Lake Bled is a small alpine lake in the Julian Alps of northwest Slovenia, and in the middle of it sits the country's only natural island, with a church on top. A castle stands on the cliff above the eastern shore, looking down on both. There is no bridge. You cross in a pletna, a flat-bottomed wooden boat under a striped awning, rowed standing up from the stern. That has been the way to the island for centuries, and it is not going to change. In 1740 an empress gave twenty-two local families the exclusive right to ferry pilgrims across, the right still passes from father to son, and no pletna has ever been fitted with a motor. So the crossing is slow, and the church tower growing closer is half of it.
From the landing a stairway of ninety-nine steps takes you straight up to the church door. Inside hangs a rope, and you pull it three times with the wish kept unspoken while the bell sounds overhead. Thermal springs rise along the northern shore and warm the water enough to swim in through the summer, which is unusual this high in the Alps. The highest view costs you a forty-minute climb through the woods on the western shore, part of it up a metal ladder-staircase, to Mala Osojnica. From that ledge the island lines up against the castle and the peaks behind it. The cake everyone eats on the terraces facing the water looks like an heirloom and was invented in 1953: puff pastry, vanilla custard and cream, cut into a square exactly seven centimetres to a side. The bell in that church tower is not the one it was meant to have. The first was being ferried out when a storm took the boat down, and no diver has ever found it; the one hanging there now was cast in 1534 and sent from Rome to replace it.