Ptuj

Ptuj is the oldest recorded town in Slovenia. People lived here in the late Stone Age and Celts in the late Iron Age, at a crossing of the Drava on the Amber Road between the Baltic and the Adriatic. Rome controlled it by the first century BC, and Poetovio became the base of the Legio XIII Gemina. In AD 69 the Danubian legions chose Vespasian as emperor here — the first written mention of the town — and in 103 Trajan granted it city status as Colonia Ulpia Traiana Poetovio. It grew into a military, trade and customs centre, and its bishop Victorinus was martyred in about 304. The Huns plundered it in 450, and Avars and Slavs occupied it in 570.

From the late ninth century the town came under the Archbishopric of Salzburg, which rebuilt the castle on the hill in the 12th century; city statutes of 1376 brought prosperity, and the Dominicans founded a monastery in 1230. After Habsburg rule was restored in 1490, Pettau, as it was known in German, was incorporated into the Duchy of Styria in 1555. It suffered Ottoman wars and great fires, and in the 19th century it declined when the Southern Railway was built through Maribor instead. In 1910 most of the old town spoke German, while the villages around spoke Slovene.

After the First World War Rudolf Maister secured Lower Styria for the new South Slav state, and the town became Ptuj. Nazi Germany occupied it in 1941 and deported its Slovene population, settling German speakers from South Tyrol and Gottschee in their homes; these and the local Germans were expelled to Austria in 1945, and since then the town has been almost entirely Slovene.

Kurentovanje is the town's great event. Begun in 1960 by Drago Hasl and his colleagues, it has grown from a one-day ethnographic event into an eleven-day festival at Shrovetide that draws around 100,000 people. Its central figure, the kurent or korant, wears a sheepskin, a mask with a long red tongue, cowbells and coloured ribbons, and groups of kurents go from house to house making noise with bells and wooden clubs to scare away evil spirits and winter. Kurents from Ptuj wear feathers, those from Haloze and Lancova Vas horns. In 2017 their door-to-door rounds were added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list, and Ptuj has belonged to the Federation of European Carnival Cities since 1991.

The town's Roman past is visible in the street. The Orpheus Monument, a Roman tombstone almost 5 m tall, still stands in its original place on Slovenski trg, and in 1830 a local priest set Roman stones into the Town Tower to make the town's first open-air museum. The regional museum spreads across the castle, the Dominican monastery and other sites.

Ptuj has kept its medieval fairs, though they now last three days a year rather than weeks: St George's in April, St Oswald's in August and St Catherine's in November. The town also claims the world's oldest working cinema, opened in 1897.

About 18,000 people lived in the town in 2023, and close to 24,000 in the whole City Municipality of Ptuj. It is the eighth-largest town in Slovenia and the economic, administrative, educational, health and cultural centre of the Lower Drava region, with the regional museum, a hospital, a town theatre and galleries.

The old town is compact, with the suburb of Breg on the right bank of the Drava and newer quarters spreading around it. Beyond the town, farmers keep dairy cattle and grow crops on the plain, while orchards and vineyards cover the sunny slopes of the Ptuj hills, and the large Dubrava forest lies at the foot of the hills.

Life follows the calendar of the vine and the carnival. Wine from the Haloze hills is made, stored and bottled in Ptuj, and the days before Lent belong to Kurentovanje, when masked groups from Ptuj and the surrounding villages fill the streets.

Ptuj gives its name to one of Slovenia's protected foods, the Ptuj onion, ptujski lük, a heart-shaped onion with reddish layers and a deep purple edge. Another protected product of the region is Styrian and Prekmurje pumpkin seed oil, štajersko-prekmursko bučno olje, pressed from roasted, hull-less seeds of the local Styrian oil pumpkin. Dark in colour, it is mixed with cider vinegar in the typical Styrian salad dressing.

The best-known pastry of the north-east, prekmurska gibanica, comes from Prekmurje across the Mura but has become a national speciality: layers of pastry filled with poppy seeds, walnuts, apples, raisins and quark.

Wine is the town's other trade. Haloze, one of the seven districts of the Podravje wine region, has grown vines since the Celts in the fourth century BC, and most of its wine is made, stored and bottled in Ptuj. White wines dominate, and the town's cellars and the hills around are the natural places to taste them.