The secret Idrija WW2 Partisans Printing Press is hidden away in the middle of a huge forest paradise on the side of a mountain and was the only resistance newspaper still publishing at the end of WW2.. this is pretty unique and special.

And would be reason alone to try to find it.. well this forest adventure might also be the trickiest thing you get up to on your Slovenian holibubbles, but one of the most surprising, unexpected, emotional and beautiful things you can get up to here in Green Paradise!

even if you drove or were driven here, you do need to be fit enough to get up these forest steps..

There are actually 2 ways to find it.. One path from above and one from below.. So we had better explain how to do both and let you decide which path is the one for you!

If you take the easier path from below then you could also do a short guided tour of the Printing Press organised by the Idrija Castle museum.. If you can find the other path from above, this is a much more tricky approach down to the secret location..

But whichever way you find it, just find it, cos this will be one of those epic secret Green adventures you might not even have realised you could do in the Greenest country in Europe!

ALL the letters, sets and ink printing equipment is still here and the walls are insulated with newspapers..

Why is there so much amazing Secret Partisan Stuff hidden away in the vast Slovenian Forests?

Slovenia is the third most forested country in Europe and so this became the theatre of jungle warfare for local Partisans to hide in and create a jaw dropping number of secret hospitals in addition to this amazing printing press to defy the Nazi occupiers during WW2.

Lots were discovered, moved, destroyed or abandoned and after 80 years some have just rotted away, but other amazing specimens still DO remain and offer visitors to Slovenia an incredible & unique adventure, searching for them in stunning forest locations.. and when you do find one and stand there in such a beautiful spot, then learn about the stories of courage & bravery, betrayal and defiance, it will be difficult not to be moved.. 

Could you have imagined you could experience all that in a Green Slovenian daytrip?

entrance from below to the secret Printing Press..

From the humble perspective of being foreigners living here in the most beautiful small country in Europe, we can see Green Slovenia is kinda sleep walking around in tourism.. Especially when you consider there are all these secret & unique WW2 Partisan hideaways and a whole bunch of other unique Medieval Fortress Churches too, with so many other amazing Secret Places to Visit as well..

But if any other country in the world was lucky enough to have such an amazing network of these UNIQUE hidden secret hospitals & Partisan historical treasures, just like this printing press, with such amazing stories in such amazing locations, then you can bet your bottom dollar that visitors would be able to find, experience AND enjoy them much easier than here!

the printing press complex..

It is a similar story for castles here too, with literally hundreds of amazing ones dotted around in all shapes, conditions & sizes, but the frustrating likelihood is that first time visitors to Green Slovenia might ONLY get to see 2 castles during their all too short visit, one being Ljubblyjana castle, (which is ok, but frankly average compared to dozens of other much better castles here in Slovenia) and mercifully one of the best if not, the best castle in the world, at Predjama..

So it is also kinda up to you guys to open your eyes and wake up too, maybe check out this website a bit more, especially in our DAYTRIPS and SECRET PLACES TO VISIT SECTIONS to discover more of the secret green treasures available to you and GO FIND THEM.. you are almost guaranteed an unforgettabubble & unique Green adventure at the very least, but we also know from our own experiences here that you will get a lot more outta the day!

52 People lived and worked here, so there are quite a few huts to see..

Now we will focus on the Partisan story that most visitors completely miss out on.. AND the good news is.. there is A LOT of GOOD NEWS to tell you about, cos despite the general lethargy in tourism here, THERE ARE LOTS of incredible, dedicated local people and local societies working absolute wonders to maintain, preserve and show off these Partisan treasures.. 

This is most certainly the case here in Idrija and now we are gonna tell you all about it..

the short hike up is worth it even if you just saw this beautiful river gliding down the mountain..

The Idrija WW2 Secret Partisan Printing Press..

Firstly, it should come as no surprise to you that the most prolific and successful secret forest WW2 printing press in the world is extremely well hidden away in the Slovenian forest, high above the UNESCO protected town of Idrija!

But thanks to the incredible and long serving exploits of wonderful people like Alvin and the Idrija local municipality (as they are called here), YOU CAN go visit this hidden forest den, hanging off the side of a mountain, where 52 people snuck away right under the noses of the Nazis and managed to print over a MILLION pages filled with hope & defiance and a little bit of their own propoganda too, of course....

Like we said, there are TWO ways to go visit this printing press, but we STRONGLY advise you to contact the good people at the Idrija Castle Museum to book a short tour from the path BELOW and get a lovely local person to unlock the doors for you and properly explain this amazing story of ingenuity, organisation, determination and bravery..

the hair on your arms will stand on end when you see photos of the brave people who lived and worked here..

How to book a short tour of the WW2 Printing Press in English..

So what you need to do is phone ahead, (better at least the day before) to Damjana at the Idrija Town museum on 00386 (0) 418 701 48 to set up the tour.. it is not expensive at all, considering the unique experience you get..

You will need to drive up the very steep mountain road from Idrija to the village of VOJSKO, (give yourself 30 mins from Idrija) where we recommend you park at the church, (we have a photo of it here for you) and meet the guide to then be driven along the much narrower stone tracks past little farms and even deeper into the forest to the small car park 250 metres below the hospital..

There is some parking here and then you begin one of the longest 250m of your life..

At the car park, without any signs or the forest staircase you would not have a clue what was hidden above you..

You walk up those handy steps to the printing press buildings for the tour, so you will need reasonable fitness and mobility and are taken back to your car after the tour in about a 2 hour turnaround..

This is how we would recommend you do it AND indeed how we did it on our second visit to the Printing Press, (we will tell you about our first visit further below)..

Almost there and you get another sharp intake of breath when you finally see how big this is..

But you do have a few other options for this guided tour and some people do prefer to DRIVE ALL the way to the Printing Press car park and meet the guide there.. (Nerves of steel and an adventurous nature required.. oh yeah and great insurance for your rental car).. 

You will very probably not be hiking up the mountain here direct from Idrija unless you are a serious, serious hiker and have a lot more time, BUT if you fancy a bit of a hike, then you could decide to park up at the church in Vojsko and walk from there to the Secret Printing Press car park for your appointment with the guide..

if you are meeting the Idrija TIC people, then park up here next to the church..

Whichever way you do it, it would be a real shame to make it to the Printing Press and then not have a guide open the doors for you to explore inside and find out more.. we sincerely hope you do and we hope this amazing place gets more visitors from outside Slovenia as a result of this article..

Considering 52 brave people lived and worked up here, the huts are actually not so big, so the tour does not take too long, but there is SO MUCH incredible detail, history and story here, you can really feel it all around you..

So with just a little bit of prior planning on your part, you can see, smell and hear how this secret place in the forest managed to create over one million pages of paper in the middle of a Green paradise!

Here you will notice how every door was double, so at least one could always be closed so as not to show any light at night..

There is lots of stuff to learn about inside the huts.. You will find out how ridiculously close the local Nazi officer's house was and how the workers successfully hid the noise and light from their operation.

It is a common feature of Secret Partisan locations to be very near raging rivers or waterfalls to provide covering noise & water and these printing press huts are right next to a powerful mountain river, more like a waterfall cascading down the rock slopes..

Kitchen with a stunning view..

Thanks to the decades of work here by local people like Alvin, you will see exactly how the huts were inside and out AND ALL the materials, desks, moulds, metal printing letters and other equipment needed to print a Partisan newspaper.

But best of all.. the main printing press STILL works after 80 years and it is such a joy to SEE it rolling paper, HEAR it clunking & purring away like a kitten and SMELL the ink..

We were treated to the most fantastic, unexpected display as Alvin actually turned the printer on and printed a few pages..

You will see where the workers slept and hear how they kept this place secret even inside their own Partisan network, with each cell in the supply and delivery chain having their own responsibilty and territory.

And you will see photos of some of the workers and maybe hear some stories about the real people who worked here..

But you will also get to do a unique short or longer hike in the forest to a place you would never go unless there was a reason to come here..

over one million sheets of paper were printed here, right under the noses of the Nazis..

How to find & hike to the WW2 Printing Press from Above..

Our first trip to find the Printing Press was what we would describe as an epic Green Slovenian mystery adventure, but one that we will tell you all about now, so if you do indeed decide to find it from above then you have a little bit more info and a little bit less mystery than we did..  

there are bits you might need to scramble up, but wow what a hike..

It always sounds so simple when locals tell you how to get to a secret place here.. "Just a short walk, follow the signs, park at the car park".. and you can get lulled into a false sense of security that everything is gonna be just as easy as lemon pie, but in our experience it rarely is, so this is why we put so much detail into our website for you, cos we live here and can come back.. but this might be your one shot at finding a secret printing press!

To be clear, locals are not deliberately trying to hoodwink you or see you fall off a cliff, they just do not fully realise you cannot read the signs and will have no clue which of the 3 paths in front of you to take when those little red circles on the trees and rocks suddenly disappear!

Slovenes were literally born walking in the forests & up mountains and driving along rickety, bumpy stone track roads that would terrify some of us..

This is Green Slovenia Baby, history, culture and Green paradise..

So they do not seem to realise that even fit foreigners might struggle to keep up with them .. a case in point is Alvin, who would probubbly not mind being described as an older gentleman, but boy, you should see him go up & down those forest steps to the Printing press.. like a mountain goat!

IF you mix these little complexities with a language that only 2 million people speak, that is close to impossible to guess, but is still often the ONLY language plastered on the few signs you might actually find, then you will understand better why Green Slovenia is still so hopelessly undiscovered..

Undiscovered by those visitors who DO NOT want to rock up in busses en masse, take a selfie and go, but undiscovered by the Green tourists, who DO WANT to respect and enjoy the nature here, leave very little imprint and happy to spend some money locally to go towards preserving this Green paradise for the world..

tha path starts like a dream forest path..

So we will now tell you the mini adventure we went through to get here for the first time, after being told something like, "Just park above and hike down" in the hope that you will be a little better prepared if you do decide to approach the Printing Press from above!

Generally, though there is good news to report too, in that we have seen the number and quality of signs here in Slovenia in Englsh gradually improving over the years..

OK, we knew the Printing Press was hidden somewhere above Idrija, the town where we have already visited the amazing Mercury mine, so one day we decided to go find the printing press in the afternoon on a fab circular loop adventure from the Lodge to the Soca river, returning via Idrija..

it was so beautiful up here, but we were relieved to finally see the sign to Vojsko..

We spent the morning cruising the Soca lake on Captain Dejan's Paddle Steamer and drove back towards Idrija along a really lovely quiet river road from Most na Soci. 

But our simple and cunning plan was to turn off the fantastic main road from Tolmin to Idrija about two thirds of the way to Idrija to try a more direct cross country route we saw on googlemaps to the little village of Vojsko (which is the closest to the printing press).. so we typed "Vojsko" into our car navigation and off the main road we went..

We often advise guests not to be too dependent on google in Green Slovenia as a computer screen looks flat, but actually nowhere here is flat except the promenade by the coast in Portoroz and Slovenia's North East region near Hungary! 

if you get to this blue sign, then bingo! just park here in the grass and walk.. don't believe the 750m jibber jabber!!

Luckily we have a 4x4 and we sure needed it as the road went up and up and round and round. It narrowed and turned into a dirt (not even stone) track and then eventually with sweaty palms, we broke the mountain and finally popped out in Vojsko!

Beatiful, yes, but our strong advice is to avoid this particular route up into the hills, coming off that road from the Most na Soci direction unless you are a professional rally driver or professional adventurer.. Better to drive to Idrija and get to Vojsko from there!

Our little detour is typical of the mistake you can make if you blindly follow a computer map here and just key in where you want to go.. but of course the scenery we saw in the forest was very beautiful and looking back it was a real adventure!

tha path starts like a dream forest path..

This off road adventure that delivered us high above Idrija in the very pretty village of Vojsko with houses scattered around like dominoes was not where the fun stopped.. we then found ourselves trying to following a series of increasingly shrinking & diminshing signs just in Slovene to get to the Printing Press upper car park as we will lavishly describe it..

We gambled a bit and decided the sign to follow had the word Partisan on. Here it is in Slovene so you can write down the words to follow.. "Partizanska Tiskarna Slovenija".. simples! (the Tiskarna bit means "printing press").

THIS is the track from the big blue sign to the start of the hike with just one narrow parking space..

Off we drove, up and out into the countryside as the roads got narrower and the nightmare of heading down a track that was too narrow to get back out of was starting to rumble again!

After a lot of twisting and turning, we found a grass track that had at least the look or hope of leading to a car park.. (we had been told there was a car park here.. but you should know that sometimes what a Local might describe as a car park is not what you might think of as one.. particularly if you have a nice shiny rental car)!

this the start of the hike from above, DO NOT TRY TO DRIVE DOWN HERE..

And it was really not a car park in any shape or form, indeed our only clue that you could park here was that a big local minivan was lurched on the side of the path in the bushes and as this one & only space was taken, it forced us to do a 25 point turn to get back off the grass jungle road and back to the little main road, where in sheer frustration, we just parked up on the grass, trying not to block the road!

Hopefully the frustration and determination required to do this green adventure is coming out here as you will need a sprinkling of both to find this place.. but is SO worth it in the end.. just read on..

you are really up in the mountains here..

So Finally.. at last.. how to hike to the Secret Printing Press from ABOVE..

There is just ONE path down to the Printing Press, so you MUST find the "car park", abandon your car as safely as possible and hike down the same track.. there is only one track.

This is not a flip flop destination though, so will need good shoes, be extremely careful if wet and at times you might need to scramble a little bit as basically, you are going down the side of a steep mountain like a sheep. But there are no sheer drops and the slope is not exposed at all, so the danger is slipping or tripping.. you are still completely surrounded by lots and lots of trees.. very, very beautiful forest..

It is certainly an adventure to hike carefully down this path with the excitement of finding those hidden Partisan wooden buildings somewhere ahead..

there are bits you might need to scramble up, but wow what a hike..

From the top of the path it can take up to half an hour to finally get a glimpse of a roof between some trees and then bingo, you are there, next to the small wooden camp that makes up a secret complex where those 52 people worked and managed to print all types of news, propoganda and even fake official documents on behalf of the Partisans.

Once you get this far, you will have decided in advance whether to have booked to meet the local guide there and if you havent, then all you can do is look through the windows, imagine and go back to your car.. this time up the path.

the sensational view you walked here for..

So it really is up to you how you get to see this Printing Press, but no other country in the world has such a unique treasure as this and also consider that at the time of writng this article, (start of 2025) the Cerkno Partisan Secret hospital museum, which is the biggest of all in the network of Partisan Hospitals is still closed for another year to be repaired after washing away in a mountain flood.. so it just goes to highlight how rare and special this Idrija Printing Press really is and why you should have a go at finding it!

We already mentioned that we split our day's adventures out between here in the afternoon and the Soca lake in the morning, but there are masses and masses of other secret place possibilities for you to choose to combine with a visit here on a round trip from the Lodge..

The pretty town of Idrija is just a 50 min drive direct to the Lodge and has more things to do & see than you could shake a stick at! (fit into a day), with the very special Mercury mine, the biggest wooden water wheel in Europe, the Idrija castle museum, miner's house museum and Idrija is also the centre of the Slovenian Lace industry..

you might need this bench on the way back up on the route from above!

The nearby Bela (White) Idrija river with crystal clear green water and white beaches is our FAVOURITE place for a river swim in Slovenia, which is saying something and you could also search for Slovenias shortest river and the incredibly picturesque "wild lake" too.

You could also divert from the main Idrija road, this time onto another main road and do a spectacular detour drive home to the Lodge via Godovic which drops you into the stunning Vipava Wine Valley for all the culinary delights on offer there..

Path up into the forest to the Partisans hideaway..

You might also decide to spend the entire day just hiking in the Idrija Geopark area, maybe you will have a bash at walking up the mountain from the town to the Printing Press.. wow this would be another fantastic Green adventure, but there are plenty of hikes around Idrija, especially along the stunning river! 

A visit to a Secret Partisan Printing Press is one of those special unique forest experiences you might never have imagined you could get up to in little old Green Slovenia.. but you can and now you know how to do it!