Ptuj is Slovenia's oldest town and one of its most charming: a medieval centre of red roofs, cobbled lanes and baroque houses on the banks of the Drava River, crowned by a castle that dominates the landscape. It was Roman Poetovio, a centre of up to 40,000 inhabitants at its peak, and that age can be felt on every corner, from the Roman Orpheus Monument to the medieval walls and towers.
Beyond history, Ptuj means wine, thermal baths and festivity. The town keeps up a winemaking tradition that goes back a thousand years, with a cellar that has been storing wines for more than seven centuries, and it's surrounded by the vineyard-covered Haloze and Slovenske Gorice hills. Across the river, Terme Ptuj invites you to a thermal soak all year round. And every February, Ptuj celebrates Kurentovanje, one of Europe's most unusual carnivals, with the Kurent —shaggy figures with cowbells and masks— chasing winter away.
This guide helps you make the most of Ptuj: what to see at the castle and its museums and how much admission costs, how to explore the old town and its Roman and medieval monuments, where to taste the country's oldest wine, how to enjoy the thermal baths, and how to get around by SŽ train and bus from Maribor or Ljubljana. A small but wonderfully rich stop in eastern Slovenia, ideal to combine with Maribor.
Ptuj is Slovenia's oldest documented town, inhabited since the Stone Age. In the 1st century AD the Romans turned it into Poetovio, an important military, commercial and administrative centre of the province of Pannonia, which grew to tens of thousands of inhabitants, with garrisoned legions and the cult of the god Mithras; from that era remain the Orpheus Monument and several Mithraic sanctuaries. After the invasions and the fall of Rome, the town was reborn in the Middle Ages under the Archbishops of Salzburg, who built the castle and granted it town rights in the 13th century; its market, its monasteries and its bridge over the Drava made it prosperous. For centuries it was under the Habsburgs, endured Ottoman raids and lived off wine and river trade. In the 19th century the railway, and then in the 20th the two world wars and Tito's Yugoslavia, shaped its course, up to Slovenian independence in 1991. Today it preserves its medieval centre, its winemaking tradition and the Kurentovanje carnival. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Slovenian Lower Styria: Ptuj, the country's oldest town, built on Roman Poetovio, and Maribor, wine capital and home of the world's oldest vine, where General Rudolf Maister carried out his daring takeover in 1918.
Read the history of The east: Maribor and Ptuj →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 8 activities in Liubliana. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Ptuj rightly claims to be the oldest recorded town in Slovenia, and its history goes back to prehistoric times: there are traces of human settlement in the area from the Stone Age, and in the Iron Age a community linked to Central European cultures lived here. But the big leap came with Rome. At the ford of the River Drava, a key point on the routes linking Italy with Pannonia and the Danube, the Romans set up a military camp that soon grew into a town: Poetovio.
In the 1st century AD, under Emperor Trajan, Poetovio was granted the status of a colony, and it became one of the most important centres of the province of Pannonia. At its peak it is estimated to have had tens of thousands of inhabitants, with legions stationed there, forums, temples, baths, workshops and districts on both banks of the Drava. It was a cosmopolitan city, a meeting point for soldiers, merchants and officials from all over the empire.
Remarkable traces of that Poetovio survive. The most famous is the Orpheus Monument (Orfejev spomenik), a large 2nd-century marble funerary stele more than five metres high, which still stands in its original spot on the main square. Perhaps the most unusual remains are the Mithraea: underground sanctuaries dedicated to the god Mithras, a deity of Eastern origin whose mystery cult was very popular among Roman soldiers. Ptuj has several of the best-preserved Mithraea in this part of Europe, complete with altars and reliefs, evidence of a faith that competed with early Christianity.
The Roman world came to an end with the great migrations. Between the 4th and 6th centuries, Poetovio saw peoples such as the Goths and the Huns pass through, and urban life shrank. Then, between the 6th and 7th centuries, the Slavs arrived. They were the ancestors of the Slovenes, who resettled the region and gave it their language. Through Slavic, the Roman name Poetovio gradually became Ptuj.
In the Early Middle Ages, the area came under the influence of the powerful Archbishopric of Salzburg, one of the great church institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. The archbishops turned Ptuj into a stronghold of their power in these border lands: as early as the 12th century they built the castle that still towers over the town from the hill above the river, and they encouraged the town to grow at its foot. Ptuj received town rights in the 13th century (by around 1257 it was already referred to as a town), making it one of the oldest chartered towns in Slovenia.
Medieval Ptuj thrived thanks to its bridge over the Drava, its market, its fairs and its position on trade routes. Religious orders arrived, the Dominicans and the Minorites (Franciscans), and built monasteries that still stand today. The town filled with churches, noble houses and walls. In 1479 the town was briefly taken by King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary during his wars with the Habsburgs, a sign of how hotly contested this border was.
From the late Middle Ages and for centuries afterwards, Ptuj and all of Lower Styria were firmly under the rule of the Austrian Habsburgs, who governed from Vienna and Graz. These were times of both prosperity and hardship. On the one hand, the town lived off river trade on the Drava, its fairs and, above all, wine. The nearby hills of Haloze and Slovenske Gorice, with ideal soils and climate, have long produced highly regarded whites. The town's wine cellar, the Ptujska klet, has more than seven centuries of documented history, making it one of the oldest working wine cellars in the country.
On the other hand, the 15th and 16th centuries brought the terror of Ottoman raids. The Ottoman Empire had conquered the Balkans and was besieging Vienna, and its armies and raiding parties pushed into these Slovenian lands, ravaging the countryside, burning villages and carrying off captives. Walled and protected by its castle, Ptuj strengthened its defences and became a refuge for the people of the surrounding area. The Turkish threat shaped the region's life and imagination for generations.
Despite these tensions, the town kept its character and culture. The Protestant Reformation found some following in Slovenian Styria before the Catholic Counter-Reformation, backed by the Habsburgs, reversed it, leaving the Baroque landscape of churches and monasteries that visitors admire today. Ptuj was a small town but proud of its age, with an identity forged from Slovenian, German and Pannonian influences.
Of all of Ptuj's traditions, none is as unusual or as famous as the Kurent (or Korant), the stars of the carnival now held under the name Kurentovanje. Its roots go back to the pre-Christian world of the Slavic peoples and to farming rites of fertility and the changing seasons. The tradition as we know it, though, took shape over the centuries in the villages of the Ptuj area (the Ptujsko polje and the nearby hills).
The Kurent is unmistakable: a man covered in sheepskin, wearing a horned mask with red-rimmed eyes and a long red leather tongue, with large cowbells (zvonci) hanging from his waist. During carnival, groups of Kurent go through villages and streets jumping and swinging their hips so the bells ring out loudly. Their symbolic mission is to drive away winter and wake up spring. Other traditional masked figures join them, such as ploughmen, bears, witches and bridegrooms, in a lively piece of folk theatre.
This living tradition, handed down from generation to generation in rural communities, was added to UNESCO's list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017 as the 'Door-to-door rounds of Kurenti'. In the 20th century, the town of Ptuj turned Kurentovanje into a large carnival festival that brings together these groups and others from around the country and abroad. Today it lasts about ten days, it is one of Slovenia's most important events, and international publications rank it among the world's most original carnivals.
The 19th century brought modernisation. The arrival of the railway connected Ptuj with Vienna, Graz, Zagreb and Budapest, linking it to the networks of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and opening up markets for its wine and other products. At the same time, the Slovenian national revival also took hold here, in a town where the Slovenian majority lived alongside a German-speaking minority, with the national tensions typical of the empire's language borders.
The 20th century was turbulent. After Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918, Ptuj became part of the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, which later became Yugoslavia. The Second World War brought occupation by Nazi Germany, which annexed Lower Styria to the Reich and imposed a brutal policy of Germanisation, with deportations, repression and persecution of the Slovenian population. The Partisan resistance was active in the region. After the war, Ptuj became part of Tito's socialist Yugoslavia, within the Republic of Slovenia, and went through decades of industrialisation and social change while keeping its historic centre.
After Slovenia became independent in 1991 and joined the European Union in 2004, Ptuj reinvented itself as a cultural and tourist destination. It restored its castle and medieval centre, made more of its Roman heritage and winemaking tradition, developed its thermal spa and brought the Kurent carnival to an international audience. Today, this small town on the banks of the Drava offers visitors almost two thousand years of continuous history: the Poetovio of the legionaries and the sanctuaries of Mithras, the Ptuj of the Archbishops of Salzburg and the walls built against the Turks, the centuries-old wine cellars and the winter masks that still leap through the streets every February to call in the spring.
