Ljubljana Festival

The Ljubljana Festival is an international summer arts festival whose roots lie in the Ljubljana Tourist Society’s Tourist Week of 1952. The festival itself began in 1953 and grew beyond the original local event into a programme of orchestral and chamber music, opera, ballet, theatre and other musical genres. The Križanke complex, adapted by Jože Plečnik from a former monastery, is one of its principal settings. Performances also take place at Congress Square, Cankarjev dom and the Slovenian Philharmonic. Its history includes visits by orchestras such as the Vienna and New York philharmonics and collaborations with Slovenian and international opera companies. Festival Ljubljana also develops cultural activity outside the main summer season. The first festival was held in 1953, a year after a trial tourism week, and it has run every summer since. Its home is the Križanke complex — the open-air Summer Theatre, the Devil's Courtyard, the Knights' Hall — with concerts also at Cankarjev dom, Congress Square, the Slovenian Philharmonic and the opera house. A season now runs to seventy or eighty events across opera, symphonic and chamber music, ballet and theatre, and a Winter Festival was added in 2017. Festival Ljubljana, a public cultural institution, organises it; it has belonged to the European Festivals Association since 1977.