Predjama Castle

The tale of the robber knight Erasmus, of the Jamski or Lueger family, woven around his picturesque Castle Jama (later Predjama), has spiced inexhaustible interest in this castle, with its underground tunnel linked to the outside world, by which the knight kept himself supplied with food when besieged on the Emperor’s orders by Baron Rauber, because of the murder of Marshal Pappenheim (1483). As Janez Vajkard Valvasor reports in The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola (1689), Rauber wanted to starve the outlaw in the prison of his own castle, but Erasmus mockingly hurled over the battlements a slaughtered ox and sufficient mutton for a whole troop, and kept sending his besieger gifts of fresh cherries and fish. The castle’s attractive position in the shelter of a rocky cavern and undoubted value as a landmark has excited the popular and professional imagination, as well as the creativity of landscape painters. Its ‘portraitists’ include the great German architect, set designer, painter and graphic artist Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841). As a set designer, Schinkel was taken by the scenic effect of the Renaissance building and its romantic symbiosis with the natural scenery. He sketched the castle on his way to Italy between 1803 and 1805, and in 1816 reproduced an image of Predjama as a lithograph, then a new graphic medium. The excellent lithograph is thus among the earliest examples of this technique. The inscription under the scene is DAS SCHLOSS PREDIAMA IN CREIN XII STUND : VON TRIEST. The Neoclassical master also left a literary parallel to this art work – he expressed his excitement about the visit to Postojna Cave in his travel diary Reisen nach Italien: Tagebücher, Briefe, Zeichnungen, Aquarelle.