The National Museum of Slovenia, from a Neanderthal flute to an Egyptian mummy

What to see in the National Museum of Slovenia

The collections run from the Palaeolithic to the 20th century. The highlights, according to the Ministry of Culture, are these.

• The Neanderthal flute from Divje babe cave, probably the oldest instrument in the world.
• The wooden dugout and finds from the pile dwellings of the Ljubljana Marshes, from the third millennium BC.
• The bronze situla from Vače, from around 500 BC.
• A gilded figure of a Roman citizen from Emona, the forerunner of Ljubljana.
• The Egyptian mummy Ishata.
• Finds from the Ljubljanica river and early medieval jewellery and weapons.

There are also coins, weapons, armour and applied arts, spread between the Muzejska and Metelkova sites.

The mammoth next door

The Rudolfinum also houses the Slovenian Museum of Natural History, with zoological, botanical and geological collections. The eye-catcher is the almost complete skeleton of a mammoth about 20,000 years old found at Nevlje, near Kamnik, alongside a 210-million-year-old fossil fish from the Triglav mountains and the skeleton of a Miocene whale. Its founding collection was Baron Sigmund Zois’s minerals.

Opening hours and tickets

The Muzejska building opens every day from 10am to 6pm, and until 8pm on Thursdays; the Metelkova site, Tuesday to Sunday. Both close on four holidays a year (1 Jan, 1 May, 1 Nov and 25 Dec). Tickets cost €8 per site or €10 for both, €4 or €6 for pensioners and students, and €16 or €17 for a family. Entry costs nothing on the first Sunday of each month, except during major temporary exhibitions, and the audio guide is included.

The museum sits by Tivoli Park and a few steps from the National Gallery, so I would do both in the same morning. Alongside the city’s other collections, it is compared in Ljubljana museums. The Neanderthal flute came from Divje babe cave, near Cerkno, which you can only see on a guided visit between mid-April and mid-October. Few visits explain the history of Slovenia better than this one.

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From provincial museum to national museum

Created as the Provincial Museum of Carniola in 1821, it became the National Museum in 1921, under the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. It is Slovenia’s oldest cultural and scientific institution. Other museums later grew out of it, such as the ethnographic museum and, in 1944, the natural history museum, which still shares its building.

That building is the Rudolfinum, a neo-Renaissance palace named after Crown Prince Rudolf, completed in 1885 and built by the Slovene architect Viljem Treo. In front of it, since 1904, stands a monument to the polymath Janez Vajkard Valvasor. Inside, the ceiling paintings date from 1885, and the main staircase is decorated with figures by the Graz sculptor Veit Königer, brought from Novo Celje castle after the Second World War. In 2008 the museum opened a second site on Metelkova Street.

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