Križanke Summer Theatre

Teutonic Knights began building here around 1228, and for seven centuries the complex south of Ljubljana's old town remained a monastery — shaken by the Idrija earthquake of 1511, patched together between 1567 and 1579, given a Baroque church by the Venetian architect Domenico Rossi in 1714–15. Nationalisation in 1945 left it empty. In 1952 the city turned to Jože Plečnik, then eighty, and asked him to make a festival theatre of the ruin; the work completed in 1956 was his last major gift to Ljubljana. He kept the cloister and set within it shallow arcades and courtyards washed in vivid sgraffito, so that an audience arrives through architecture rather than a foyer. The open-air stage in the main courtyard has been the heart of the Ljubljana Festival ever since, roofed against Slovene summer weather when it must be, and each spring it becomes home to Druga Godba, the city's festival of world and alternative music. Opera, orchestral concerts and jazz share the same stone walls.