FOUR – SQUARE CITY CENTRE

The core of Idrija’s city centre is covered by four squares. Acacius’s, Municipal, Scopoli’s and Aumetz’s. Let us take a brief stroll across them and look at some principal sights.

The oldest among them  ACACIUS’S SQUARE – in local slang “Old Piazza” – is surrounded by a warehouse (“magazin”), theatre, ancient school edifice from the 18th century, the building  of the former municipal coffee house beside the Nikova rivulet, a hundred – year old administrative residence of foresters, and the former vicarage. In the middle of the of the square one may admire a baroque fountain made of cut stone.

Younger MUNICIPAL SQUARE ( in recent history called “Marshall Tito Square”) acquired its present appearance only subsequent World War 2, when after 1950 the parish church dedicated to miners patroness St. Barbara  was finally demolished. The square is at its southern edge marked with characteristic “bourgeois” houses – almost palaces – of former wealthy merchants, whereas on its northern side are the  “old school” and Idrija’s town hall.

SCOPOLI’S SQUARE bears the name of the famous naturalist Janez Anton Scopoli, who as the first Idrijan doctor.

AUMETZ’S SQUARE came into existence due to the rearrangement and widening of Rožna Street below the slope that rises towards Frančiška’s Shaft  and the Miner’s House. It has been named after the northern French city of Aumetz, which established fraternal ties with Idrija.