TheTraveler

 

Castles, Counts and Leaky Coffins:
Bojnice Castle, Central Slovakia
By Amanda Kendle

“I remember you told me you are going to visit Bojnice Castle this weekend, so I checked in my book at home and found some interesting stories about it,” was the Thursday afternoon greeting from my ever-chatty student Viera, who should have been learning Advanced Business English from me. After six months of teaching Viera, a young lawyer with a multinational in Bratislava, I couldn’t remember opening our textbook more than a handful of times.

“You know, of course, it is right near my hometown, so I have a book from an anniversary of the castle, it was published just small, and my father gave me a copy.”
I definitely knew that Slovakia’s prettiest fairytale castle was part of Viera’s upbringing – in fact her persistent nagging was one of the reasons I was finally going there. The village of Bojnice – Viera had taught me to pronounce it “boy-ni-tse” – was about a two-hour drive from Bratislava, making it a perfect day trip to make with my visiting parents and their hire car.

It was a grey Saturday morning in Bratislava, but after passing through several Slovak microclimates we reached Prievidza, the larger town near the castle, in glary sunshine. The glint of several gliders from the local flying club caught our eyes as they drifted slowly through the now cloudless sky. Unlike most parts of Slovakia, Bojnice Castle was clearly signposted, and we drove up through Bojnice village to its parking area. A first close-up view of the castle whisked me off to Disneyland. The pale blue tipped Rapunzel towers battled with the sky for the most intense colour, just as in every tourist brochure picture I’d seen: I doubted if grey skies ever came to Bojnice. The square towers on some corners added a slightly defensive look.

Viera had explained that although the castle had a history back to the 1100s, what we saw today was mostly quite new. “The last owner was Count Palffy,” she’d told me as our scheduled lesson time rapidly ticked by, “and he wanted to make it a beautiful castle for the woman he wanted to marry. But she left him and he died before it was finished.”

It might not have worked out for the Count and his lover, but I was glad the renovations had still been completed, and that the castle was as magical inside as out. I ogled at the long wide spiral staircase with my favourite kind of vaulted ceiling, long curves meeting at graceful triangular points.
The walls and steps varied across several sandstone colours, interrupted by the odd arched window. Unfortunately, nobody is trusted to wander these treasure-heavy corridors unaccompanied - a Slovak guide led our group through the rooms, pointing out the appropriate sections on our English translation handout.

The elaborate Oriental Room caught my attention and sent my memory back to my recent lesson with Viera: “You know, I can’t remember the story exactly, but there is an Oriental Room in the castle. And there is some language there, like Chinese maybe. A visitor came from, maybe China, and he saw that the – letters?” she looked at me quizzically. “Characters,” I prompted. “Yes characters, they were upside down, or backwards. And he was rich and he paid for them to fix the characters.” Standing with a swivelling neck in the Oriental Room, I couldn’t find Viera’s Chinese characters, but I did find some inscriptions in Arabic – perhaps they had been the source of all the trouble.

The tour ended down in the crypt. It was as airy and light a crypt as I’ve ever seen, but edging around Palffy’s enormous coffin still made me jittery.
“I heard a story,” Viera had told me, “a story that there was a strange substance leaking from Count Palffy’s coffin. And the people who worked at the castle, they had it analysed by scientists, but they couldn’t explain what it was. But many people say that the Count had a son from another woman who lived outside the castle. This son had died a year before but someone secretly moved his body into the Count’s coffin, which was the Count’s dying wish. So some people say that this strange liquid was something from the liquid they use to keep the body of his son!” Viera had bubbled over with excitement. During the tour I heard a local explain to their English-speaking friend that they’d heard the dark liquid had started leaking from the crypt when Palffy’s treasures were being sold off: and when the asset-clearing stopped, so did the leakage. Whatever the story, I carefully checked all corners of the crypt but came up dry.

Handing in our English translations and thanking the guide, we circled the outside of the castle to find the best fairytale views and snapshot angles.
I took more photos than usual, anticipating Viera’s first question at our next lesson. As I walked in on Tuesday afternoon, I was soon proven right.
“Amanda, hello, so did you bring some photographs of Bojnice to show me? Did you like it? Oh, and my father told me another story …” We sat down with unopened textbooks in front of us, and I heard still more absorbing legends of Bojnice Castle. I’m still not sure if Viera ever learnt much from me, but she certainly taught me plenty.

Amanda Kendle is a freelance writer and photographer based in Australia

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