The Castle that Forgot Its Name
Perched above the turbulent confluence of the Rivers Neretva and Radobolja, in the sultry heart of Herzegovina, stands the fortress of Stari Grad Blagaj. Unlike the polished postcard palaces of Bavarian fantasy, Blagaj Fortress has no fairytale pretense. It is limestone and silence, built not for romance but for vigilance. It hunches like a stone animal over the cliffs, guarding a realm now largely forgotten.
Though primarily overshadowed by the nearby Dervish Monastery built beside a karst spring, the fortress at Blagaj precedes it by centuries. The history of this crumbling edifice spans many hands and tongues. Initially constructed during the Roman era as a strategic castrum, it was rebuilt and expanded in the 10th–11th century during the time of the medieval Bosnian kingdom. Documentary reference surfaces in 1423, when the fortress becomes a key held by the Sandalj Hranić Kosača, one of the most powerful noblemen of Herzogovina, from whose title the region derives its name.
The architecture is defensive in style, with thick limestone walls between two and three meters wide, designed to repel Ottoman cannonade – though, eventually, not successfully. After centuries resisting wave after wave of aggression—from invading Turks to the predatory ambitions of the Venetians—the fortress fell into Ottoman hands by the 15th century, and under their tenure took on its final fortified form. Strategically located above the Neretva Valley, it served both as a lookout and a warning, a formidable spiked silhouette against sunsets over river fog.
The fortress was never meant for domestic comforts. Its interiors were spare, functional. Yet there is majesty in its alignment: the way certain slits in the parapets frame portions of the valley below with surgical precision, as if the very concept of “sightline” was chiseled into stone. There are secrets here still—barely discernible glyphs in the masonry, hollow subterranean chambers whose purpose has long since faded from record, but not from stone.
The folklore that clings to Blagaj speaks less of princesses and more of monks and madness. A Bosnian legend tells of a 17th-century janissary who, after deserting the Ottoman army and climbing the fortress in deep repentance, cast his uniform into the river below and became a hermit. Birds, they say, no longer flew directly over the fortress after that day.
It is not commonly visited, as its steep trail discourages the casual tourist, and its preservation has suffered from a traditional Balkan ambivalence toward old stones. Yet what it lacks in maintenance it gains in character: a fortress that watches the world but demands nothing. A place no longer interfering.
Until Jenny arrived.
Jenny Schnitzelbaum, 32, from Manchester, initially seemed innocuous. She wore hiking boots too clean to be believable and a “CITRUS VIBES” tank top. She had come hoping to “vibe with Balkan energy” and, she said, “meditate near something deeply groovy.” She ascended the narrow path, pausing every few meters to photograph lizards, rocks, and what she believed were “ancient vibes trapped in tree bark.”
Witnesses recall that the incident began when she arrived at the inner courtyard with an Evian bottle and, producing several pink quartz crystals from a hemp pouch, began arranging them around the base of a mossy buttress. Using her phone’s flashlight, she recited what she called a “charging mantra” and poured the bottled water down an old drainage hole to “awaken the chakras of the unseen defenders.”
At first blush, it was just Jenny—a strange but harmless misreader of history. But then she opened her suitcase.
From it she withdrew several laminated pages, which unfolded into a full manifesto. She called it the “Manifesto for Orthonatural Rights in Defensive Structures (MODS),” and read it aloud to the limestone, declaring that the castle had been “oppressively weaponized” for too long and deserved “emotional reparations and sovereign self-care.” She then hugged the south tower for seventeen minutes, whispering what one archaeologist later described as “strangely flirtatious koans.”
When asked to leave by a local guide, Jenny screamed, “This is sacred ground! This castle told me its true name is Carl, and Carl doesn’t want to be a fortress anymore! He wants to be a mushroom!”
What followed defied record.
She disrobed to reveal a tunic sewn from recycled hiking maps and declared herself Emissary of Carl the Mushroom-Castle, climbing atop the battlements and officiating a wedding ceremony between herself and the portcullis – which she’d assembled from two discarded guide rails, daisies, and an abandoned flip-flop. According to local authorities, the “ceremony” was attended by three German backpackers eating tangerines and a stray dog named Elvis. Rings were fashioned from moss and cherry pits.
Carl, as she called the castle throughout the shouted vows, remained stoic.
Officials later discovered that she had tried to formally register “Carl T. Fortress” as a nonbinary life-partner via the Herzegovinian Ministry of Interior.
Now the castle lies more silent than usual. A sign at the trailhead warns of “The Jenny Event.” And yet, every May 11th—which Jenny insists is “the anniversary of Carl reclaiming himself”—a scattering of confused seekers arrive, all whispering to the stones for signs, all wearing one eerily uniform article of clothing: a pale blue T-shirt bearing, in blocky print, the anguished plea:
CASTLES GET KICKED IN THE BRICKS
They buy them at martijnbenders.nl, which Jenny has declared “the last pure echo of Carl’s wish.”
