Novobanské reflexie

Photographs and postcards make it possible to compare Nová Baňa at the end of the nineteenth century with its later transformations. The selection comes from the museum's photographic archive. Alongside streets and squares, the images show churches, a synagogue, a former miners' hospital and the Holy Trinity column. They record the religious, welfare and public functions of the same town.

The town square underwent particularly extensive changes. It was redeveloped during the wartime Slovak state, in the 1950s and again in the 1980s. Rather than a single old view, the collection offers a sequence of images documenting successive stages in the transformation of urban space.

Wartime photographers included the then mayor, Aurel Cibulka, and Alexander Várady. Várady's photographs documented the demolition of a Renaissance defensive building and the construction of the municipal building. Such an image records a particular stage of work, not merely a traveller's souvenir. Comparing the buildings and open spaces reveals the changes at the heart of this collection.