Orava

The problem with having been here for two years is that by now all of the places I’d like to go are the ones that are the least easy to get to. These are the ones that it takes a bus and three trains to get to, and four buses to get home from, and that mean leaving earlier on a Saturday than one usually gets up on a weekday. I am committed to seeing as many things as I can, though, especially my castles and World Heritage Sites.

If you’re a classic cinema fan, you might recognize Orava Castle from the old black-and-white vampire film Nosferatu. (I can’t even imagine how inexpensive it was to film in Slovakia in the 1920s.) Orava is one of the country’s most famous castles, and it was only the travel time that kept me from visiting it before. But on Saturday Tika and I went up north, taking a bus from Tisovec to Banská Bystrica, then trains from Bystrica to Vrútky, then Kraľovany, and finally Oravský Podzámok. On the way home we took buses from Oravský Podzámok to Dolný Kubín, then to Ružomberok, Bystrica, and home.

From the train station in Oravský Podzámok, you walk to the left, which takes you across the Orava River. Once you’ve crossed the river, the entrance to the castle grounds is on the right side. When we first saw the castle from the train, we expected it to be up higher, because there are higher hills in the area; but it’s a tricksy castle. It doesn’t look like much of a climb, but once you’re inside, you move upward pretty steadily. From the top of the citadel it’s a fair drop pretty much straight down.
Our tour group entered the castle (through the door with the dragon handle!) at 10:50. We passed through the first two gates, then a tunnel into the lower castle area. Like Fiľakovo, Orava has three distinct levels: the lower, middle, and upper castles. When we were entering the first room, one of the armouries, I needed to clarify with the guide where I could take pictures, so I went up and did the whole 'I don't speak much Slovak but...' thing. She spoke some English, though, so not only did I get my answer about photographs, but she also gave us some information about things she'd already said, and told us that there were explanatory texts in some of the rooms.

Like other castles, Orava had been used as a defensive position for quite a while (on the high ground), and the castle has been rebuilt and expanded several times in its history. Many of the governors of the castle were from the Austro-Hungarian nobility. Some of the furnished rooms in the castle are fairly modern--that is, from the 18th century and possibly later.

In a fairly predictable fashion, my favorite room was the "Knights' Hall," which was decorated with paintings of hunters and this Davy Crockett-type dude about to kill him a bar.

Lonely Planet says the tour is "long" without being more specific. Our tour, excluding the chapel, which was an additional two euros, ran about an hour and forty minutes. It didn't feel long, though, and it covered a lot of the castle. Besides the furnished rooms, there was also an exhibit on the geography and natural life in the Orava region, with a stuffed two-faced goat kid and more normal taxidermied subjects.

I felt a bit disoriented on the tour, because we were passing through rooms and hallways, sometimes emerging into courtyards and onto balconies, and always moving up toward the highest point. I would not recommend the tour for people with serious vertigo or inner-ear imbalances; when we climbed the last set of stairs to the citadel, I was feeling a little dizzy. The citadel is the highest part, the easiest to defend, and on the back side the drop goes right down the rock face into the river. True to the Central European spirit of "If you're dumb enough to hurt/kill yourself, don't blame us," there was a window wide open in the citadel with nary a protective barrier between a visitor and highly-probable death.

Unfortunately (for me, perhaps fortunately for readers), I feel like I'm running out of things to say about castles. I liked Orava, although even now, as I'm writing about it and remembering being there, I still feel a little off-balance. The weather, as you can see, was fantastic, and the trees around the castle hill were beautiful. The one major bummer was that we didn't see any of the historical skits that are apparently sometimes performed on the grounds, although we did see a couple who'd just gotten married in the chapel. Orava Castle is definitely a cool place, but the verticality of it and the resultant physiological reaction probably rules it out of the running for my future castle home.