Mount Triglav and its role among Slovenes

Mikša, Peter (author), Ajlec, Kornelija (author)

Mount Triglav, the highest mountain in the Julian Alps, is also the highest peak of the Republic of Slovenia. It is depicted in thenational coat of arms and, consequently, in the flag of the country. Thus, it is the most prominent Slovenian national symbol. Thisstatus is rooted in the historical processes and events that linked Mount Triglav with Slovenes. The name Triglav appeared on a mapfor the first time in 1744, and its first depiction dates back to 1778. With the development and organization of mountaineering andalpinism in the second half of the nineteenth century, Slovenian mountains, and in particular the Triglav mountain range, arousedthe interest of German mountaineering clubs, which began to build huts and lay out trails to these huts and to nearby summits inorder to mark this area as German. This general sentiment and purely patriotic motives led Jakob Aljaž, who worked as a parishpriest beneath Triglav, to purchase the summit of Triglav in 1895 and erect a tower there. In the following years, the publicincreasingly took notice of his action, a visible indicator of the victory of Slovenes over Germans. Gradually, Triglav became an ever-growing symbol of Slovenian identity. The architect Jože Plečnik first depicted the mountain as a symbol of Slovenes in 1934. At theend of 1941, during the occupation of Slovenia in the Second World War, Triglav was used as a symbol of the Liberation Front. In1947, it was officially used as a national symbol in the new Slovenian Constitution, when it was depicted in the coat of arms. Itremained in every Yugoslav and Slovenian constitution until Slovenia’s independence in 1991and afterwards.

• Language: English
• Keywords: Triglav, Alps, battle for the mountains, symbolism, coat of arms, Slovenia
• Work type: Scientific work
• Typology: 1.16 - Independent Scientific Component Part or a Chapter in a Monograph
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Place of publishing: Cham
• Year: 2025
• Number of pages: Str. 327-346
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-180695
• UDC: 796.52(497.6Triglav)
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-99017-5_19
• COBISS.SI-ID: 267674627
• Publication date in RUL: 13.03.2026

Record is a part of a monograph

• Title: Discourses on mountains of Montenegro and Slovenia
• Editors: Matija Zorn, Olga Pelcer-Vujačić, Peter Mikša
• Place of publishing: Cham
• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2026
• ISBN: 978-3-031-99016-8
• COBISS.SI-ID: 267673091
• Collection title: Historical geography and geosciences (Print)
• Collection ISSN: 2520-1379

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Description: The most restrictive Creative Commons license. This only allows people to download and share the work for no commercial gain and for no other purposes.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: Alpe, bitka za gore, simbolika, grb, Slovenija

Projects

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: P6-0101-2022
• Name: Geografija Slovenije