Tivoli Park, Sts. Cyril & Methodius Church, Modern Art

Taking advantage of the non-rainy afternoon today, I went for a walk in a park, Tivoli Park to be precise. I then visited two nearby sights, Saints Cyril & Methodius Church and the Museum of Modern Art.

(Non-rainy, but still entirely overcast. What’s a traveller who’s been mostly spoiled by the weather on this trip until now to do?)

Tivoli Park

I visited Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen once. Apple Photos tells me that was more than nine years ago now, well before I started this journal. So don’t bother looking for a post about it on these pages. You’d be wasting your time.

But if you’ve ever been to Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen or if you’ve seen a picture of it (you can probably find lots on the internet), I want you to form as clear a mental image of it as you can in your head.

Got it? Good.

You now have a good picture of one of the infinite number of things that Tivoli Park in Ljubljana doesn’t resemble.

We have a long process of elimination ahead of us, but stick with me, people. We’ll get there if we live long enough.

Now, I want you to picture a TiVo video device …

Nah, you people will desert me if I carry on in that direction for one instant more. I know you will. Let’s cut to the chase.

Tivoli Park is a large, very calming, mostly grass and trees park with paths that wind through it. The park also has benches. bushes, shrubs, a few modern sculptures, and a funky fountain. And I think I passed a flower bed, but it wasn’t flowering at this time of year.

If peacefully and relaxingly walking and/or sitting aren’t your thing, near the main entrance, the park also offers snack bars, a mini-golf course, tennis courts, basketball hoops, and soccer fields—or as they call them here, football pitches, that are a fraction of regulation size, a simple playground, and a small skateboard daredevil park.

Despite having all that, Tivoli Park is not a particularly long walk outside the central core of the city. Of course, “not a particularly long walk” is a subjective measure. I didn’t time how long it took me, but Google Maps tells me that walking from the circle at the centre of the old part of the city that I mentioned on my first day here to Tivoli Park should take you about 17 minutes. Then again, not everyone walks at the same speed. Your time may vary.

I spent considerable time this afternoon walking through Tivoli Park and sitting on a couple of its benches. I didn’t try doing any of the other activities. It was still well worth the visit. I got my fill of urban greenery, without leaving the city or venturing far from its core. Does it get better than that?

Sts. Cyril & Methodius Church

Saints Cyril & Methodius Church sits very close to one of the entrances to Tivoli Park. Or, in my case today, one of the exits.

According to the tour book I use, the church also goes by the name of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

The exterior is attractive, but I found it hard to photograph the full front facade because trees block the sight lines. Damned nature.

When I walked inside, I thought it might be an antimatter TARDIS cleverly disguised as a church because the interior appeared much smaller to me than the exterior, by an amount that can’t be entirely explained by the thickness of the walls. I might be wrong about that.

Small though it may be, I think it has more religious decorative elements than most churches much larger than it. I don’t think there’s a single square centimetre of wall space that doesn’t have paintings or other decorations on it, usually painted directly on the wall.

A very large (very large for the space), multi-tiered chandelier hangs from the ceiling.

I don’t know how, with all that going on, the Saints Cyril & Methodius Church still manages to maintain its dark and sombre atmosphere. But it does.

It’s a miracle! A miracle, I tell ya!

Museum of Modern Art

When I left Saints Cyril & Methodius Church, it wasn’t particularly late in the afternoon. I decided to take in another sight.

I pulled out my trusty walking tour app. When I first got it, I did indeed use it as a walking tour app. However, I found it frustrating to try to follow the dictated route, even with the available in-app GPS mapping.

So I don’t use it as a walking tour app anymore. Now I use it only as a list of suggested sights.

One function in the app shows me all the sights on all of its tours in a particular city. And it lets me sort them based on their distance from me at that time. I used that function upon leaving the church.

Ljubljana’s Museum of Modern Art sits right across from the church. Today was the gallery’s lucky day. It got a visit from me. I might not have visited if it resided elsewhere in the city.

The Museum of Modern Art (the “MG+” of the two galleries covered by the website I linked to) is not very large. And for today, and I don’t know how many days before and after today, its exhibit space was, I think, about half its normal size.

The gallery was busy setting up a new exhibition in the other half.

Friends, family, and the few regular readers (if any) who are not family or friends know what a connoisseur of art in general, and particularly modern art, I am. Specifically, not at all.

So let’s rip the bandaid off quickly and get going.

The open rooms display a variety of paintings and sculptures of the modern era. Some are purely abstract and indecipherable by the likes of me. Others are somewhat abstract, but I could guess, probably incorrectly, as to what they represented. Still others are purely representational and I was confident, although possibly overconfident, that I recognized what the subject was.

There. Done. Day over. See you tomorrow.