A short history of Slovenia, told to make sense of what you'll see

From pile dwellings to Rome

The earliest traces you can visit are in the Ljubljana Marshes, where people built prehistoric pile dwellings; those at Ig are now World Heritage, part of a listing shared by six Alpine countries. The Iron Age brought the Hallstatt culture, and in Roman times the area had three main towns, Emona, forerunner of Ljubljana, Celeia, today’s Celje, and Poetovio, today’s Ptuj, plus smaller centres such as Nauportus at Vrhnika. Rome also built a defensive system here, the Claustra Alpium Iuliarum, with forts such as Ad Pirum at Hrušica. For this period I’d start in Ptuj.

Slavs, Carniola and the Counts of Celje

Between the 6th and 7th centuries a Slavic-speaking population settled the area. Carantania emerged, a principality centred north of present-day Slovenia, in what is now Austrian Carinthia, and Christianity arrived from Aquileia and Freising. Carniola is first recorded in 973 and had become a duchy by 1364. In the 14th and 15th centuries the Counts of Celje dominated the scene, with figures such as Anne of Celje, Queen of Poland, and Barbara of Celje, Holy Roman Empress through her marriage to Sigismund of Luxembourg. It was also the time of Ottoman raids.

Trubar, the written language and Napoleon

My favourite moment in Slovenian history comes in 1550. In 1550 the first books ever printed in Slovenian appeared, Primož Trubar’s catechism and primer, and in 1584 came the Bible translated by Jurij Dalmatin and the grammar written by Adam Bohorič. More than two centuries later, between 1809 and 1813-1814, part of the territory passed to Napoleon’s empire as the Illyrian Provinces, with Ljubljana as the seat of the governor-general. In 1848 the United Slovenia programme called for all Slovene-speaking lands in the empire to be brought together in one administrative unit. How that history lives on in the language is in the language of Slovenia.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Ljubljana before prices climb.

The Isonzo Front and Yugoslavia

The First World War hit hard from 1915, when Italy entered the war and the Soča Front opened, the Isonzo of the history books, which the government calls one of the bloodiest fronts of the conflict. When Austria-Hungary collapsed, the central Slovene lands joined the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. After the 1920 Carinthian plebiscite part of the Slovene population stayed in Austria, and the Littoral, Gorizia, the Trieste hinterland and part of Istria came under Italian rule.

In April 1941 the Axis attack brought down the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and Slovene territory was carved up between Germany, Italy and Hungary, with a small part annexed to the Independent State of Croatia. Occupation brought deportations and repression as well as organised resistance around the Liberation Front, and the government itself describes those years as particularly complex, with a difficult legacy. After 1945 Slovenia was a republic within socialist Yugoslavia, which broke with the Soviet Union in 1948, while the western border was settled in stages, through the London Memorandum of 1954 and the Treaty of Osimo of 1975.

Independence in 1991

In April 1990 Slovenia held its first multi-party elections since the Second World War, and on 23 December that year a plebiscite saw 88.5% of all eligible voters, 95% of those who voted, back independence. The Assembly passed the independence acts on 25 June 1991 and the declaration followed on the 26th. An armed conflict with the Yugoslav People’s Army followed, the so-called Ten-Day War, which ended with the Brioni Declaration on 7 July 1991. International recognition came in early 1992, and on 22 May that year Slovenia joined the UN. What each date means today is in Slovenia’s Independence Day. The national symbols, with Triglav on the coat of arms, are explained in Slovenia flag.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Ljubljana before prices climb.

From Yugoslavia to the EU

The rest is recent. Slovenia joined the Council of Europe in 1993, NATO and the EU in 2004, the euro on 1 January 2007 and Schengen that December. For a traveller that means open borders and euros, as I explain in Slovenia in the EU. If I had just one day to make sense of all this, I’d spend it at Ljubljana Castle, around 900 years old and home to an exhibition on the country’s history.