On Thursday 20 December 2012 in front of City Hall there was the 13th staging of the ‘Returning the Book to the People’ event, held to commemorate the 412th anniversary of the burning of the first books in Slovene.

The Returning the Book to the People event was organised by the City of Ljubljana and the Primož Trubar Slovenian Protestant Society. At the first event in 2000, a memorial plaque was unveiled in Mestni trg, next to which candles are now lit each year to commemorate the burning of the books in Slovene in the time of the Counter-Reformation.

During this year’s Returning the Book to the People event, visitors to the stands can choose books and have a commemorative stamp put in or have a memorial charter printed at Master Janez’s medieval printing works. Inside City Hall, there is on display a Slovene translation of Janez Vajkard Valvasor’s Wonders of the Duchy of Carniola, a graphic exhibition of renaissance frescoes (PARNAS), a film on frescoes as well as a film on the life of Primož Trubar.

During the Counter-Reformation, on 23 December 1600 in front of Ljubljana Town Hall 11 wagon loads of books were burned and subsequently on 9 January 1601 a further three wagons of reformation books, thus altogether a total of about 2,000 of the first books in Slovene.