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Other people's parties can be awkward affairs. Especially when you've invited yourself, and don't speak the same language. In early February I saw a picture of a Slovenian 'demon' dancer; a 2 metre yeti-like figure in shaggy fur, with a mask of painted leather and a red tongue, bracketed by wild boar tusks, hanging to his waist. A head-dress of feathers and birds' wings haloed his head. In the eleven days before Lent hundreds of these koranti come from the small agricultural villages on both sides of the Drava river to exorcise Slovenia's oldest town, Ptuj, of winter spirits.

A few days after seeing the picture I flew into Ljubljana, floating down on a country deep in snow, with hilltop churches and dark forests scribbled onto the paper-white landscape. I drove in a series of elegant skids to Ptuj, just short of the Croatian border, in the east.

I wasn't the first gate-crasher in Ptuj - pronounced as if aiming for a distant spitoon. People had been inviting themselves into the region for the last three millennia, and the Slovenians have absorbed incoming tribes and their customs to create a culture which now contains elements of, perhaps, every belief system subscribed to in Europe's past. When the koranti - and the other 35 or so official 'masks' - take to the streets of Ptuj on the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday, it's like a perambulating bar-graph of Europe's spiritual development.

Over the past 3,000 years Slovenia's attractions to outsiders have remained constant. High mountains and deep, fertile valleys to support isolated farming clans; accessible iron ore and forests to provide to provide charcoal for smelting; natural magnesium rich hot springs; and a geographical position that made it a hub between the Alps and the Adriatic, on the amber trail, and between the Balkans and Italy. Illyrian tribes championed iron over bronze in the Hallstatt period. The Romans developed Ptuj and, importantly, allowed their slaves and traders to establish the town as a centre of the Persian religion Mithraism in the first and second century AD.

The modern Slovenian ancestors, the Sclavi, arrived from the Carpathian basin, as part of the dominio effect of shifting tribes in the 6th century. They brought an interior world of 'vile' - good and bad spirits - with them, as well as their cattle and agricultural customs. The first attempt to convert the Slovenians to Christianity by the Frankish empire of Carolingians in 748 failed. A second try by Irish monks aided by the diocese of Salzburg, later in the same century and using the local language and, one suspects, with a greater tolerance of local beliefs, was more successful. Today, despite a political flirtation with Protestantism in the 16th century, Slovenia is overwhelmingly Catholic. And Pagan.

Slovenians take Lent seriously, and so the excesses of 'fasenk' - carnival - are a necessary preparation for the coming forty days of denial. A time of misrule, of spirits to placate, of celebrated fertility, and of disguises and entry into a world turned upside down. A time when Paganism finds a framework within Catholicism, and the urban is taken over by the rural. Indeed the very word 'pagan' coming from the Latin paganus means not only a country-dweller, but hints at crudely weaponed country bumpkins at the very gates of the city.

Ptuj, in the full of its Dionysian celebrations, is an Aladdin's Cave for the folklorist, and a nightmare for the ethnographer. Anthropoligist Niko Kuret claimed that Slovenina, despite its small population of two million, "has all the diversity of Europe." But Andrej Brence, curator of Ptuj's museum and chronicler of koranti tradition, was quick to point out that the regions living and developing spring festival traditions were almost impossible to assemble into a coherent historical pattern. The koranti were a case in point, as Andrej explained.

"The earliest written reference to koranti is only from the 19th century. Obviously in some form it's much older, but we don't know much about them, apart from what we see today." We were examining an early korant costume: "Look at the club, with hedgehog skin and spines wrapped around the end. And the sheepskin suit and the heavy mask. Basically it's a weapon and armour." Between the two world wars, only unmarried men from certain villages could be koranti, and they would go around the farms collecting donations of food and wine in exchange for driving away the winter. "When two different groups of koranti - the 'horned ones' from east of the Drava river, and the 'feathered ones' from the west bank -meant it usually ended in fighting. One or two koranti were killed every year, and nearly always in fights over girls."

Nowdays, since the establishment of the urban umbrella fasenk in Ptuj 40 years ago, anyone can be a korant. Women, children, men from the town. That's if they can afford the handmade costume and the essential belt of huge brass cowbells imported from Austria. The outfits were already becoming modern heirlooms. Vlado Hvalec had been a korant for 22 years. He was adamant that the origins of the costume and customs went back three millennia.

"We are demons who scare away the the winter spirits. The pig tusks symbolise masculine virility, and the feathers show our freedom. And the tongue - look - it's an insult, a frightening insult, to the spirits to show our tongues." Vlado kept his costume in his sitting room for the rest of the year, "so that everybody can see it and know what I am."

At the carnival dance that night, some koranti risked heat stroke in their 30 kilos of skins and bells by dancing to Croatian torch-singer Tereza Kesovia. The clannish nature of the villagers and townspeople was evident in the other disguises. Families and groups of friends came dressed in the same 'masks.' There were shoals of mermaids, troupes of Gypsies, straw-stuffed scarecrows, and innumerable cabals of devils and hosts of angels.

Roberto, a brawny-armed, stubble-chinned 'bride,' in white lace, pushed a drink across to me. "Kriscov kopance - it means 'the infant Christ's bath water' - boiled schnapps with cinnamon and lemon." He looked around the wildly dancing crowd. He raised his glass.

"In a mask you can do forbidden things - confession comes later."

The devils and evil spirits of the next day were perhaps more psychosomatic and drawn from the excesses of the night before than derived from a Celtic past. But exorcism was at hand. The bells of St George's church pealed as a phalanx of koranti, some 250 of them, jogged past, shoulder-to-shoulder through the drifts of snow, in a bottom-rolling gait that clattered their cow bells against each in a solid roar of sound. Ahead, trios of forman - carters - stopped at the street intersections and cracked six-metre whips to drive away the devil. A red cat-suited devil - tajfl - ran along the gathering crowd as master of ceremonies, a net to gather souls in slung over his shoulder, a trident in his hand.

From the surrounding villages, groups of traditional 'masks' enacted out their symbolic heritage. One hamlet provided a line of women bearing fresh-baked 'plait loaves' studded with flowers. Four flat-land villages had teams of ploughmen, oraci, in top boots and aprons, 'tilling the soil' to bring fertility to the snow covered land. And a rusa, a lewdly mischievous pantomine horse galloped the streets to bring virility to the farmers' stallions, bulls, rams and boars.

From Haloze and Cirkovce the 'log-haulers' pulled a fresh cut tree, the male spirit, and stopped to saw of rings of trunk to present to girls on the pavement as a sigh that they should get married as soon as possible. The unmarried women watching were prepared; all carried hand-embroidered handkerchiefs to give to their favourite koranti, who collected them in great flowing 'cuffs' tied to their wrists.

"No chickens, this year." I was told sadly. The picek and kura - the cock and hens - usually children from certain villages, had defected to a rival carnival in other region, affronting Ptuj's pride. But in return the 'girl catchers' of Slovenska Bistrica had arrived. Young men in lip-stick smeared shirts pulling a cart dressed in evergreen branches.

"Every Tuesday in February we go out in our town to catch girls to kiss - so, this is Sunday in Ptuj, but here we are." Ales broke off in mid-explanation to dive into the crowd, reappearing clasping a handkerchief waving teenage girl, and yoking her into the cart's rope traces. On the cart two mannequins, a bride and groom, turned in a slow dance, whilst a man dressed as a hag beat the legs of the man figure with a stick.

"They're the couple showing the good things to look forward to in marriage," ALes laughed, "but all I want is kisses," His team members broke into song echoing his sentiments.

Above the sound of the church bells, and the clanging of the kurenti cowbells, and the whip cracking, there was the cacophony of competing accordions. "Welcome to heaven, here's your harp; welcome to hell, here's your accordion," someone muttered, nursing a hangover. Sasa, one of a trio of girl devils I'd met the night before, watched the passing demons, ploughmen, cartoon horses, and the brawling knots of Womble warrior koranti collecting handkerchiefs from the crowd. "Carnival is the time of marrying and kissing, and Lent is the time of fasting - that's when life goes back to normal.

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