Postojna

The Postojna area has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic: excavations at the Betal Rock Shelter, just outside the town, found stone tools and the bones of Ice Age animals, and a Roman fort stood on Sovič, the hill above the town. The settlement is first mentioned in 1226 and became a market borough in 1432. Its Slovene name is said to come from the white-tailed eagle, which once nested on Sovič and still appears on the town's coat of arms, while German speakers knew the place as Adelsberg. Ottoman raiders reached it several times in the 16th century, and after the castle on Sovič burned in 1689 a new manor rose on today's Titov trg.

Postojna sat on the main road from Ljubljana to Trieste, and carters' traffic, then the railway in 1857, made it grow. The cave had been visited since the Middle Ages — names scratched inside date to 1213 — but in 1818, during preparations for a visit by Emperor Francis I, the lamplighter Luka Čeč found new passages, and the cave opened to the public as a tourist sight, with rails from 1872 and electric light from 1884, before Ljubljana had it. Postojna was declared a town in 1909.

After the First World War the Treaty of Rapallo gave the town to Italy, which built barracks on its upper edge, and its position near the Yugoslav border helped make it an important regional centre. In 1944 Slovene Partisans destroyed a German fuel store inside the cave, and the fire burned for seven days. After 1945 the town expanded east in blocks of flats, and it is today the main centre of Inner Carniola, home to the Karst Research Institute and, since 2002, the International Union of Speleology.

Postojna's identity is bound up with the karst. The Karst Research Institute of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts has its seat in the old manor on Titov trg, karst studies are taught in the town, and since 2014 it has hosted a UNESCO karst study centre, the first of its kind in Slovenia. The olm, the pale blind salamander of the underground rivers, lives in the cave, and the hatching of olm young there in 2016 made news around the world.

The cave itself has long been a stage. Its concert hall, in use since the 19th century, can hold thousands of people, and a post office inside, first opened in 1899, is described as the world's first underground post office. Predjama Castle carries the region's best-known legend: that of Erasmus of Lueg, the robber knight who defied the Habsburg emperor and held out in the cliff castle until he was killed after a long siege; a popular but unfounded story says he died by a cannon shot while in his lavatory.

The town also has a cultural centre with an events hall, a public library and a music school, and the town holds a summer cultural festival, Zmaj 'ma mlade. Several well-known Slovenes were born here, among them Luka Čeč, the cave's first guide, Alojz Kraigher and Borut Pahor.

A little over 10,000 people live in the town, the largest in Inner Carniola and the seat of the Municipality of Postojna. It sits on a gentle slope above the Pivka valley, beneath the Postojna Gate, the easiest pass from the interior of Slovenia towards the sea, so the old road, the motorway and the railway from Ljubljana all run through it.

Forests surround the town, and timber, then engineering and food industries, grew up alongside tourism; the cave company, the forestry company and a bakery are among the larger employers. Postojna is also a local centre for schools, with a grammar school and forestry and wood-working colleges, as well as courts, the police and the regional administration.

Life divides between the old centre around Titov trg and the post-war estates at Kremenca and Kidričevo naselje to the east. Each day the visitors arrive by coach and car for the cave and leave again by evening, while the town keeps its own pace. A ski area on the slopes of the Javorniki east of town has not operated for several years.

Postojna belonged for centuries to the Duchy of Carniola, which gave its name to Slovenia's best-known sausage, kranjska klobasa. It is a parboiled sausage of chopped pork and bacon seasoned with salt, a little garlic and black pepper, stuffed into pork casing, hot-smoked and sold in pairs linked by a wooden skewer.

From the west comes jota, a thick soup of beans with sauerkraut or sour turnip, potatoes, bacon and spare ribs, made through the Slovenian Littoral, around Trieste and in Istria, usually with olive oil and garlic. Žganci, a dish of buckwheat, maize or wheat flour regarded as a national dish, especially in its buckwheat form, and potica, the rolled festive pastry, are shared with the rest of Slovenia. Inner Carniola once had more unusual food as well: roasted dormouse and quail were eaten here, and until the crayfish plague of the 1880s the noble crayfish of its rivers was a source of income and often on the menu.

Eating out is simple. Several restaurants and cafés stand by the cave entrance and below Predjama Castle for the day visitors.