Navje

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Neoclassical arcade on Navje cemetery in Ljubljana.
Neoclassical arcade on Navje cemetery in Ljubljana.

Navje, formerly known as St. Christopher Cemetery (Slovene: Pokopališče Sv. Krištofa) is a memorial park in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. It is located in the Bežigrad district, just behind the Ljubljana railway station.

Between the early 18th century and the 1930s, the wider area was used as the central cemetery of Ljubljana. In 1936, a new cemetery was established, known as Žale, and most of the graves were moved there. A small portion of the old cemetery was transformed in a pantheon of famous Slovenes. The memorial park was designed by the architects Jože Plečnik and Ivo Spinčič. Already in 1932, Plečnik had proposed to buld a monumantal church on the same site, which would include a crypt with tombs of famous Slovenes. The project, planned together with his student Edvard Ravnikar, was however rejected, so Plečnik proposed the creation of Navje.

Between 1936 and 1940 several tombs of notable personalities were moved into the park, but because of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the project was never completed. Many of the tombs planned to be moved into Navje, such as Prešeren's, Trubar's, Maister's and Rusjan's, were not brought in, while many tombs of unimportant individuals, planned to be moved to Žale, have remained in the park. Plečnik's plans for the enlargment of the park were never carried out. After World War Two, the park was largely neglected and was renovated only in the 1990s, although works are still going on in the surroundings.

[edit] Famous tombs

Notable people burried in Navje include:

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