Olimje

Olimje is easy to drive past. It’s a single monastery complex in a fold of the Kozjansko hills near Podčetrtek, no town to speak of around it, and we’d only stopped because a guidebook mentioned chocolate — a small monastic chocolaterie that seemed like a nice detour on the way to somewhere else. What we found instead was a genuinely remarkable pharmacy that neither of us expected.

The Third-Oldest Pharmacy in Europe

Tucked inside the Minorite monastery, behind a door easy to miss if you don’t know to look for it, is a pharmacy dating to the early 1700s, reputedly the third oldest in Europe still holding its original fittings. Dark wood cabinets lined floor to ceiling with hand-painted ceramic jars, each labeled in faded Latin script for herbs and tinctures I couldn’t begin to identify, and a ceiling fresco of Christ as the “heavenly apothecary,” dispensing medicine to the faithful.

A monk was on hand to explain, briefly, that the monastery still grows medicinal herbs in its own garden, following traditions that go back to the pharmacy’s founding. Standing in that small room, lit only through narrow windows, felt like stepping into a working museum that had simply never stopped working.

Chocolate, Then Water

The monastery’s small chocolaterie next door — Čokoladnica Olimje — makes handmade chocolates using recipes tied to the monastery’s herb garden, thyme and lavender worked into dark chocolate in ways I wouldn’t have predicted liking as much as I did. We bought a box, ate half of it in the car within the hour, and made no apologies for it.

From Olimje it’s a short drive to the Sotina thermal springs and the Terme Olimia resort complex nearby, which felt like an odd but pleasant contrast — centuries-old contemplative silence in the morning, and steaming thermal pools by early evening. Lia pointed out that this pairing, monastery then spa, was as Slovenian a combination as we’d find anywhere on the trip.

When to go: Spring through early autumn, when the monastery gardens are blooming and a stop at the nearby thermal spa makes sense as an afternoon add-on. The pharmacy itself is a year-round, weather-independent visit.