Turjak Castle

Turjak stands above the settlement of the same name in the municipality of Velike Lašče, in Lower Carniola about 20 km south-east of Ljubljana. The knights von Auersperg, later counts, raised the first castle on the site as early as the late 11th century, and it may already have been standing by 1062, the year the family is first mentioned in the person of Konrad von Auersperg. A stone slab set into the ox tower on the eastern side gives the date a little differently: it records that in the year of the Lord 1067 the lord Konrad Turjaški began to build Turjak. Coats of arms and the figure of an aurochs are cut into the slab beside the text, gilded at one time. The origin of the name is uncertain. Local tradition takes it from the tur, the extinct wild cattle the counts of Turjak carried in their arms, though a corruption of the founders' own name, Ursberg and later Auersperg, is the likelier explanation.

In 1140 the castle was destroyed and burned in a succession struggle between the two heirs of Pilgram II von Auersperg, his son Pilgram IV and his son-in-law Otto von Ortenburg. Pilgram IV held the castle, and was defeated. Count Adolf II von Auersperg rebuilt it in 1190, and his son Otto was then drawn into a complicated war against the noble houses of Görtz and Ortenburg and the Patriarchate of Aquileia, in the course of which the castle was flattened a second time. After that the site of the first two castles was abandoned in favour of the present one further up the slope; minor ruins of the older work can still be made out lower down.

The present castle is first mentioned in 1220. In 1270 Peter and Wolfgang von Auersperg sold it to another branch of the family, only for Baltazar von Auersperg, chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire, to buy it back. Fourteenth-century Auersperg owners included Gerhard, recorded in 1317, and the brothers Friederich, Volkard and Herward.

The great earthquake of 1511 destroyed the castle completely. The slab on the ox tower puts the rebuilding in the words of the man who ordered it: Trojan Turjaški, hereditary high chamberlain of the Carniolan and Slovene March, records that after the earthquake left Turjak in ruins he pulled it down to the foundations and began building anew in 1520. The castle was rebuilt in time to hold out against a furious peasants' revolt in 1515, which laid waste to several other castles in the region. Valvasor's engravings of the 1680s still show a rectangular structure with small towers at only two of its corners and a large bastille at the eastern end, a layout that goes back to the major rebuilding after the earthquake, and the north wing and parts of the defensive walls are older than the 16th century. The castle has been substantially altered several times, and its triangular plan, with Renaissance bastilles at the three points and a suite of dungeons of graded unpleasantness in the western tower, postdates those engravings.

Turkish raiders mounted major assaults on Turjak in 1491 and again in 1528, and were driven off both times. The Auerspergs had a reputation as capable military leaders. Ivan Turjaški fell at the battle of Vienna in 1529, and Herbard Turjaški, Herbard VIII von Auersperg, died at Budačko in 1575.

The heads of Herbard and of Friderik Višnjegorski, Friedrich von Weichselburg, both killed in battle with Ottoman forces that year, were skinned and tanned and sent as mementoes to the Sultan in Constantinople; relatives afterwards ransomed them back for 25,000 gold pieces, and the two heads were once displayed in the castle armoury. Andrej Turjaški, called the Carniolan Achilles, commanded the Carinthian and Carniolan forces at the battle of Sisak and contributed to a decisive victory over the Ottomans on 22 June 1593.

Through the 16th century the Auerspergs were strong supporters of the Protestant Reformation in the Slovene lands. Primož Trubar and Jurij Dalmatin, the leading figures of that movement, were offered sanctuary at the castle and worked during their stay on the first translation of the Bible into Slovene, and the counts also put money behind the printing of some of the first books in the language. The castle is unusual in having two chapels, and the Romanesque Protestant one is named after Dalmatin: it holds the tombs of the Protestant counts, and gothic frescoes.

Johan Andreas von Auersperg and Wolf Engelbert von Auersperg held Turjak in the 17th century. The historian Valvasor, who wrote of Wolf Engelbert, measured the castle's standing by giving it two etchings in his Glory of the Duchy of Carniola of 1689, one of them a two-page spread. Wolf Engelbert's son and successor Adam Anton Siegfried established a fideicommiss, an entailment, in 1739, the year of his death, tying up the Turjak lordship together with the holding of Nadlischegg at Mokronog and the Turjak or Auersperg Palace in Ljubljana.

He was succeeded by his eldest son Adolf Engelbert Ignaz, who died in 1768. On 20 May 1769 the allodial land ownership went to his widow Elisabeth, born Lichtenberg, while the fideicommiss went to his brother-in-law Josef Maria, and on Josef Maria's death on 24 December 1805 the entailed properties went to Johann Paul Alois and then to count Josef von Auersperg, who held them until he died on 12 October 1883. His son count Leo von Auersperg followed him, and between 1916 and 1931 the holder was Leo's son Herward, succeeded in turn by his own son of the same name. One of the family left a stranger memorial: the chapel of the Turjak graveyard houses a glass jar containing the preserved heart of the young count Hanno von Auersperg (1838–1861), who is said to have taken his own life after his family exiled him to Naples for refusing to give up a girl beneath him in rank. The castle's widest fame in Slovenia, though, rests on France Prešeren's ballad Turjaška Rozamunda, on the wooing of the spoilt heiress of Turjak in the late Middle Ages.

On 19 September 1943 Partisans of the Prešeren brigade took the castle after a lengthy battle with its garrison, Slovene Blue Guard detachments of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland. About five hundred of them were taken prisoner and became the target of retribution, in the form of notable war crimes. The battle left the castle severely damaged, and it lay in ruins for several years.

After the Second World War the castle was nationalised and restoration work was slowly taken in hand. Denationalisation returned it to its former owners, the Turjaški family, who gave it up and sold it to the Slovene state, and it has been protected as a monument of national significance since 6 October 1999. The Catholic chapel on the west side has served as a church since 1789 and, after a renovation in 1990, has held mass every Sunday. In 2006 the president of Slovenia, Janez Drnovšek, founded the Movement for Justice and Development, a civil-society group, at a large rally at the castle, and on 1 September of that year the international order Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosomilitani Universalis proclaimed the grand priory of the Independent Order of Knights Templar of Slovenia there.