Cankar Memorial House

Na klancu 1 is the address of Cankar Memorial House, an important cultural monument of the city center of Vrhnika. It is located on the site where once stood a wooden, thatched cottage, in which Ivan Cankar (1876-1918), the greatest Slovenian writer and playwright was born. There was a fire in 1879 and the hut was burnt down. The Cankar family had to roam abandoned barns and houses all over Vrhnika - hey moved no less than 10 times in the next 19 years.

The new owners of the burnt down hut decided to rebuild. In 1880 a new house grew on the foundation of the old – it was the same house you can sightsee and walk through today. The interior is divided into a living area, tiny room called ‘izba’ and a black kitchen.

At the guided tour through the Cankar Memorial House you are able to see a memorial collection of objects, which display the living conditions of a poor family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The shelves and cabinets display Cankar’s incunabula, photos of the writer, his relatives, friends and benefactors from Ljubljana and from his ‘Vienna period’, his self-portraits and drawings.