Dušan Koman

The Carthusian monastery Pleterje lies sheltered under the Gorjanci hills, only 2 km from Šentjernej. The vineyard-covered slopes of the Pleterski Hrib (282 m a.s.l.) rise above it to the north. The monastery is isolated from the outside world by a high wall and reached via the road from Šentjernej through the village of Šmarje. At the entrance to the monastery church, the four-kilometres circular Pleterska Pot (Pleterje Pathway) begins and ends, offering a visitor a tour around the monastery and through the monastery vineyard to the top of Pleterski Hrib.

The building of the monastery began in 1407, when Herman II, the Count of Celje, issued a document announcing that he had begun to build a monastery of the Holy Trinity for the Carthusian order. Thus the monastery, after those in Žiče, Jurklošter and Bistra the youngest Carthusian monastery in Slovenia, was an institution of the Counts of Celje, supporters of the order even prior to that time. In the beginning of the 15th century, the regulations of the Carthusian order that  originated in France were already loose to that extent that only one monastery was built in Pleterje and not two, one for the monastic brothers and a completely separate one for the lay brothers. The layout is therefore unified, a church, a great and a lesser cloister and auxiliary building behind a unified wall. The building was supervised by the monk Hartman from the Carthusian monastery of Gaming in the Lower Austria, who also became the first prior of the new monastery. It was formally finished in 1420 when the monastery church was consecrated by Herman, the Bishop of Freising, an illegitimate son of the Count Herman II. The count died in 1435 and is buried in the monastery. In the period of the Turkish raids, the monastery wall was strengthened. In the 16th century, the monastery also felt the wave of Lutheran faith (Primož Trubar, an important Protestant author, was the minister in the nearby Šentjernej). In 1595, it was taken over by the Jesuits. They remained until 1773 when the Jesuit order was disbanded and the estate of Pleterje came under the state. The Carthusians regained in through repurchase in 1889 and started building a new monastery (finished 1904).