Bled Castle

Bled entered written history in 1004, when the German emperor Henry II granted the Bled estate to Bishop Albuin of Brixen. Seven years later, on 22 May 1011, Henry granted Albuin's successor Adalbero the castle itself — castellum Veldes — together with thirty royal farms of land. That charter is the castle's first mention, and by it Bled counts, according to the written sources, as the oldest castle in Slovenia. The land around it then lay in the March of Carniola within the Holy Roman Empire; in 1278 it passed to the Austrian House of Habsburg.

The bishops of Brixen held Bled for eight centuries, but they rarely came to see it. The lordship was administered and guarded by the bishop's ministeriales — until 1349 the knights of Bled — and in the mid-14th century the bishops gave up direct administration altogether, pledging the estate to its administrator, Konrad von Kreigh, as security for borrowed money.

The Kreigh family ruled at Bled for nearly two hundred years, from 1368 to 1558, and ruled harshly: their curtailing of peasant rights and rough treatment of the serfs helped drive Bled's peasants to join the all-Slovene revolt of 1515. In 1558 the lease passed to Baron Herbard Auersperg, a celebrated hero of the Turkish wars — and a great protector of the Protestantism then spreading at Bled, which cost him the post. In 1574 he had to leave and surrender the lease to a partisan of the Catholic party, Baron Ivan Josip Lenkovič. From 1597 to 1615 the bishops dispensed with lessees and appointed their own governors, and a long succession of lease-holders followed — noblemen until the mid-18th century, burghers thereafter.

Two earthquakes struck the castle: one in 1511, after which Herbard Auersperg rebuilt it, and one in 1690, repaired by the Gallenfels barons. Its Gothic fortification system survived both.

After 800 years of Brixen rule, the lordship was taken for the state in 1803 by order of the Vienna court commission. Under the French Illyrian Provinces of 1809–1813 it belonged to the French state, its revenues enjoyed by the governor-general, Marshal Auguste Marmont. The confiscated property was returned to Brixen in 1838 — and twenty years later the bishop and cathedral chapter sold it: in 1858 the Bled lordship and the island provostry went for 150,000 gulden to Viktor Ruard, owner of the Jesenice ironworks. Ruard sold the great forests to the Carniolan Industrial Company in 1871 but kept the castle, the lake and the building land around it. The property passed to the merchant Adolf Muhr in 1882; in 1918 the hotelier Ivan Kenda bought castle, lake and island together; a cooperative bank took the castle in 1937, then the Drava Banovina, and finally the state.

The chapel in the upper courtyard, built in the 16th century and dedicated to the bishops St Albuin and St Ingenuin, was painted around 1700 with illusionist frescoes; beside the altar the donors themselves are depicted, Henry II and his wife Kunigunda. Of the oldest castle only the Romanesque walls and entrance tower survive — the rest of the buildings around the two courtyards are Renaissance work, with a drawbridge over a moat.

When the castle roof burned in 1947, the excavations that followed led the National Museum in Ljubljana to press for the castle's conservation, and it was restored to the plans of the architect Tone Bitenc with funds from the state and the municipality of Bled. Part of the rooms now hold a museum whose collection tells the history of the country around Lake Bled from the Bronze Age onwards, and the castle is one of Slovenia's most visited attractions.