Yes, you read that right, this castle is built into a cave. Observe:
Predjama Castle is an easy drive from the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana (or, in our case, a bus ride to Postojna Caves and then a quick taxi ride with a very informative man). If you’re travelling Europe and you think (as my sister and I did) that you’ve seen castles before, so you don’t need to see one more… Make a detour to see Predjama Castle. We’re so glad our Croatian friend encouraged us to go. It is incredibly unique and fascinating. Everything about it is designed for sieges and adapted for the cave environment.
It’s not just built beside a cave – the cave is an integral part of its structure. There are rooms and corridors that have solid rock for one wall. There are staircases between levels that are carved into cave passageways. The chimney in the kitchen is a natural hole in the cave. The cave ceiling actually overhangs some of the castle roof, offering further protection from the elements.
As one of the interpretive signs says, it was really designed for a siege environment, not to be a pleasant place to live. There are actually runnels carved into some of the cave walls to direct dripping water. We were there on a rainy day and I think it was actually warmer outside of the castle, in the rain. I certainly get the impression it was continuously damp and miserable. Deeper in the cave, there’s a series of pipes and funnels designed to collect clean drinking water that had dripped through the cave ceiling, in case the other water sources were poisoned.
There’s a whole section of the castle that was deeper in the cave. It would have been subdivided in the past, but because no one really wanted to live here past the medieval period, there are few records of what was actually there except the evidence left behind in the carved rock. There’s an extensive network of about 14 km’s worth of caves and it’s unclear how deep the livable spaces went.
According to the excellent audio-guides, there was a famous siege in the 1400s in which the Hungarians tried to defeat Erasmus Lueger, a sort of Robin Hood figure. His people could use the cave network to sneak out to surrounding communities and fetch supplies. He apparently taunted his opponents by tossing down fresh cherries at them; as they didn’t know about the cave system, this was baffling. Erasmus ended up losing the siege, however, due to a traitorous servant. The lavatory was a bit more exposed than the rest of the castle (likely so the, uh, leavings would drop directly in the stream below), and the servant lit a lantern when his boss was on the toilet, resulting in him being struck by a cannonball and killed.
History Research Shenanigans 