After an evening in Ljubljana, where a friend of us joined for a while. So, now a group of four, we hit the highway, but before we finally left the country for Italy, we stopped at a place I had wanted to see for a long time, the Predjama Castle.
From afar, you could see the dazzling white walls literally growing out of the 123-meter-high, vertical cliff face. This is the largest cave castle in the world, and as we stood in front of it, we wondered how they were able to “squeeze” such a large building into the mouth of a cave in the Middle Ages.
The castle’s history dates back more than 800 years, but its most famous inhabitant was undoubtedly Erazem Lueger, a knight who is only referred to as the “Slovenian Robin Hood”. In the 15th century, Erazem came into conflict with the Habsburgs and took refuge in this impregnable castle. The imperial army besieged the castle for over a year, but to no avail, the knight mockingly threw fresh cherries and roast meat at them from the walls, while the besiegers starved below.
The secret of the castle lay in the vast cave system hidden behind it. The knight went out to the nearby villages for food through a secret vertical passage, so the besiegers could never starve him. From the inside, the castle had a very strange feeling: one wall of the room was smooth stone, and the other was raw, damp rock itself. There was also a torture chamber inside that would make even the bravest visitor shudder.
Erazem’s story ended not on the battlefield, but in a rather prosaic place. A traitorous servant signaled the besiegers with a candle when the knight went to the weakest point of the castle – the toilet. The imperial troops finished him off with a single well-aimed cannonball. An instructive, but somewhat undignified end for such an adventurous knight!
