History of Levice
Many archeological finds, such as the outlines of dwellings, grave pits, stone and bone tools, shards of burnt clay vessels, testify to the fact that the surroundings of Levíce were continuously inhabited from the Neolithic to the present day.
TeMuseum_2.jpg More than 6000 years ago in the Neolithic (Late Stone Age), the area around today's Levice was inhabited by peasant-shepherd people, after whom in 1950 in Levické Dolné lúky fragments of the so-called volute ceramics of the iron type, during the construction of ponds. The clay idol under Vápnik, found in 1952 during surface harvesting on a plow tree together with a number of fluted ceramics, comes from the following late Stone Age. The idol is actually a stylized sculpture of a woman, decorated with engraved lines on the front.
Around 700 BC. Skýto-Trákovia came to us from the South Russian steppes, skilled masters in the production of iron objects, which we include in the so-called Hallstatt period. They were the first people in our territory, whom we know by name. After them, around 300 BC. the Celts came to our territory, whose monuments we include in the circle of so-called La Tène culture. They were farmers, skilled craftsmen and merchants, they were the first in our territory to use metal coins as currency. From this period comes a rare coin find, discovered in 1930 in Levice na Nova osada, in a vertically grooved clay vessel, as well as one of the largest Celtic cemeteries with rich finds, which was discovered during the construction of the Kaufland shopping center in 2005.
At the turn of the century, the Germanic tribes of the Quaids and Marcomanni penetrated to us from the northwest, and their Roman neighbor became the Roman Empire. In the fourth century, the power of the Roman Empire declined and the pressure of the Huns, who pushed west from Central Asia to the Carpathian Basin, began to increase. This movement has avalanche spread to the general migration of nations. Since the end of the 5th century, we have been meeting the first tribes of ancient Slavs in our territory - settled farmers. They soon became addicted to the Avars, against whom they often rebelled. After heavy fighting in the 7th century, the power of the Avars gradually disappeared and independent Slavic principalities were established on its ruins.
After a short period of the Great Moravian Empire in the 9th century, weakened by domestic strife and destroyed by Hungarian invasions, our territory came under their control at the beginning of the 10th century, when the Hungarians settled permanently, especially in the lowlands of the Carpathian Basin.
The first written mention of Levice dates from 1156 and it says that the Archbishop of Esztergom, Martirius, consecrated the church of St. Martin in the village of Bratka. A parish was established there, to which the villages "Villa Leua" and Vitk were attached. The village of Leua (Levice) at that time lay east of the center of today's Levice, somewhere at the foot of a vineyard hill, which we still call Staré Levice.
Levice Castle was built at the end of the 13th century, when the significance of the nearby Tekov Castle, plundered by the Tatars, declined. A strategically well-protected place at the end of the promontory of the Štiavnica Mountains was chosen for its construction, from where there was an excellent view and the marshy terrain made it difficult to access it. The fortress was built to protect Central Slovak mining towns. Under the protection of the castle in the 14th century. the village "Veľké" or "Nové Levice" was established, which are the predecessors of today's town Levice.
The engraving of the 150-year-old Turkish occupation of Hungary, which began in the 16th century, has economically weakened the city, which has become even more dependent on the castle. Levice Castle, then royal, was ranked among the 15 most important anti-Turkish defensive fortresses. In the middle of the 17th century, the raids of the Turks intensified. When the captain of the castle saw the enormous superiority of the enemy, in early November 1663 he handed over the city to the Turks without a fight. The rule of the Turks in Levice lasted only 224 days, when on June 12, 1664 they managed to expel them from the town by an unexpected attack. After the end of the wars with the Turks, Levice Castle lost the importance of the border fortifications and in In 1699 it was abolished by an official order as a fortress.
Frequent fires used to be a great disaster for Levice. Fire in In 1696 they destroyed almost the entire city. By the time of the Rákoczi Uprising (1703 - 1711), the castle was already in a very bad condition. So that the enemies could not use the castle militarily, the insurgents decided to destroy the castle before leaving. The fortress was never rebuilt and ceased to have military value. In r. In 1715 there were 195 taxpayers in the town, of which 43 were craftsmen.
In the second half of the 18th century. Levice greatly expanded, became the center of the agricultural area of southern Pohronie and the center of trade and craft production in guilds. The most well-known and most famous for their products were the guilds of bootmakers, shoemakers and buttonmakers. In the 19th century. Small businesses gradually grew, and so did trade, concentrated with Jewish entrepreneurs. The wealthiest families of the Leidenfrost and Schöeller families invested mainly in farms but also in other businesses; they built a distillery with a refinery, a steam mill, a brickyard, expanded the breeding of breeding cattle and had new vineyards planted. In 1873, Levice had 6,000 inhabitants.
Folk education in Levice demonstrably existed as early as the 16th century, and secondary education began to develop in the 19th century. In 1815 the Piarist Grammar School in Levice was founded and in 1870 the State Teacher Training Institute. Both schools still exist today. In 1870, the current old Levice barracks were also built, and in 1880 the Levice newspaper - the weekly Bars (Tekov) - began to be published regularly.
Cultural and intellectual life in the city significantly supported the establishment of the Tekovsky Museum in 1926, originally a town museum under the administration of the town hall and in the years after the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic the Slovak and Hungarian public town library, the predecessor of today's Tekovska Library in Levice.
During the period of the 1st Czechoslovak Republic in the first half of the 20th century, the architectural development of the city took place. In r. In 1933, a tobacco factory was built. In the 1950s, Levice found itself in great housing distress due to a significant influx of people from the countryside to the city. In 1961, Levice had 13744 inhabitants, at that time it became the district town of the largest district in Slovakia. By the end of the 1980s, the population had grown to 37,500.
In 1976, the originally independent villages of Kalinčiakovo and Malý Kiar were administratively annexed to Levice, and in 1986 the villages of Čankov and Horša.
In 2016, the city commemorated the 860th anniversary of the first written mention of the city of Levice, and in the spirit of this anniversary was the whole year of 2016.
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