Summit of Kriváň, High Tatras
16 August 1841: 25-year-old Ľudovít Štúr, his Greek pupil Prince Aristarchos and a party of Liptov patriots, women among them, reach the crooked summit of Kriváň, the first recorded ascent with women. The climb made the mountain a symbol of the Slovak nation and began the national ascents still held every August.
- Year
- 1841
- Where
- Liptov, High Tatras · SK
- Era
- Industrial
- Coordinates
- 49.163, 19.999
The moment
The crooked mountain
Kriváň is not the highest peak of the High Tatras. Its fame comes from its shape: the summit, 2,494.7 metres high, bends to one side, and the name comes from the root kriv-, "crooked".
It had been climbed long before 1841. The first recorded ascent was made on 4 August 1773 by Andreas Jonas Czirbes, a Lutheran pastor from Spišská Nová Ves.
A king's memorial on the summit
In 1840 King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony climbed Kriváň, and Hungarian monarchists raised a memorial to his ascent on the top. By Slovak accounts it was a cast-iron pyramid about two and a half metres high on a granite base, crowned with a gilded model of the Saxon royal crown, and it was unveiled only twelve days before Štúr's party arrived.
Its exact form and date rest on those Slovak accounts. What is certain is that the memorial became a target. Slovak patriots objected to an inscription that left them out, and in 1861 its crown was thrown down.
Women on the summit
On 16 August 1841 the 25-year-old Ľudovít Štúr reached the summit with his Greek pupil, Prince Aristarchos, and a party of Liptov patriots. Women were among them, and it is the first recorded ascent of Kriváň with women.
The rest of the party is less certain. Sources disagree on which other leaders of the national movement came along, naming either Jozef Miloslav Hurban or Michal Miloslav Hodža, and neither the weather nor the party's clothing is recorded.
Štúr was already the leader of a generation. In 1836 he had taken students to the ruins of Devín to swear loyalty to the national cause, and two years after Kriváň, in July 1843, he and his colleagues agreed at Hlboké on the new standard of written Slovak.
Why the mountain is on the coins
Kriváň is Slovakia's national mountain. In 2005 a country-wide vote chose it as one of the designs for Slovakia's euro coins, and it appeared on them when the country adopted the euro.
Every August a national ascent climbs it. The organised event began in 1955, first to commemorate the uprising of 1944, and is now run by the Slovak Tourist Club, Matica slovenská and local towns, with summit access limited to 300 people a day.
Slovaks trace the tradition further back, to Štúr's climb of 1841. The ascent turned a crooked peak above the Liptov basin into a symbol of the nation, and the memorial raised to a Saxon king was not the one that lasted.
Sources
Further reading
Tagged
- slovakia
- tatras
- krivan
- national-revival
- stur
- mountains
- 19th-century
- liptov
Published
See also
1869
Court Opera on the Ringstraße, Vienna
On the evening of 25 May 1869 Emperor Franz Joseph opens the new Court Opera, the first great public building on Vienna's Ringstraße, with Mozart's Don Giovanni sung in German. Neither of its architects lives to see the night: both died in 1868, after Viennese mockery of the 'sunken box'.
1897
Giant Ferris Wheel, Prater, Vienna
On 3 July 1897, a hot summer day, Vienna's Giant Ferris Wheel opens in the Prater, built by English engineers for the jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph's 50 years on the throne. Its 30 cabins turn up to 64.75 m above the canals of the 'Venice in Vienna' pleasure park, making it one of the largest wheels in the world; a ride costs a gulden.
1810
Theresienwiese, Munich
On 17 October 1810 a horse race on a meadow outside Munich crowns the celebrations for the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen; 50,000 spectators watch from the hillside, and the field is named Theresienwiese after the bride. Repeated the next year, the race becomes the Oktoberfest.