Zlatno (Poltár)

Zlatno is a municipality in the southern central Slovakia of Slovakia with 472 inhabitants (December 31, 2019) and belongs to Okres Poltár , a circle of kraj Banskobystrický .

geography

The municipality is located in the western part of the Slovak Ore Mountains in the valley of the Poltarica brook . The center of the village lies at an altitude of 389 m nm and is ten kilometers from Poltár and 28 kilometers from Lučenec .

Due to the very small municipal area of only 35.8 hectares, Zlatno has an above-average population density of around 1300 inhabitants per km².

The only neighboring municipality is České Brezovo , which surrounds the municipality on all sides; thus Zlatno is an enclave in the municipality of České Brezovo.

history

Zlatno only became an independent municipality on May 1, 1998 when it was separated from the České Brezovo municipality.

The settlement, originally inhabited by woodcutters, was transformed in the 19th century into a location for glass production, the history of which began in the village in 1833. In 1836 Johann Georg Zahn built a glass factory to replace an older glassworks in nearby Vlkov, the location of which was becoming increasingly unfavorable in view of the supply of raw materials. The new glass factory specialized in sheet glass, packaging and utility glass, bottles, cylinders for kerosene lamps and the like. The chemist Leo Pantocsek , who immigrated from Poland in 1848 , made a major contribution to the modernization of the glass factory. Among other things, artificial iris coatings made of bismuth oxide were used in production in 1856. This is one of the reasons why the glass factory's products were successful at the world exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1889 (gold medal) and were exported to Great Britain and the United States. When JG Zahn sold the factory in 1880, there were about 80 employees.

The construction of the Lučenec – Utekáč railway , which reached Zlatno in 1908 and enabled the delivery of high-quality raw materials, helped further development . During the First World War, operations were not stopped, but only partially restricted; However, this changed after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the annexation of Slovakia into the newly formed Czechoslovakia . Due to high debt and a lack of orders, operations were interrupted between 1932 and 1936 and again between 1938 and 1940. Shortly after restarting operations, the glass factory had 230 employees. Further modernizations were undertaken in the late 1950s and 1975.

After the Velvet Revolution the economic situation of the glass factory deteriorated again and after a long downfall, operations had to be stopped in August 2003. Since then there has not been a restart. The coat of arms reminds of the glass production, which shows a glass beaker held by a hand with a sun above it on a red field (symbolizes the name of the community, as the Slovak word zlato means gold in German ).

population

According to the 2011 census, 490 inhabitants lived in Zlatno, of whom 436 were Slovaks, three Magyars, two Ukrainians and one Roma and one Czech each; two residents belonged to a different ethnic group. 45 residents gave no information in this regard. 248 residents supported the Roman Catholic Church, 25 residents the Evangelical Church AB, seven residents the Evangelical Methodist Church, five residents the Orthodox Church, four residents the Jehovah's Witnesses and one resident of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church. 146 inhabitants were without religious denomination and the denomination of 54 inhabitants was not determined.