Croatian Zagorje - On the Trail of the Neanderthal to Štrukli

Trakošćan Castle

The road to the Trakošćan Castle led sparspely populated villages. After exiting the forest, a large (pay) car park appeared on the left and a yellowish-looking castle with a magnificent tower glistened from the top of the hill in the background. Both the castle and the surrounding park make for a pleasant destination for a one-day summer getaway. We toured the castle first and then went for a walk by the lake later on.

A nice red-carpet circle path leads throughout the whole castle and the carpet takes you to every subsequent chamber and hallway. We walked through the castle chambers, the Knight’s and Hunter’s Hall, the music room and the dining room. The rooms and exhibits that date back to the 15th-19th century perfectly illustrate life on the castle grounds. I could easily visualise the ladies at the castle playing the piano in the music room, reading books, or playing chess, and the lords of the manor in their armours. The castle is home to an extensive library, more than 200 portraits in oil, as well as an enviable collection of firearms and cold weapons. The admission fee to the castle is 40 kunas.

Underneath the castle, there are meadows, trees and bushes, as well as a lake (the reservoir was built on the Čemernica Stream dam), from which there’s an even better view. A five-kilometre educational dirt trail circles the lake and was named the Path of the Fairies.

The Krapina Neanderthal Museum

We continued towards Krapina. A scale model of an enormous caveman by the road told us we were at the right place. The museum is located on the Hušnjak Hill near the Neanderthal archaeological site. There’s a dirt trail leading from the car park to the museum. The building’s front is a glass wall, behind which is a multimedia room where we first watched a 16 minutes long movie about the Neanderthals and their habitat.

The arrows guided us through the rest of the museum. A wonderful and modern interactive museum, which we found very interesting, stretches across 1200 square kilometres. I’m certain the museum, with its exhibits and modern interactive displays, arouses the interest of children as well. It illustrates the prehistoric era, the origin of the universe, the formation of Earth and the evolution of life in an interesting way. There are Neanderthals, which you first meet in the introductory film, placed all over the exhibits, together with their habitat, plus you also get to find out how the film was made.

The thing I liked the most was the spiral, gently rising path leading from the big bang to the formation of Earth and the origin of humans. Geological periods are shown in different colours on the floor. The time scale is condensed into 24 hours, so that the “length” of each period totals to just a few hours or a few minutes. Key milestones of each period are shown, and animal and humans, that were supposed to belong to a certain period, “walked” past me while I was following the path. The floor even contains paw- and footprints. The evolution of the material world and living beings is displayed on the wall. A DNA molecule winds towards the sky from the floor in the middle of this “time machine of the evolution of periods”, showing the complexity of living beings. The complex evolution of dozens of millennia is presented in an interesting and yet so simple way. Absolutely wonderful!

We really liked the museum, so we spent more time there than we initially planned. We also spent a lot of time at the castle prior to that, so we didn’t have enough time to visit Kumrovec. Hungry and left with a dying phone battery, we headed to a nearby restaurant for some authentic štrukli from Zagorje, a Croatian delicacy. It was an amazing one-day trip.