Ptuj is a town in…
Ptuj is a town in northeastern Slovenia. Traditionally the area was part of the Styria region. Ptuj is the oldest city in Slovenia. There is evidence that the area was settled in the Stone Age. In the Late Iron Age it was settled by Celts.By the 1st century BC, the settlement was controlled by Ancient Rome. In 69 AD, Vespasian was elected Roman Emperor by the Danubian legions in Ptuj, and the first written mention of the city of Ptuj is from the same year. The city of Poetovio was the base-camp of Legio XIII Gemina in Pannonia. The name originated in the times of Emperor Trajan, who granted the settlement city status and named it Colonia Ulpia Traiana Poetovio in 103. After the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Ptuj was occupied by Nazi Germany. From 1941 to 1944 the town’s Slovenian population was dispossessed and deported. Their homes were taken over by German speakers from South Tyrol and the Gottschee County, who had themselves been evicted according to an agreement between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. These German immigrants, along with the native German Pettauer, were expelled to Austria in 1945; many later settled in North America.
Since 1945 Ptuj has been populated almost completely by Slovenians. Ptuj is the center place of a ten-day-long carnival in the spring, an ancient Slavic pagan rite of spring and fertility, called Kurentovanje or Korantovanje. Kurent is believed to be the name of an ancient god of hedonism – the Slavic counterpart of the Greek Priapos, although there are no written records. Kurenti or Koranti are figures dressed in sheep skin who go about the town wearing masks, a long red tongue, cow bells, and multi-colored ribbons on the head. The Kurenti from Ptuj and the adjoining villages also wear feathers, while those from the Haloze and Lancova vas wear horns. Organized in groups, Kurents go through town, from house to house, making noise with their bells and wooden sticks, to symbolically scare off evil spirits and the winter.