by DoDo
Sun Dec 11th, 2005 at 10:45:30 AM EST
Update [2006-10-29 14:7:7 by DoDo]: With the old pictures gone from the webhost, I reloaded them -- and some more. Also see the diary with pictures of next year's visit.
Looking from the castle at the Kalvária hill in Banská Štiavnica (Hungarian: Selmecbánya, German: Schemnitz), on a photo I made two months ago.
Situated in the mountains with no main roads across it, and thus not many tourists visiting, this onetime gold-mining town in Central Slovakia retained its sleepy charm (this photo shows very little of its beauties). Should you visit, I highly recommend the second half of October - a regular sunny and relatively warm period, which makes leaves glow in all kinds of colors.
What nice places have you seen recently?
As I partially descend from this area, each year there is a joint family visit to the cemeteries, one or two weeks before All Saints' Day, capitalising on this special climate. (I made the photo on someone else's machine, and only now got the files.) This year we came a little earlier than usual, so you only see the beginning of the autumn color explosion.
We finish the cemeteries in Bzovík (Hungarian: Bozók). (A grand-grandmother is buried in the nearby village. She gave birth to my grandfather unmarried, because the estranged first wife of my grand-grandfather didn't want to divorce - but, being the village notary, my grand-grandfather was tricky: he simply changed both his own surname - from his Czech father - and that of her - from a German ancestor - to the same Hungarian surname... which I inherited.) In Bzovík, we then have the traditional lunch at the nearby abandoned castle:
From the previously pictured tower, look towards the West, at the Štiavnické vrchy (Selmeci-hegység) mountain chain, with its highest peak, the 1009 m high Sitno (Hungarian: Szitnya):
Then comes the also traditional afternoon excursion, which this time targeted Banská Štiavnica, more narrowly its Old Castle.
Some words on the town's history:
Gold mining goes back at least to the Celts here. But, in the Hungarian Kingdom that was established in the Carpathian Basin towards the end of the great migrations, the nomadic-in-origin Magyar tribes only had goldsmiths, and neither them nor the conquered locals had miners.
So to develop natural riches, Hungarian kings invited Germans, to found miners' cities from what is now Slovakia to Transsylvania. They were locally called Saxons (tough most of them came from Western and Southwestern Germany). These cities, capitalising from their relative autonomy and trade, grew rather rich, especially after the Ottoman Empire's expansion and Habsburg-led counter-campaigns destroyed much of the central and Southern parts of the onetime kingdom (I wrote a diary on this). But they also had their fair share of destruction during the turbulences of Central European history - from Mongols to world wars. Still, in this town a lot of beauty remained -- here we look from the Old Castle to the New Castle:
Like in all other Slovakian towns, after WWI, and even more so after WWII, there have been massive directly and indirectly forced relocations of ethnic Germans, and to a lesser part ethnic Hungarians - while Slovakians (and Gypsies) moved in from villages.
Not as fast as say in Prague, after the fall of communism, an all-out restoration programme started in the city - freeing walls from hundred years of soot.
A parting shot: on the way home in nearby Svätý Anton (Hungarian: Szentantal, German: Sankt Anton in der Au), the castle is illuminated by the last bit of sunshine falling into the valley:
The last aristocratic inhabitant was the Tsar of Bulgaria. Today it has a very rich exhibition, including a hunters' exhibition.
