History
Novo Mesto (literally "New Town") has been settled since pre-history. The city is one of the most important archeological sites of the Hallstatt culture (Early Iron Age) and has been nicknamed the "City of Situlas" after numerous situlas found in the area.
Graben Castle down the Krka River, ancestral seat of the noble House of Graben von Stein, was first mentioned in a 1170 deed. The town itself was founded by the Habsburg archduke Rudolf IV of Austria on 7 April 1365 as Rudolfswerth (Slovene: Rudolfovo). The Austrian Habsburgs received the Carniolan March from the hands of Emperor Louis IV in 1335 and in 1364 Rudolf "the Founder" proclaimed himself a Duke of Carniola.
Following World War I and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the city passed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and was officially renamed Novo mesto although it had been informally known as such since its founding. During World War II the city passed back and forth between Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, finally settling in German hands.
In 1958, the authorities of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had a motorway built connecting the Slovenian capital Ljubljana and Zagreb in Croatia, which passed through Novo Mesto. The A2 motorway is today part of the European route E70. With its construction, Novo Mesto became much better connected to the rest of Slovenia and the rest of Yugoslavia, and began to grow as an important regional center.
Read more about this topic: Novo Mesto
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)