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Prisojnik or Prisank is a mountain of the Julian Alps in Slovenia, the 18th tallest peak in the country at a height of 2,547 m. A popular hiking and climbing destination, it is located immediately above the well-traveled Vršič Pass, from where most ascents begin.
The peak is known as Monte Prisani in Italian. Unusually for a prominent feature in the Julian Alps and less than 10 km from the modern Austrian border, it has no common German name.
The mountain best-known feature is the Heathen Maiden (Slovene language: Ajdovska deklica), a Pareidolia rock formation on the mountain's steep northern face. Folk belief in the surrounding area has traditionally identified it as a Slavic fairies (Slavic nymph or fairy) dwelling in the mountain.
There are several marked approaches to the summit:
More demanding approaches include:
Prisojnik is carved largely from Middle Triassic carbonate rocks that record a complete platform-to-structural basin cycle. The lower slopes expose up to 200 m of massive grey limestone assigned to the Contrin Formation, deposited in a warm, shallow-marine setting roughly 240 million years ago. Above this limestone geologists have mapped thin, red, nodular layers of the Loibl Formation—deep-water lime-mud packed with (microscopic plankton) and paper-thin —showing that the former platform suddenly drowned and was submerged beneath deeper water. Tiny fissures called clastic dike cut down into the Contrin limestone and are filled with the same red mud, confirming that faulting opened cracks while the new seafloor were settling.
Overlying the red pelagic beds are green and thin rhyolite lava flows that record short-lived volcanism connected with the same Extensional tectonics. These grade upward into 25 m of thin-bedded grey limestone of the Buchenstein Formation, rich in re-worked algae and shell fragments transported downslope from neighbouring . The summit wall is made of more than 500 m of massive, partly dolomitised limestone belonging to the Schlern Formation, which represents the renewed growth of a shallow-water carbonate platform during the Ladinian to early Carnian stages of the Triassic.
The full succession shows that Prisojnik stood on the tilted margin of a small half-graben—a fault-bounded Fault block that sank gently along one side while the opposite side rose. As the block subsidence, the platform surface drowned, deep-water muds and volcanics accumulated in the depression, and finally the basin was rapidly infilled by carbonate debris as the platform Progradation back across it. These structures make the mountain an important field locality for studying how the opening of the Tethys Ocean reshaped the geology of the present-day Julian Alps.
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