the sixteenth century The Reformation, and a manor in the water meadowReformácia a kaštieľ v mokrej lúke

Luther's ideas reached the mining towns of central Slovakia within a few years of 1517, carried by German miners and merchants, and by the middle of the century most of Zvolen county — its nobles, its towns and its villages — was Lutheran. Hronsek belonged to noble families who went the same way as everyone around them. The village's oldest building dates from this period: a fortified manor with a fifteenth-century core, rebuilt in 1576, sitting low in the damp meadow and known ever since as the water manor. Being Lutheran here was completely unremarkable. It would take another hundred years for that to become dangerous.Lutherove myšlienky sa do stredoslovenských banských miest dostali pár rokov po roku 1517, priniesli ich nemeckí baníci a kupci, a do polovice storočia bola väčšina Zvolenskej stolice — jej zemianstvo, mestá aj dediny — evanjelická. Hronsek patril šľachtickým rodinám, ktoré sa vydali tou istou cestou ako všetci naokolo. Z tohto obdobia pochádza najstaršia stavba obce: opevnený kaštieľ s jadrom z pätnásteho storočia, prestavaný v roku 1576, nízko posadený vo vlhkej lúke a odvtedy známy ako vodný kaštieľ. Byť tu evanjelikom nebolo vtedy nič zvláštne. Trvalo ďalších sto rokov, kým sa to stalo nebezpečným.