The town of Slovenj Gradec (German: Windischgrätz) is located in the lower valley of the Mislinja. It is the end and starting point of the Slovenian Mountain Trail. Accordingly, you will find everything you need before or after a multi-day tour in the town.
Slovenj Gradec is the seat of the only municipality in the statistical region of Carinthia and the legal, economic, banking, educational, informational, health, care and transport center of Mislinjska dolina and the wider area of the statistical region of Carinthia. The ancient town in the valley between Pohorje and Uršlja Gora is also a Slovenian synonym for a cultural center, where the rich traditions of the past join hands with a modern pulse. Slovenj Gradac was spared the excessive and, in the sense of being embedded in the old-world landscape image, disproportionate industrial development, such as characterized most Slovenian cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. The rapid development of economic and service opportunities in recent years has therefore happily joined hands with the ancient spiritual tradition and natural resources in the immediate vicinity of the urban center. Historical monuments connect us with the past at every step and easily lull us into a feeling of romantic nostalgia, while at the same time reminding us that we are only the humble but proud successors of a story that began in the distant past.
A living connection with the past and the wealth of cultural heritage is the foundation of cultural development and a central feature of local identity even in the times we live in. It is unfolded amid the muted echo of the most famous episode of medieval history, which is embodied in the art treasures of the city's parish church, dedicated in 1251 as the first in the world to the Hungarian princess and Thuringian duchess St. Elizabeth, the protector of the poor and beggars, and a respectful memory of the world-famous composer Hugo Wolf, an unsurpassed master of late romantic soliloquy, who was born in 1860 in a house on the central square of Slovenegra. The artistic tradition of medieval carvers and baroque masters has flowed into the internationally resounding activity of the Gallery of Fine Arts, which in the last four decades, especially with events under the auspices of the United Nations, has established Slovenj Gradec far beyond the borders of its homeland and permanently marked it as a place of peace and international communication. The crown of these efforts is the document with which in 1989 the Secretary General of the World Organization Perez de Cuellar included Slovenj Gradec among the honorary holders of the title of Herald of Peace.
But the venerable urban tradition and cosmopolitan openness to the world are only part of the landscape and spiritual atmosphere of the world by Mislinja. The rural hinterland here has preserved its archaic originality and a large part of its ancient primeval beauty. At any time of the year, the alluring and almost unspoiled nature is immersed in a soft, relaxed landscape with forests of overgrown hills, which is only here and there crossed by torrential water from the many sources on the surfaces of Pohorje and Uršlja gora, cutting deep and narrow ravines where the mists creep in until noon, when the sun already warms the meadows and fields in the valley.
Translated by Google •
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