Maribor is Slovenia's second city and the capital of the east. It sits on the Drava, with an old town of sunny squares, a medieval past and, above all, a wine identity like no other: this is home to the Stara trta, the Old Vine, the oldest vine in the world that still produces grapes. It is more than four centuries old and has a place in the Guinness World Records. Lent, the riverside district where it grows, is the city's most charming area and the centre of its festivals.
But Maribor is also about nature and a young vibe. Behind it rises the Pohorje, a forested mountain of gentle peaks that you reach by cable car from the city itself. It offers skiing in winter (including a women's World Cup slope, home of the Golden Fox trophy, Zlata lisica) and hiking, cycling and lakes in summer. With a large university, the city has a lively cultural scene and nightlife, and in summer it hosts Festival Lent, one of Europe's biggest open-air festivals.
This guide takes you through the best of Maribor: the Old Vine and the Old Vine House in Lent, the old town and its squares, the cathedral, the castle and its museum, how to ride the cable car up the Pohorje and what to do there in each season, where to taste Styrian wines, and how to get around by SŽ train and bus. It is an authentic, green wine city, perfect for discovering Slovenia's other side alongside Ptuj.
Maribor grew up at the foot of a medieval castle, Marchburg, first recorded in the 12th century on the border of the Holy Roman Empire's March of Styria. It received town rights around 1254. For centuries it was a Habsburg trading and wine town, with an important Jewish community in the Middle Ages (the synagogue and the Jewish Tower survive from that time). It suffered Ottoman raids and successfully held out against a siege in 1532. River trade on the Drava and, in the 19th century, the arrival of the Vienna-Trieste railway turned it into an industrial hub. The 20th century was hard: strong national tensions between Slovenians and Germans, the Nazi annexation of Lower Styria in 1941 with deportations and harsh repression, and Allied bombing that damaged the city. After the war, in Tito's Yugoslavia, Maribor became a major industrial centre, and it was badly hit by the restructuring of the 1990s. Since independence in 1991 it has reinvented itself around wine, the university, the Pohorje and culture, and it was European Capital of Culture in 2012. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Slovenian Lower Styria: Ptuj, the country's oldest town, built on Roman Poetovio, and Maribor, wine capital and home of the world's oldest vine, where General Rudolf Maister carried out his daring takeover in 1918.
Read the history of The east: Maribor and Ptuj →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 8 activities in Liubliana. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Maribor's story begins on a hill and on a frontier. In the 12th century, on the eastern edge of the March of Styria in the Holy Roman Empire, records mention a castle called Marchburg, the 'castle of the march', meaning the border. It stood on the heights above the valley of the Drava River. A settlement grew up at the foot of the fortress and took its name from it: Marburg an der Drau in German, and much later, in Slavic form, Maribor.
The site was a superb strategic spot. It had a ford across the Drava, sat where trade routes between the German lands, Pannonia and the Adriatic crossed, and lay in a district of fertile soils and hills that were perfect for vines. The settlement grew fast, and around 1254 it was granted town rights. With its walls, market, guilds and bridge, medieval Marburg became one of the most important towns in Lower Styria.
Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the town and the region were ruled by the Habsburgs, who governed Styria from Graz and Vienna. Marburg's patrician class mostly spoke German, while the surrounding countryside was Slovene. That split in language and society would shape the town's history well into the 20th century. For centuries its economy rested on wine, on river trade along the Drava, which carried timber rafts and goods downstream, and on the crafts.
Medieval Marburg was home to a thriving Jewish community, one of the most prominent in Styria. The Jewish quarter lay in the riverside district of Lent and had its own synagogue, one of the oldest surviving in Europe, dating back to the 14th century, as well as a cemetery and towers. The Jews of Maribor were influential merchants and moneylenders. One of them, the rabbi and scholar Israel Isserlein, became famous across the Jewish world of Central Europe in the 15th century.
That presence ended abruptly. In 1496-1497, giving in to pressure from the towns and guilds, Emperor Maximilian I ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Styria and Carinthia. Maribor's community was banished, the synagogue was turned into a church and the quarter changed character. Today the restored synagogue is a cultural and memorial centre that remembers the community that vanished.
The other great danger of the age came from the south. In the 15th and 16th centuries, having conquered the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire launched repeated raids into the Slovene lands and spread terror through the countryside. Maribor strengthened its walls and towers, and two of them survive: the Jewish Tower and the Water Tower. In 1532 the town held out against an Ottoman siege when Suleiman the Magnificent's army passed through the region on its way to Vienna. The town is still proud of that resistance.
No century changed Maribor more than the 19th. The railway arrived in 1846. The Austrian Southern Railway (Südbahn), which linked Vienna with Trieste via Graz and Maribor, made the town a major rail hub, with workshops, a station and new industrial wealth. The town grew, modernised and drew workers from the surrounding countryside.
That growth also sharpened national tensions. Broadly speaking, Maribor's elite and middle class spoke German, while the countryside and the working population were mostly Slovene. As nationalism rose across Austria-Hungary, the argument over whether the town was German or Slovene grew more and more heated in the press, in the schools and in politics. Maribor, or Marburg, became one of the great flashpoints along the language border.
The tension came to a head at the end of the First World War. When Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918, both Austria and the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs claimed the town. The Slovene officer Rudolf Maister and his troops took control of Maribor in late 1918, securing its place in what would become the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. That episode, still very much alive in Slovene memory, put Maribor on the Slovene side of the new border, while Graz stayed in Austria.
No symbol sums up Maribor better than the Stara trta, the Old Vine. It grows on the front of a house in the Lent district, beside the Drava. It is a vine of the native žametovka variety (also called modra kavčina), and studies put it at more than 400 years old, planted around the late 16th or early 17th century. Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest vine in the world that still bears grapes.
What's remarkable about this plant isn't just its age but everything it has lived through. The Old Vine survived sieges and wars, the fires that swept through Lent, the floods of the Drava and, above all, the phylloxera plague that wiped out vineyards across Europe, Styria included, in the late 19th century. Millions of vines died, but this one lived on. Every autumn it gives a small harvest that is made into a token amount of wine, bottled in special artist-designed flasks and kept as official gifts for heads of state and other dignitaries.
The vine has its own house-museum, the Hiša Stare trte (Old Vine House), which serves as a visitor centre for Slovene wine and as a wine shop for the Podravje region. Maribor holds a calendar of wine festivities around it: a ceremonial pruning in spring, the grape harvest in autumn and St Martin's Day in November. The Old Vine made Maribor the symbolic capital of Slovene wine and a living link with the past, one that is quite literally rooted.
The 20th century hit Maribor hard. During the Second World War, after the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, Nazi Germany annexed Lower Styria straight into the Reich and launched a brutal campaign of Germanisation. Slovene was banned, thousands of people were deported, imprisoned or executed, and the resistance was hunted down. Adolf Hitler visited Maribor in 1941 and ordered that 'this land be made German again'. What remained of the Jewish community was wiped out in the Holocaust. As a major industrial and railway centre, the town was also heavily bombed by the Allies, and much of its urban fabric was destroyed.
After the war, in Tito's socialist Yugoslavia, Maribor was reborn as one of the country's biggest industrial centres, with car, machinery and textile factories that employed tens of thousands of people. That reliance on industry turned into a problem with the crisis and Slovenia's independence in 1991. With the Yugoslav markets gone and industry being restructured, factories closed, unemployment rose and the 1990s brought a hard transition.
The city found ways to reinvent itself. It invested in its university, in culture, in wine and nature tourism, with Pohorje on its doorstep, the wine routes and the Old Vine, and in big events such as the long-running Festival Lent, one of the largest open-air festivals in Europe. In 2012 Maribor was European Capital of Culture, which recognised that transformation. Today Slovenia's second city pairs its old town and its memory (the castle, the synagogue, the old towers) with a young spirit and a proudly wine-making identity. It still looks out over the Drava and the Pohorje, which have been part of its story from the very start.
