Križevniška ulica has become a new cultural quarter between the City Museum and the new Breg embankment.

As part of the Križevniška ulica urban intervention and greening project, Križevniška ulica (‘Knights of the Cross Street’) has become a new cultural quarter between the City Museum and the new Breg embankment.

The ambient-urban intervention project has been designed by Robert Waltel with other creative talents, Križevniška residents and with financial support from the City of Ljubljana.

As part of the project, a list of important people who have shown their creativity on Križevniška has been made, and small artistic installations have been set up on the street, with explanatory signs and descriptions, greenery and flowers and benches for reading and socialising. The City of Ljubljana was eager to assist with start-up funding for the purchase and rental of urban equipment and installations, while the artists who create in this part of the city contributed the programme.

The cultural quarter between the City Museum and the Breg embankment opened at the end of August with a performance in several locations around Križevniška ulica entitled ‘I, after whom Ljubljana is named’, a homage to poet Tomaž Šalamun directed by Ivica Buljan. The cultural quarter then saw creative workshops and presentations of Mini Summer and the Festival of Letters, followed by poetry and prose readings and smaller concerts. A medieval day in Ljubljana is foreseen for Sunday 2 October, which is to be one of the cultural quarter’s major projects, while soon a social evening for all those who create on Križevniška will be prepared.
In the future, this broader cultural quarter will cover all the cultural and scientific institutions that operate all the way to Dvorni trg, including the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SAZU) and the City Museum. Other cultural institutions also participated in the project, which works under the artistic and implementation leadership of the Mini Theatre: the Sculpture Association, the Photon Gallery, the Squot Gallery, TipoRenesansa Printing Workshop, KUD C3 and Ljubljana City Museum, as well as hospitality service providers (Shamballa restaurant, Pod skalco bar and Vitez restaurant). Today, many intellectuals and artists live and create on this street, including composers Urban Koder and Aldo Kumar.

Križevniška ulica, which used to be known as Ribiška, is one of the oldest streets in Ljubljana. Between 1167 and 1200 the Knights Templar had a stronghold here, later superseded by the Teutonic Order. The Spanheim noble family, who set up the administrative centre of their estates in Carniola in Ljubljana in the 12th century, founded the monastic church of Mary, Help of Christians here, and alongside it a monastic house with a hospital and school for the education of poor children.

Among the numerous cultural figures that have lived, created or at least stopped on Križevniška are poet Srečko Kosovel, playwright Matej Bor and director Ciril Debevec. Also once living here were the family of lawyer and patron Blaž Crobath, the father of writer Luiza Pesjak, with whom France Prešeren worked, among others. Crobath’s ‘Ljubljana salon’ was a meeting point for Slovene and Slavic intellectuals.

At 7pm on Thursday 15 September 2011, the crowd at the opening of the renovated Križevniška ulica were addressed by Mayor Zoran Janković and Deputy Mayor Prof Janez Koželj.