Banská Štiavnica

We ventured into Central Slovakia for the first time, to Banská Štiavnica.  After enduring a one-hour railway workers' strike, we took three trains to reach our destination.  A small town now south of Banska Bystrica and Zvolen, it has been focused on mining since the twelfth century, or perhaps longer.  That area of the Small Tatra range has, or has had, rich deposits of precious, semi-precious, or just plain useful minerals.  At one time the area boasted the richest deposits of gold and silver anywhere in Europe, and in the sixteenth century the Hapsburgs used the treasure pulled out of these mountains to finance the wars against the Turks, and to pay for the Counter-Reformation In Central Europe.  

We visited the old castle (a forttification born of a church, built between 1552 and 1559), toured an open-air mining museum, saw a wonderful mineral exhibit, and took in much of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural glory of the town.  When the area produced wealth, many Austro-Hungarian swells built palaces, and "like a fossil preserved in amber,  Banská Štiavnica is a town frozen in time."  Of course, it helps that the town became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1972 and the Norwegians came with their North Sea Oil money to finance restoration.  And--we ate well!  We'll let pictures tell the story.  Sunday morning dawned clear, so we hiked up to Calvary, a 1930s stations-of-the-cross exercise up a steep hill.  The stations and three chapels are pretty run down now, but the views are unparalleled. We only got a chance to walk around the New Castle (so named because it was built five years after the old one) before we had to head home.

But things got better...

The column on the right is for delays.

 

The Horse we came in and left on.

The Old Castle...

Let me in!

The basilica which became a fortress.

Beginning a BBQ, but we didn't get invited

An archer's view

Inside the chapel-turned-mortuary

A sixteenth-century fresco

The well could be drained and used for escape

 

The city

Hungary, including Slovakia

The Miners' Gild (crossed hammers)

A metal door is a metal door, unless it has seventeenth century graffiti

The wooden steps only date from 1772

Lilliput, or Wonderland?

Going to work in a mine

Young or old, hard hats are in

Follow the yellow hats....

but don't touch the wires!

The necessary room

Crossed hammers in the mine

Modern mining

Above ground

Wonderful food

This is goulash?

Climbing to Calvary early Sunday

Making progress....

Near the top

The view!

The Lutheran church

Inside

Some of the architecture...

A former hotel

A city building

A clock with a carillon

The "New" Castle

World Championship!!

So--it was World Championship hockey time in Slovakia for the past several weeks.  Countries' teams from around the world (o.k., Europe and North America) started out in Kosice in East Central Slovakia or here in Bratislava for the qualifying rounds, and then moved to Bratislava for the quarter- and semifinals and the finals.  If you follow hockey at all and can get past the Stanley Cup hype, you know that Finland won an all-Scandinavian final.

Unlike as in North American hockey, these guys come to play and not fight.  In fact, during the matches on TV there was some rough stuff but only one person got a double minor penalty (two consecutive 2-minute penalties).  By-and-large the games are competitive but not fistfights.  The same can be said for the fans.  They were happy, excited, sometimes rowdy, but never combative, at least that we saw.  It got crowded downtown and fans wore their team jerseys and consumed prodigious amounts of food and alcoholic beverages.

Mostly what the police had to do, from our point of view, was stand around and watch.  Yeah, there were incidents (the Danish team had all of their computers and things stolen from their hotel, for example), but mostly, everyone was very cheerful.

The city was duded up, of course.  Folks couldn't remove all of the graffiti or tear down all of the derelict buildings, but the city looked good.  Players "posed"

for fiberglass statues around town, many times placed around the appropriate embassy.  The French team, with a statue in front of the French embassy, alas did not make it out of Kosice, but the young USA team (with the USA statue in front of the Embassy of the United States) did--for one game.  They lost to the Czechs 4-0 in the quarters. What team does the tie-dye guy represent?  We're really not sure.  But. as you can see from the pictures, the statues attracted attention! Even the performance art people got into the action, like the goalie.

Gooool!!!

?????

 The city managed to put an erector set something in the middle of the main square that we couldn't figure out.  It didn't even move, at least that we saw.  They put the Slovak, Canadian, American, and French flags on the main pillars.  None of those teams made it out of the quarterfinals.

 Even the guy in the top hat and tails in front of the fauncy Cafe Palffy managed to have a Team Slovakia scarf and a hockey stick. 

But, as you can see, the bottom line (yes, the lady has her hand on the statue's but, by it's bottom line) is that now a few more people know that Slovakia is not Slovenia.  Slovakia beat Slovenia and the Danes, but lost to the big teams and didn't make the second round.  The Slovenes lost to everybody, but their fans, at least the ones we saw, were rowdy and good-hearted.  Although we didn't get to a match in person, we got to engage in what we like best--people watching!