Ljubljana Castle

Castle Hill was fortified long before any castle stood on it: the site has been settled continuously since around 1200 BC, and the summit probably became a Roman army stronghold after the fortifications of Illyrian and Celtic times. The first medieval castle is believed to have been a wooden and stone fortification of the 11th century, rebuilt in the 12th.

The oldest written record is a parchment list of the dead, the Nomina defunctorum, kept in the Udine cathedral archive and most probably dating to the second half of 1161. It notes that the nobleman Rudolf of Tarcento, a lawyer of the Patriarchate of Aquileia, had granted a canon twenty farmsteads beside "castrum Leibach" — by the historian Peter Štih's reckoning, between 1112 and 1125. By 1144 the castle was recorded as a seat of the Carinthian dukes of the House of Sponheim, and a document of 1256 named it the most important castle of the rulers of Carniola — castrum capitalis. King Ottokar II of Bohemia took it late in 1270; after his defeat it passed in 1278 to Rudolph of Habsburg, and from the first half of the 14th century it served as the seat of the lords of Carniola.

In the 15th century the old fortress was almost completely demolished and rebuilt — a complete circuit of wall, towers flanking the entrance, a drawbridge — its purpose now to defend the empire against Ottoman invasion and peasant revolt. St George's Chapel dates from this rebuilding: an imperial document of 1489 records its consecration to St George, St Pancras and the Empress Helena, and in 1747 it was reworked in Baroque style and painted with the coats of arms of the provincial governors. The armoury is said to have been built in 1524 at the wish of Emperor Ferdinand.

The castle kept a grim pit prison between the wall and the native rock, reached only from courtyard level: prisoners were lowered by rope or chain and waited in ankle-irons under an open sky — captured Turkish soldiers, Protestants and insurgent peasants among them. The Tower of Erasmus, which archaeologists believe served as a prison for nobles, preserves the year 1442 scratched into its walls and is named for the robber-knight Erazem Lueger, master of Predjama Castle. After he stabbed an army commander at a gala dinner, the territorial governor Krištof von Thein locked him up there for a few weeks with his brother — but he escaped, most likely by bribing a guard, and returned to Predjama.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the castle served as an arsenal. French troops occupied Ljubljana and the castle in 1797 and again in 1809, and during the Illyrian Provinces it was used as barracks and a military hospital. Back under Austria from 1815 it became a prison, and remained one until 1895 apart from a break between 1848 and 1868, taking up the role again during the Second World War. Its prisoners included the Italian revolutionary Silvio Pellico, the Hungarian prime minister Lajos Batthyány and the Slovene writer Ivan Cankar.

With no ruler in residence and no further military need for a fortification here, the castle lost importance; maintenance costs ran too high and the fabric began to crumble. The Viewing Tower of 1848 housed a guard who fired cannon shots to warn the city of fire; the mix of prison and military stronghold made the castle unpopular with the citizens below.

On 16 May 1905 the Municipality of Ljubljana bought the castle for 60,200 kronen at the explicit wish of the mayor, Ivan Hribar, who planned to establish a city museum in it. The plan was never carried out; instead the city settled poor families there, and residents stayed until 1963, when preparations for renovation began. In the late 1930s the architect Jože Plečnik reworked the remains of the fortifications on the hilltop into the promenade called Šance.

Extensive renovation began around 1970 and ran for decades. A monument by the sculptor Stojan Batič to the Slovene peasant revolts — above all those of 1515 and 1573 — was raised near the castle in 1974; the panoramic tower was raised 1.2 metres back to its Baroque height in 1982; and the restored castle became a venue first for weddings and later for cultural events. The funicular up Castle Hill — an idea going back to Hribar's mayoralty — was built in 2006 and entered service on 28 December that year, climbing beside the wall that once linked the medieval city to the castle. Since 1 April 2011 the complex has been managed by the public institute Javni zavod Ljubljanski grad.