ABSTRACT

In the interwar period, the Slovene capital of Ljubljana in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was made up of multiple districts, each capturing a particular aspect of the town's overall character. The Trnovo district was popularly described at the time as a beautiful, village-like neighborhood of vegetable gardens, large green spaces, historic architecture, and a small medieval section that together created a rural idyll just outside the town center. Following World War II, which in Yugoslavia was accompanied by a vicious civil war, Tito's socialist state came into power in 1945 and went about rebuilding the country on multiple levels. For capital cities, such as Ljubljana, this raised the question of how to introduce socialist modernity into the existing urban fabric, a fabric that carried clear references to a non-socialist past. The greater Trnovo area was historically associated with two historic settlements, historic Trnovo and historic Krakovo.