St. Mark's Church (Vrba)

Despite being a modest and unprepossessing building, St. Mark's Church is widely known in Slovenia due to its appearance in O Vrba, one of the best-known sonnets of the Slovene national poet France Prešeren.

Though it is only mentioned in the last verse of the sonnet, the church has come to symbolize the home and safety that one yearns for when the bitterness and disappointment of having followed one's destiny to foreign lands becomes too much to bear.

[2] The church is dedicated to St Mark and is a plain-looking building with a wooden roof and a variety of features from various periods.

Two gilded side altars are from the early 17th century with slightly crude 17th-century sculpture and 19th-century paintings of the Pietà and of St Bartholomew.

The marble altar table was designed by Tone Bitenc, a pupil of Jože Plečnik, and combines Baroque elements with Plečnik-style modernism.