21 June 2019, Friday
Today we leave the beautiful City of Zagreb for Ljubljana, Slovenia. I like Zagreb. It was a pleasant surprise. Most people could speak English, they are nice, open and friendly, public transport is well organised, city is pretty clean and still not too much tourists as yet.
We checked out at 11 a.m. and made our way to the bus station, for our bus at 12.15 p.m. A short ride - about 2 hours and we were in Ljubljana, Slovenia. We walked to our hostel which luckily was nearby. Actually, everything is pretty nearby as Ljubljana is really a small town. We didn’t even need to get any tickets for public transportation. Everything worth seeing was within a 15 minute radius.
A bit of history first before I go on. The Slovenes settled in the region of what is now Slovenia in the 6th century, together with the Bavarians and the Franks. At that time, Christianisation took place. Afterwards, the Slovene lands were part of the Holy Roman Empire, and later they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the dissolution at the end of WW I in 1918 - when the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed, and turned into the multinational state of Yugoslavia in 1929.
After WW II, Slovenia became a republic in the renewed Yugoslavia, which although communist, distanced itself from Moscow's rule. Dissatisfied with the exercise of power by the majority Serbs, Slovenes succeeded in establishing their independence in 1991 after a short 10-day war. Slovenia is part of the European Union and luckily they are using the Euro here which makes things a lot more simpler.
We didn’t really have a smooth check-in, there was no one at the reception and then we got a cranky receptionist who was quite curt with us although he did his job. So we didn’t ask him for city maps or anything, but we found some maps in the outside area of the hostel so we took one with the intention of getting more information from the tourist information centre.
To get there we had to cross a bridge known as the Dragon Bridge, because there are statues of dragons on the 4 corners of the bridge; sort of guardians of the bridge I guess. Dragons are kind of an emblem here in Ljubljana; they show up all over the city. It was opened in 1901 and at the time it was sort of a technical achievement
as it was one of the first reinforced concrete bridges in Europe.
There are altogether 4 bridges here in Ljubljana. Apart from the Dragon Bridge there is the Cobblers’ Bridge. Before 1867 it was a wooden bridge which connected 3 town squares. In 1867 it was replaced by a narrower, cast iron bridge. To bring back the appearance of earlier bridges, the new bridge was designed in the shape of a square above water, while the old cast iron bridge was moved to a new location. In the old days vending booths used to line the bridge.
There is also the Triple Bridge which is the central bridge and dates back to 1842. This bridge was originally intended for road traffic, while the Cobblers’ Bridge and the Butchers’ Bridge which are alongside the Triple Bridge were added for pedestrians. Now they are all pedestrian bridges, except the Dragon Bridge. The Butchers’ Bridge had a lot of love locks on them, with weird skulls of dead animals (cows I think - not sure whether they are real or fake) situated here and there on the hand rails.
All these bridges were to cross over the Ljubljana River, which once had several islands. On one of these islands there used to be a church called the Volbenk Church. Near the islet there was an ‘S’ shaped barrier called “the rake” which caught driftwood and debris. It also used to serve as a toll house, where guards collected tax on goods transported on the river. The bank of the river is called Breg. In the 14th century it was the main port for transporting all goods to Ljubljana. In Roman times there was a bridge with a road from Emona to Dolenjska (south of the country). Later the boatmen from Trnovo transported people across the river in that spot. The traffic on Breg died away in 1857 with the advent of railroads.
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