The village of Svätý Anton lies south of Banská Štiavnica under the majestic Sitno, shrouded in legends, and is part of the territory of the UNESCO site. This area is characterized by a number of cultural and historical monuments. The dominant feature of the village is the baroque-classical mansion, which was built on the site of a smaller fortified castle mentioned already in the 15th century. It belongs to the group of feudal settlements that arose during the great construction activity of the Hungarian military aristocracy, devoted to the Habsburgs, which became rich in the anti-Turkish resistance. Important European architects and artists (Giulio Ferrari, Ján Entzenhofer, Anton Schmidt and Dionýz Stanetti) participated in its construction, decoration and later reconstruction.
The mansion was built in the Baroque style as a two-winged building with arcades to an open courtyard with a Baroque stone fountain. In the middle of the 18th century, Count Andrej Koháry finished rebuilding the manor house into a sumptuous four-wing noble residence. The Kohárys lived in the castle until the last male member of the family, František Jozef Koháry, breathed his last. The new owners, the prominent German princely family of Coburg, significantly improved the manor house and were responsible for its current furnishings. They enriched the castle collections with, for example, a golden salon, the furniture of which was originally the property of the French queen Marie Antoinette. Its halls not only witnessed the visits of the Belgian princess Louise, but also the favorite holiday castle of the Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand I, who especially appreciated the extraordinary quality of the local hunting grounds. The Coburg family lost their property in 1945, after World War II, due to the so-called Beneš decree, which deprived the nobility of German nationality of any property on the territory of the Czechoslovak Republic. The mansion has been serving as a museum since 1962, currently it houses an art-historical and hunting exhibition. Thanks to the diversity of its collections preserved in an exceptionally complete and authentic form, in 1985 the entire area of the manor house in St. Anton was declared a National Cultural Monument.
Slovak
Czech
Hungarian
German
