A Family, a Forest and an Iron FortuneRod, les a bohatstvo zo železa
Gemer was iron country. Ore came out of the hills, charcoal came out of the forests, and the hammer mills along the valleys turned both into money for the landowners who held them. The greatest of those landowners were the Andrássys, whose fortress seat stood a few kilometres away at Krásna Hôrka. Betliar was the other half of that arrangement — the comfortable half.Gemer bol krajinou železa. Z kopcov sa dobývala ruda, z lesov sa pálilo drevené uhlie a hámre v dolinách menili oboje na peniaze pre zemepánov, ktorým patrili. Najväčšími z nich boli Andrássyovci, ktorých pevnostné sídlo stálo pár kilometrov odtiaľto na Krásnej Hôrke. Betliar bol tou druhou — pohodlnou — polovicou tohto usporiadania.
A fortified manor stood on the site in the late Middle Ages, and the estate passed to the Andrássy family in the seventeenth century, by which time they were already established above the neighbouring valley. Through the eighteenth century they rebuilt it as a baroque country house; in the eighteen-eighties the family remade it again in the romantic, French-influenced manner of that decade — steeper roofs, a tower, decorative gables — and laid out the interiors much as you see them now.Na tomto mieste stál v neskorom stredoveku opevnený kaštieľ a v sedemnástom storočí prešlo panstvo na Andrássyovcov, ktorí už vtedy sídlili nad susednou dolinou. Počas osemnásteho storočia ho prestavali na barokové vidiecke sídlo; v osemdesiatych rokoch devätnásteho storočia ho rod pretvoril znovu — v romantickom duchu s francúzskymi vzormi: strmšie strechy, veža, ozdobné štíty — a interiéry usporiadal zhruba tak, ako ich vidíme dnes.
What makes Betliar unusual is what the family did with the house. They were travellers and collectors, and they brought back what they saw — hunting trophies from Africa and Asia, antiquities, weapons, natural-history curiosities — and they read: the library grew into one of the largest private collections of books in this part of the country. The house was never a museum in the family's time. It simply accumulated.Výnimočným robí Betliar to, čo s domom rodina urobila. Boli to cestovatelia a zberatelia — privážali si, čo videli: poľovnícke trofeje z Afriky a Ázie, starožitnosti, zbrane, prírodovedné kuriozity — a čítali: knižnica vyrástla na jednu z najväčších súkromných knižných zbierok v tejto časti krajiny. Za čias rodiny nebol dom nikdy múzeom. Jednoducho sa v ňom hromadilo.
