Games, arts, pilgrim hiking, dancing and tournaments – at the threshold of the 19th century, these late medieval leisure activities underwent a process of change or renovation and de-confessionalization, but also one of decline. This process was influenced by modern technical inventions and their technical refinements (e.g. the bicycle, the motorbike and the car, firearms, rowing boats and – in winter – ice-skates, sledges and skis) and industrial production. In Ljubljana, as early as the 18th century people started abandoning a ball game which was a kind of predecessor of tennis, as well as balovž (“ballroom”). In the 19th century, new dances prevailed (for example, the waltz, the polka, the mazurka) and later, at the turn of the 20th century, dancing lessons with dance masters appeared, with the polka and the waltz conquering the rural areas. With the decline of tournaments, the skill of pricking, hitting or stabbing (Ringelrennen, Ringelstechen in German) transformed into the traditional folk event štehvanje (“Slovene quintain”, in the Gail valley in Carinthia). Conversely, older activities turned into modern sports towards the end of the 19th century, such as boules, ninepin bowling, shooting, fencing, show jumping and equestrianism, which was later joined by trotters and systematic horse breeding (Ljutomer in Styria), and sledding and ice-skating in wintertime. Just before the First World War, skiing became popular; though it was an international vogue, Slovenians could claim native antecedents, as peasants’ use of skis on the Bloke Plateau (central Slovenia) had already been reported in the 17th century; in 1845 the newspaper Novice reported on skiing on the Bloke Plateau and on the specific type of skis used there, noting that it was mastered by men and women. Modern alpine skis and skiing techniques led to the demise of this tradition, although its vocabulary entered the newly introduced practice. “Sport” (referring to international games like football, athletics, rowing, swimming, tennis) entered the Slovene lands at the end of the 19th century and served as a model of leisure time activity in terms of the rules and regularity of competitions. Sports brought competitiveness and competition instead of playful socialization, rivalry and entertainment.

On the other hand, the 19th century also saw a change in relation to corporeality, from exercising to body care and hygiene. With education and the conscript army, modern exercise spread into schools and affected young people’s relationship towards physical activity in their early teens, and so became a popular leisure time activity which the Slovenes called telovadba (“gymnastics”, in German Turnen). The first case of gymnastics being offered as a form of public exercise can be traced to Ljubljana in the 1840s, when a private gymnastics institute opened its doors. There, a group of amateurs was formed which after the constitutional changes in the Habsburg Empire in 1860 and 1861 formed a society (Južni Sokol; Southern Falcon, 1863), triggering the Slovenian participation in a mass gymnastic movement. With the formation of societies, training facilities also began to appear: specialized gyms or gymnastic centres (or sokolnice, “Sokol training facilities”), which in some places (in cooperation with reading societies) developed into multipurpose national halls. At the end of the century, gymnastic mass festivals (zlet) were held, which included mass group exercises as well as competitions for individuals and societies; these were also open to women. During the growth of different nationalisms in the Habsburg Empire, and especially in the presence of the German-Slovene conflict in the second half of the 19th century, the Slovene Sokol movement evolved into a mass national movement on the basis of Miroslav Tyrš’s nationalist-regenerative agenda. This movement represented the Slavic ethnic majority in the Slovenian lands, outnumbering the German Turnvereine.

Gymnastics also included hiking, which gradually moved further afield to include hillwalking and mountaineering – mountain tops exercising a moral, physical and scientific allure. The mountaineers formed societies, marked out paths, built huts and influenced the development of skiing, as skis allowed them to climb in winter. They also influenced the development of tourism, which spread with the growing interest in people’s health and wellbeing based on physical activity and with the opening of thermal baths (e.g. Rogaška Slatina) or the popular solar and water baths at Bled; these were opened in the mid-19th century and included hiking trips into the nearby mountains in their programme.