The old town of Ribnik (Ribnik castle)

If your travels take you through Karlovac towards Ozalj, have a look around the wider area, because the landscape here is exceptionally beautiful! Driving around, you are bound to come across Ribnik Old Town as well. You can leave the car in the local shop’s car park, and a road framed by an avenue of trees will bring you right to the castle gate.

Ribnik Old Town is a rare surviving example of a “Wasserburg” fortress, that is, a fortress surrounded by water. It stands on what was once a strategically important route between Carniola and Zagreb on one side, and Ogulin and the road on down to the sea on the other.

It takes its name from the very moat and lake that surrounded it, which served not only as a defence but as a fish pond (ribnjak) too. The lake clearly had a constant supply of water, because a stream still runs close by today. There was once a mill on it, and around it stretched fields of grain and centuries-old beech and oak forests. The whole of that area ended in the south at the river Kupa, which played a great part in water transport through history.

Taking all those facts together, the position of the castle (the old town) was clearly chosen with great care.

As doctrines of warfare changed the moat lost its point, so a record from 1558 states that the fish pond around the old town is no more. The present-day appearance of Ribnik suggests that it went through several phases of reconstruction and alteration over the centuries, all depending on how the world changed and what dangers it threatened with.

It is thought that in the earlier phases there were palisades (fences of logs stood on end), which was usual for Slavic forts in the early Middle Ages. We wrote about one of those in our article on Virgrad in Slavonia.

The history of Ribnik Old Town can largely be followed in written documents from the end of the 13th century, when this area was ruled by the Babonić counts. It is known that Stjepan Babonić took part in a crusade to the “Holy Land” with 250 horsemen of his own, and on the strength of that further expanded his estates and powers.

As the centuries passed Ribnik changed many owners, staying longest in the hands of the Frankopans. After them came the Zrinski family, and so on down to the present day.

In 2002 Ribnik Old Town was shamefully sold for a pittance to a pack of international charlatans and confidence tricksters, the self-styled Frankopan family, who have nothing to do with the Croatian noble house that died out at the end of the 17th century. A certain Vjekoslav Nikola Antun Dojmi di Delupis renamed himself Frankopan in England and passed himself off falsely around the world and in Croatia in order to secure privileges that are not his. His sons Petar and Nikola carried on much the same practice, leaving behind them collapsed companies and “brokerage houses”, unpaid debts and similar traces of dishonest business, mostly hiding behind firms registered in England.

After the initial devastation they began inflicting on Ribnik castle, and repeated warnings from the competent institutions, they abandoned the so-called restoration project and left the castle to decay further. It is a sad thing, because this could be a beautiful heritage hotel with a museum collection, and as such a tourist gem for the whole region.