A permanent exhibition of the religious, social and cultural heritage of the Maribor archdiocese.
The museum collection with original documents and objects from the treasury of the Maribor diocese represents a rich cultural heritage and nearly 800 year-long history of the Lavantine diocese, which in 1962 was renamed Maribor Diocese, and in 2006 received a status of archdiocese. By visiting the museum visitors can get to know an important part of the Slovenian history, which cannot be offered anywhere else.
The beginning of the tale
Betnava Historia Lavantina begins its story one hundred years before the first mention of the Betnava mansion. That was in 1228, when a request by the Salzburg Archbishop Eberhard II, addressed to Pope Honor III, for the establishment of a diocese with its seat in St. Andraž in Carinthia, was approved. Likewise it was also the beginning of religious and cultural activity, which throughout the centuries carried out several significant deeds. It changed not only the ecclesiastical landscape but also triggered efficacious impacts on national, political and particularly cultural life in Carinthia and Štajerska.
Lavantine Diocese and A.M. Slomšek
The exhibition enumerates a few scenes, which with original material show the growth of the Lavantine diocese. Here numerous liturgical objects (mass vestments, mitres, episcopal staffs, other episcopal equipment, monstrance, chalices), which prove the seriously organized and religiously occupied work of a series of Lavantine bishops, beginning with Ulrich I in 1228 and ended in 1859, when Anton Martin Slomšek, the 54th Lavantine bishop, transferred the seat of the Lavantine diocese from St. Andraž to Maribor. Scenes from the development and life of the Lavantine diocese are accompanied by original archive material, and supplemented by other illustrations. Anton Martin Slomšek was – we could say – the last Lavantine bishop and the first of Maribor. At the exhibition, designed in Slomšek's image, which in all saintliness rose above a line of Lavantine bishops, there is a presentation of the main, most significant points of his episcopal and national-cultural work.
Slomšek can be experienced and charismatically felt by looking at his personal things, and his greatness understood with his beatification, which Pope John Paul II did in front of a multitude of people, who gathered on the 19th of September 1999 on the clearing by Betnava Mansion.