The houses at Brhlovce are cut into the hillside, not built on it. The rock is tuff — volcanic ash from the eruptions that raised the Štiavnica hills, hardened into stone soft enough to cut with a pick and firm enough to hold a roof over your head. Everything else in this village's history follows from that one property of the rock, and from the century and a half when this was raided country.Domy v Brhlovciach nie sú na svahu postavené, ale doň vytesané. Skala je tuf – sopečný popol zo Štiavnických vrchov, stvrdnutý na kameň, ktorý sa dá krájať krompáčom a pritom udrží strop nad hlavou. Celá história dediny vyplýva z tejto jedinej vlastnosti skaly – a z poldruha storočia, keď sa tadiaľto chodilo plieniť.
Drag the bar, or pick a year, to see what was happening here then.Potiahnite lištu alebo vyberte rok a uvidíte, čo sa tu vtedy dialo.
The Mongol invasionVpád Mongolov
The name first appears in writing in 1245, as Burfeu — four years after the Mongol invasion had swept through the kingdom. That is a fact about a document rather than about when people arrived, but the timing is not an accident: the kingdom that came out of 1241 was busy re-granting land, writing down who owned what and rebuilding in stone, so villages all over Slovakia get their first mention in exactly these decades. Two settlements grew here, Upper and Lower Brhlovce, and they stayed separate villages for the next seven hundred years. From 1506 the estate was held by the Kálnay family, whose name the older of the two carried in Hungarian.Meno dediny sa prvý raz objavuje v listine z roku 1245 v tvare Burfeu – štyri roky po tom, ako krajinou prešli Mongoli. Je to údaj o dokumente, nie o tom, odkedy tu ľudia žijú, ale to načasovanie nie je náhoda: Uhorsko po roku 1241 nanovo rozdávalo pôdu, zapisovalo, komu čo patrí, a stavalo z kameňa, takže množstvo slovenských dedín má prvú zmienku práve z týchto desaťročí. Vznikli tu dve osady, Horné a Dolné Brhlovce, a samostatnými dedinami zostali ďalších sedemsto rokov. Od roku 1506 držal panstvo rod Kálnayovcov, po ktorom mala staršia z osád svoje maďarské meno.
There are two reasons, and you need both. The first is the rock itself: tuff can be worked with hand tools, it stands up without props, it holds an even temperature all year — and it is free, so in a village with no money for timber or dressed stone a room dug into the hillside cost labour and nothing else. The second is fear. After the Ottomans took Esztergom in 1543 the frontier ran through this country, and after Nové Zámky fell in 1663 and became the seat of an Ottoman province, raiding parties worked the villages of Tekov county for cattle, grain and captives to sell. A house on open ground can be seen from the ridge; a room behind a rock face cannot. Local tradition says the first chambers were hiding places, and although nobody can date the first stroke of the pick, that explanation fits both the rock and the century.Dôvody sú dva a treba oba. Prvý je samotná skala: tuf sa dá opracovať ručným náradím, drží tvar bez podpery, po celý rok si udržiava rovnakú teplotu – a je zadarmo, takže v dedine, kde neboli peniaze na drevo ani na kamenárov, stála izba vylámaná do svahu iba prácu. Druhý dôvod je strach. Po páde Ostrihomu v roku 1543 viedla tadiaľto turecká hranica a po dobytí Nových Zámkov v roku 1663, z ktorých sa stalo sídlo osmanskej provincie, chodili do tekovských dedín lúpežné výpravy pre dobytok, obilie a zajatcov na predaj. Dom na voľnom priestranstve vidno z hrebeňa, izbu za skalnou stenou nie. Miestna tradícia hovorí, že prvé priestory boli úkryty, a hoci prvý úder krompáča nikto nevie datovať, tomuto vysvetleniu zodpovedá aj skala, aj storočie.
The fighting did not stop when the Ottomans did. The imperial victory outside Levice in 1664 and the recapture of Nové Zámky in 1685 ended the raiding, but the kuruc uprisings of Imrich Thököly and then Francis II Rákóczi (1703–11) marched armies across Tekov for another thirty years. And the castle at Levice, the fortress this village looked to, was not blown up by the Ottomans at all: the Habsburgs had it slighted after the Rákóczi uprising, exactly as they set about demolishing Nové Zámky from 1724. Whenever you are told that a Slovak castle was "destroyed by the Turks", the question worth asking is who actually pulled it down, and when.Boje sa neskončili s Turkami. Cisárske víťazstvo pri Leviciach v roku 1664 a znovudobytie Nových Zámkov v roku 1685 síce ukončili turecké výpravy, ale povstania Imricha Thökölyho a potom Františka II. Rákócziho (1703 – 1711) vodili cez Tekov vojská ďalších tridsať rokov. A levický hrad, na ktorý sa táto dedina obracala, nezbúrali Turci: dali ho zbúrať Habsburgovci po Rákócziho povstaní, presne tak, ako od roku 1724 rozoberali Nové Zámky. Keď vám teda niekto povie, že slovenský hrad „zničili Turci“, oplatí sa spýtať, kto ho v skutočnosti zbúral a kedy.
By the eighteenth century the rock chambers were not hiding places any more but homes. The scholar Matej Bel, who described the Kingdom of Hungary county by county, recorded the rock dwellings of this country in his great survey in 1742 — the first notice they got from the outside world. Families went on cutting: a room to live in, a cellar for the wine, a stable for the animals, a summer kitchen, chimneys driven up through the rock, and a masonry front with a window and a door built on where the cliff ran out.V 18. storočí už skalné priestory neboli úkrytmi, ale domovmi. Učenec Matej Bel, ktorý opisoval Uhorsko stolicu po stolici, spomenul skalné obydlia tohto kraja vo svojom veľkom diele v roku 1742 – je to ich prvá zmienka spoza dediny. Ľudia tesali ďalej: izbu na bývanie, pivnicu na víno, maštaľ pre dobytok, letnú kuchyňu, komíny prerazené hore cez skalu a murované priečelie s oknom a dverami tam, kde skalná stena končila.
The men of both villages were called up into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 like everybody else, and villages this size never got their numbers back from a war like that. In the middle of it, in 1917, fire destroyed the manor house in the village. Fire is the ordinary catastrophe of a Slovak village — thatch, timber, one bad night — and it is worth noticing that the one kind of dwelling here that cannot burn down is a room cut into rock.Mužov z oboch dedín odviedli v roku 1914 do rakúsko-uhorskej armády ako všade inde a malé dediny sa z takej vojny nikdy nevrátia celé. Uprostred nej, v roku 1917, zhorel v obci kaštieľ. Požiar je bežná katastrofa slovenskej dediny – slama, drevo, jedna zlá noc – a stojí za povšimnutie, že jediné obydlie, ktoré tu zhorieť nemôže, je izba vytesaná do skaly.
In 1918 the two villages became part of Czechoslovakia and the old county of Tekov was abolished; Levice, ten kilometres down the road, became the district town. For the people in the rock houses less changed than you would expect: they went on living in them, not as a curiosity but because that was the housing they had. Brhlovce stayed what it had always been — a small farming village on the edge of the volcanic hills.V roku 1918 sa obe dediny stali súčasťou Československa a stará Tekovská stolica zanikla; okresným mestom sa stali Levice, desať kilometrov po ceste. Pre ľudí v skalných domoch sa zmenilo menej, než by ste čakali: bývali v nich ďalej, nie ako v kuriozite, ale preto, že iné bývanie nemali. Brhlovce zostali tým, čím boli – malou roľníckou dedinou na kraji sopečných kopcov.
The First Vienna Award of 2 November 1938 handed Levice and the lowland below it to Hungary, and a state border was suddenly drawn across this district — the Slovak tax office fled from Levice up to Bátovce, the next village to the north, and sat there until 1940. The front reached the Hron in December 1944, and the fighting for the river went on into March 1945 before the war moved west.Prvá viedenská arbitráž z 2. novembra 1938 odovzdala Levice a nížinu pod nimi Maďarsku a cez tento okres zrazu viedla štátna hranica – berný úrad z Levíc evakuovali do Bátoviec, do najbližšej dediny na sever, a sídlil tam do roku 1940. V decembri 1944 sa front dostal k Hronu, o rieku sa bojovalo až do marca 1945 a až potom sa vojna pohla na západ.
In 1952 Upper and Lower Brhlovce were merged into a single village. The fields went into a collective farm, and as families built brick houses with electricity and dry walls, the rock rooms were left to the animals, used as cellars, walled up or filled in — they were, as people here said themselves, damp and low. That is how a way of living ends: nobody bans it, it simply loses. By the time anyone thought of protecting what was left, only a fraction of it was still there.V roku 1952 sa Horné a Dolné Brhlovce zlúčili do jednej obce. Polia prevzalo družstvo, a keď si ľudia postavili murované domy s elektrinou a suchými stenami, skalné izby ostali dobytku, slúžili ako pivnice, zamurovali sa alebo sa zasypali – boli, ako sa v dedine vravelo, vlhké a nízke. Takto sa končí spôsob bývania: nikto ho nezakáže, len prehrá. Kým niekomu napadlo chrániť to, čo zostalo, ostal z toho zlomok.
What survives is one lane of façades leaning against the cliff, protected as a reserve of folk architecture, with a single house — furnished as it was lived in — open as a museum. Slovakia has put the rock dwellings forward for the UNESCO World Heritage list. The rest are private property with families living in front of them, and that is the honest situation here: about three hundred people live in Brhlovce, and it is a village, not an open-air museum.Zostala jedna ulička priečelí opretých o skalnú stenu, vyhlásená za pamiatkovú rezerváciu ľudovej architektúry, a v nej jeden dom zariadený tak, ako sa v ňom žilo, sprístupnený ako múzeum. Skalné obydlia navrhlo Slovensko zapísať do zoznamu svetového dedičstva UNESCO. Ostatné sú súkromné a býva sa v nich – a to je na Brhlovciach podstatné: žije tu asi tristo ľudí a je to dedina, nie skanzen.
Sources consulted while researching this page. Follow them to read further — and to check us.Zdroje, z ktorých sme pri príprave tejto stránky vychádzali. Kliknite a čítajte ďalej — aj si nás overte.
Sixteen videos for this chapter.Šestnásť videí k tejto kapitole.