Spomenik Francetu Prešernu

Standing to the side of Prešeren Square towers the statue of France Prešeren, Slovenia’s national poet.

Prešeren was born in 1800, into a peasant family, the third of eight children in a farming family in the village of Vrba. He did well in school, and eventually left Slovenian to attend law school in Vienna. After school, he returned and, while working as a lawyer, began to explore his creative side. Prešeren’s poetry was so good that he was deemed the first Slovenian poet considered able to compete with his European contemporaries.

This monument in Ljubljana is a tribute to this literary giant, but there’s another layer to this memorial. When the sculpture was first unveiled in 1905, the figure of a naked muse perched above Prešeren’s head is said to have caused quite a stir with the nearby church, whose priest was not fond of the publicly displayed nude female form.

They came up with a clever solution: planting birch trees to strategically block the view of the nude muse from the church’s entrance.