Concluding our time in the Slovenian capital city of Ljubljana, and following on from the short, guided tour of the city, this post covers our slow wander back along the banks of the Ljubljanica river towards the meeting point for our excursion group in Kongresni Trg. No, I still don’t know how to pronounce it.
We had reached Dragon Bridge, easily identifiable thanks to its dragons. Like much of Ljubljana – and you’ll know this if you’ve read the first part of this exploration of the city; you have, haven’t you? – the bridge dates from the early twentieth century during much of the city’s rebuilding following the earthquake. Dragon Bridge was one of the earliest bridges in Europe to use reinforced concrete and the architectural style is from the Vienna Succession, a more all-embracing offshoot of Art Nouveau.
We then started coming across lots of public art sculptures, made from bronze, abstract, with varying themes including myths (Adam and Eve, Prometheus, a Satyr), human faces, and wildlife (birds, a tentacle, a wolf). These were almost exclusively the work of Jakov Brdar, and we loved them. Upon one of the many bridges over the Ljubljanica – Butcher’s Bridge – we also saw a lot of that most popular of pastimes for travellers with an odd sense of romanticism about them, padlocks, some of which were attached to some of the smaller sculptural pieces. My thoughts about attaching rusty eyesores to monuments is less than positive but that’s subjectivity for you.
After admiring the public art sculptures we continued towards the square we’d originally been dropped off at, taking in a few more sights of the architecture and just overall pleasant feel of Ljubljana along the way.
We were back at Kongresni Trg with plenty of time to spare (no rocking up late and spoiling other people’s plans for us, thank you very much) and that gave us the opportunity to take a quick look at the university building on the south eastern corner. Its entrance was approached by a curving path around a fountain and lined with busts of prominent men connected with academia. Only men, apparently. Different times. Anyway, a few are shown below but you can always hunt down the others if you’re so-inclined, and you can always visit Ljubljana to see them for yourself.
The siren call of the water reached out to us and drew us down some steps towards the river we’d crossed a few times already during the day, and here we passed another abstract piece of artwork – a cylindrical monument to lost lives in World War I – plus a bronze statue of Gustav Mahler. Early in his musical career he was appointed as a conductor of operas and operettas in Ljubljana.
The final few photos were from in front of the Ursuline church that had attracted my attention earlier in the day and of a pillar which I’d not been able to get near before on account of another tour group – not from the cruise ship – gathered near it. The Corinthian order capital was topped with a sculpture to the Holy Trinity.
That brought our time in Ljubljana to an end. As with all cruise tours (and probably most tours in general) there wasn’t anywhere near enough time to see as much as we’d have liked. We’d have loved to visit the castle, for instance. Additionally, the day and timing of our visit made for a quiet experience; it would have been nice to see more things open, more sense that this was a bustling capital. Ljubljana at night, for instance, feels like it would be a vastly different place, and it’s something we’d love to see. We came away from our visit to Ljubljana loving the architecture and layout, adoring the abstract public art pieces, and thinking it would be a superb destination for a weekend city break.
We still had one more stop to make in Slovenia before heading across the border and back to the Italian port, and that would be to the very popular tourist destination of Lake Bled.