Holy Trinity Square, Banská Štiavnica

The third-largest town in Hungary

In 1782 Banská Štiavnica counted 23,192 inhabitants, around 40,000 with its suburbs. Only Pressburg and Debrecen were bigger in the whole Kingdom of Hungary.

It was a silver town, rich from the mines under its steep hills, and home to a pioneering Mining Academy. No single event is attached to the year; 1782 is simply a snapshot of the town near its peak.

A square built on mine waste

The main square, Holy Trinity Square, is long and sloping for a reason: it was laid out in the early sixteenth century on a heap of mine waste more than ten metres high.

In the middle of the slope stands the Holy Trinity plague column, built between 1759 and 1764 to a design by Dionýz Stanetti, the tallest of its kind in the country. Its saints include protectors against plague and the patrons of miners.

Downhill, the late-Gothic St Catherine's Church of 1488 to 1491 has heard sermons in Slovak since 1658. Above the roofs looms the Old Castle, a parish basilica turned into a fortress against the Ottomans between 1546 and 1559, and the square is lined with the houses of mining entrepreneurs, coats of arms over their gateways.

Where mining became a science

Samuel Mikovíny founded a mining school here in 1735, the first in Hungary. In 1763 the imperial treasury in Vienna turned it into an Academy of Mining, and in 1848 it became the Academy of Mining and Forestry, often called the first technical university in the world.

It had innovated long before. In 1627 gunpowder was used in a mine here, one of the first times anywhere, after Le Thillot in France.

Mining also reshaped the landscape. The tajchy, some sixty reservoirs linked by more than a hundred kilometres of channels, were built between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries to serve the mines; Jozef Karol Hell, Maximilian Hell and Mikovíny designed the eighteenth-century system.

Why Slovaks call it the silver town

Banská Štiavnica and its academy are Slovakia's proudest contribution to the history of science and industry. On 11 December 1993 the town and its technical monuments became one of the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The academy itself left after 1919, moving to Sopron in Hungary.

Its square still carries the shape of its history. On a market morning of the 1780s the slope filled with stalls, miners, academy students and village traders, around the Trinity column.

Sources

• Wikipedia (en): Banská Štiavnica
• banskastiavnica.virtualne.sk
• domalenka.sk
• Wikipedia (sk): Kostol svätej Kataríny (Banská Štiavnica)
• banskastiavnica.travel