Bojnice Castle

We did a little more back-tracking into Slovakia again – there was the Festival of Ghosts and Ghouls on at Bojnice that sounded too intriguing. We camped at a site up the mountain behind the castle, where the super friendly fellow who ran the place explained that they had only just opened for the season, and that the next night (Saturday) they would be holding an opening party, with a bonfire, some goulash and some live music. We were welcome to join, but were warned that it could get noisy – and that’s when they started testing the sound system…

Our neighbours for the weekend arrived and we said hello, they were French, judging by their number plate. I mentioned this, and the man shrugged his shoulders and said, “ah yez, nobody iz perfect”. Got to love the French.

The next day, we headed to the castle, walking down a track on the mountain to approach it from the back, where there were donkey rides, a guy with a falcon, and stalls selling medieval weapons, snacks and folk-artsy trinkets. Everyone was in period costume, and there was a fellow picking out a traditional tune on a fiddle. We walked past a guy with freaky looking jars with pale creatures floating in them, and when he started to explain what he was selling, we cracked up as he was in fact a genuine snake-oil salesman!! (Heals all ailments, we were told)

We were well prepared for the day – the wisdom of the internet said to expect a couple of hours in the queue, with plenty of stalls to look at along the way and snacks to buy. We headed for the end of the line snaking out the front of the castle 4 people wide, finally reaching our position at the end, about 300 metres down the hill… we were in for a wait. Luckily the sun was shining (we watched numerous bald heads and shoulders burn), the music was playing and there were plenty of goodies to eat and drink. We took turns heading off to come back with local pizza topped with sour cream and bacon, long cream-filled doughy pastries, beer, cider, spicy sausage, icecream and some strange sugary rootbeer.

This was the first properly warm and sunny day we’d had so far, so this was a perfect way to spend it – sitting on the street with several thousand locals, drinking, eating and reading books. We discussed how the queue would have been in other countries – in Denmark there would have been panic, as there was no numbering system, in Malaysia there would have been a mad press of every single person cramming at the entrance, and Australia would have been about the same as we experienced – orderly and polite, though perhaps with a bit more banter. And a good thing it was a well-behaved queue, as we were there for nearly SEVEN HOURS. I kid you not. And we didn’t even wait the longest.

When we finally reached the entrance at 5:30pm, we paid for our entry as a group of 20, and started our tour through the castle. All through the vast building there were characters fully costumed to be 17th/18th century royalty, and all very dead. They led us on a theatre performance for 90 minutes through the castle (in Slovakian, which we also anticipated), occasionally leaping out to scare people. They had some great special effects and the biggest performance was in the ballroom, where all the finely-dressed corpses danced at a wedding, as the live music rose dramatically until they were dancing like something out of the Thriller video. It was a very cool way to visit a castle – never before have I stood on one of those historical house tours in the pitch dark, witnessing a murder and then seeing the ghouls screech out of the fireplace to terrorise the murderess. Very cool.

Check out the final guests leaving the wedding hall:

And then it was over. We popped out a door high in the wall of the castle, and walked down the stairs to the dry moat. Grabbed some dinner to go (when buying grilled meat, always check if you’re paying per piece, or per 100g!!) and we walked back up through the forest, with the mist now eerily drifting through the pine trees in the dark. We found the way though, by the beat of the music. The band and the bonfire were going merrily, with the locals dancing on the driveway. We sat with a couple by the fire as they painstakingly roasted a sausage on a stick above the flames. They took this business very seriously, checking the meat every few minutes. Eventually a couple of small boys wandered over to muck about with the fire, tossing a bunch of sticks on which caused the flames to leap up to the sausage and sparks to fly out to the dedicated couple. The two boys stood there a moment in silence, while the woman glared at them. Totally straight-faced, one boy pointed at the other – universal sign language for “he did it”.

With the fire now blazing hot, we decided to call it a day, and even with the bass thumping through the van, we passed out. What a day.