Kamen Castle

At the mouth of the narrow Draga valley above Begunje stands Kamen Castle — a ruin that still looks exactly the way a child imagines a knight’s castle: stone towers on a crag, the Karavanke wall rising behind. The Counts of Ortenburg raised it in the 12th century to control the old pack route that led from the Radovljica basin through Draga toward Tržič and over the mountains. Its surviving Romanesque defence tower ranks among the oldest castle architecture in Slovenia.

Its fame, though, came with the Lamberg family, who took over in the 15th century. From their line came the knight Gašper Lambergar, victor of countless tournaments — and hero of one of Slovenia’s oldest folk epics, Pegam and Lambergar. The ballad sings of a duel in Vienna where young Lambergar defeats the dreaded giant Pegam, a monster advised by two extra heads: Lambergar strikes off the real one, mounts it on his lance and gallops home to Kamen with the trophy. Historians recognise in Pegam the Czech warlord Jan Vitovec, and in the song an echo of real 15th-century wars between the Counts of Celje and the Habsburg camp.

When comfort finally outweighed security, the Lambergs moved down to Katzenstein Castle in Begunje in the 18th century and left Kamen to time — its stones were even carted off to build village houses. Today the ruin is maintained for visitors: wooden stairs lead up the tower, and in summer the walls occasionally come alive with medieval days. From Bled you reach the castle in fifteen minutes; it pairs naturally with Begunje, the Avsenik homestead and Katzenstein.