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PTUJ |
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One hundred and twenty kilometres northeast of Ljubljana, PTUJ is
the oldest town in Slovenia and about the most attractive as well,
rising up from the Drava Valley in a flutter of red roofs and topped by
a friendly looking castle. But the best thing is its streets, with
scaled-down mansions standing shoulder to shoulder on scaled-down
boulevards, medieval fantasies crumbling next to Baroque extravagances.
Out of the windows hang plants and the locals; watching the world go by
is a major occupation here.
Ptuj is on the main rail line from Ljubljana to Budapest (the Venice-Ljubljana-Budapest
express passes through here once a day in both directions), and can also
be reached by bus from Slovenia's second-largest city Maribor , which is
on the Ljubljana-Vienna line. On arriving at Maribor, turn left outside
the train station and head downhill - the bus station is on the other
side of the crossroads.
The Town
Ptuj's main street, Presernova cesta, snakes along the base of the
castle-topped hill. At its eastern end is the Priory Church of St George
(open mornings only), a building of twelfth-century origin that holds a
statue of its patron nonchalantly killing a rather homely dragon. Nearby,
its rather unambitious tower started life in the sixteenth century as a
bell tower, became city watchtower in the seventeenth century and was
retired in the eighteenth, when it was given an onion bulb spire for
decoration. Roman tombstones have been embedded in its lower reaches,
but a more noticeable leftover of Roman times is the tablet that stands
below like an oversize tooth, actually a funeral monument to a Roman
mayor. It's just possible to make out its carvings of Orpheus
entertaining assembled fauna.
From here Presernova cesta leads to the Archeological Museum (daily:
May-mid-Oct 9am-6pm; also July & Aug Sat & Sun open until 8pm; mid-Oct-Nov
9am-5pm; 600SIT) housed in what was once a Dominican monastery, a
mustardy building gutted in the eighteenth century and now hung with
spidery decoration, and worth a look for the carvings and statuary
around its likeably dishevelled cloisters.
A path opposite the monastery winds up to the Castle (daily: 9am-5/6pm;
also July & Aug Sat & Sun open until 8pm; 600SIT; guided tours upon
request, 750SIT). There's been a castle of sorts here for as long as
there's been a town, since Ptuj was the only bridging point across the
Drava for miles around, holding the defences against the tribes of the
north. An agglomeration of styles from the fourteenth to the eighteenth
centuries, the castle was home to a succession of noble families who
made it rich in the town. Most prominent were the Herbersteins, Austro-Slovene
aristocrats who made their fortune in the Habsburg Empire's sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century wars against the Turks. Their portraits hang on
the walls of the castle's museum , a collection mixed in theme and
quality, containing period rooms with original tapestries and wallpaper
on the first floor.
At Shrovetide (late Feb/early March) Ptuj is venue to one of the oldest
and most unusual customs in Slovenia. The Kurenti processions are a sort
of fertility rite and celebration of the dead confused together:
participants wear sinister masks of sheepskin and feathers with a
coloured beak for a nose and white beads for teeth, and possibly
represent ancestral spirits. So dressed, the Kurenti move in hopping
procession from house to house, scaring off evil spirits with the din
from the cowbells tied to their costumes. At the head of the procession
is the Devil, wrapped in a net to symbolize his capture: behind the
Kurenti , the Oraci ("the ploughers") pull a small wooden plough,
scattering sand around to represent the sowing of seed, and housewives
smash clay pots at their feet in the hope that this will bring health
and luck to their households.
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