name here ends in -ulica it is a street and nothing more is being claimed.
- cesta
- A road, and always the bigger one. Slovenska cesta cuts the level in half, Trubarjeva cesta and Poljanska cesta run out east, and Rimska cesta means the Roman one. Wider means faster, and faster is nobody's friend down here.
- nabrežje
- An embankment: the walled bank of the river, counted as a street. Cankarjevo, Gallusovo, Hribarjevo, Petkovškovo, Adamič-Lundrovo. Two of them face each other across the water, so you get to eat both sides of the same view.
- steza
- A footpath that counts as a street. Mačja steza is the cat's path, Kratka steza the short one, then Barvarska, Obrežna and Židovska steza. Steze have dots on them like everything else.
- -arska
- The trade that used to work the lane. Čevljarska is the shoemakers, Krojaška the tailors, Usnjarska the tanners, Ključavničarska the locksmiths, Ribja ulica the fish. Whole streets named after what came out of them.
- grad
- A castle, and grajski means belonging to it. Ulica na grad goes up to it, Grajska planota is the flat bit at the top, and Gradišče is an older fortified hill that was there before any of this. The hill names the streets, not the other way round.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 109streets
- 1,404dots
- 22.0km of street
- 28.3km on foot
- 8.1hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.