The oldest town in Slovenia

Ptuj has been settled as a town since at least the Stone Age. That’s an amazing length of time for humans to inhabit one area. It’s hard to fault early man for picking such a nice spot. It’s just upstream from a nice lake, along a pretty good sized river. It would be easy to transport stuff up and down that river as it’s big enough to allow you to float anything you’d care to build, but flows slowly enough that it wouldn’t be a giant pain to go upriver. By Roman times there were 40,000 people living there, almost double the number of people who live there now.

Unfortunately, all we could investigate was the “Old Town,” which by comparison to the history of the city was almost comically recent.

The castle was built in the mid 12^th century,

 

The first mention of the Tower was in the Town Statutes in 1376.

and the town hall was built in 1907.

Yet people had lived here in town for thousands of years before it ever occurred to anyone to build that particular castle. You really get a sense of the massive history of our planet when you consider how recent even the oldest things you have ever seen really are.

Ptuj is definitely worth a trip. Stop in at the Tourist Information Center. They’ll hand you a map with a short tour and you’ll be happy for hours. Just the castle alone will take you 2 hours to go through. With everything from wooden furniture to an old penny farthing bicycle. Seriously!

They’ve done a great job of trying to explain how Ptuj, and the area around it, played a significant part in the history of the Holy Roman Empire, and in the process, the rest of the world. They are massively proud of their place in the world and I think they deserve to be.

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Federal Trade Commission Disclaimer:

These blog entries reflect my personal opinions about the locations The Wife and I visited during our travels. I have not received money, freebies, or any other inducements to provide positive coverage of anyone, anywhere, or anything. In fact, no one on this trip knew or had any reason to know that I am a blogger. I do not work for the Tourist Boards of any country, nor am I employed in the travel industry in any way.