ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ljubljana never had the role of a true capital. Only after 1945, as part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, did the city become the political and administrative centre of a Slovene Republic, and only since 1991 has it been the capital of an independent country of Slovenia. As a consequence, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Ljubljana was endowed with the institutions that represent political autonomy, most importantly a Slovene parliament. Until that period, the city can be considered as a capital only in the sense that it was imagined as such by most of its inhabitants and by Slovenes in general. This chapter will examine how that notion took form – urbanistically, architectonically and symbolically.
