Kremnica gold

The mint here has been striking coins since the 1320s and has never stopped. It is the oldest still working anywhere in the world.

Kremnica sits in central Slovakia, a well-preserved medieval town of around 5,300 people built directly above the gold mines that paid for it. The name comes from the Slovak kremen, meaning quartz.

Gold was the entire point. The Kremnica Mountains held abundant ore, and the first evidence of sub-surface mining here reaches back to the 9th century. After the Mongol invasion of the 13th century emptied the region, Hungarian kings invited Carpathian German colonists in to replenish the population, and their technology and knowledge restarted the workings. In 1328 King Charles I of Hungary, known also as Charles Robert, granted the town its royal privileges, and the Slovak tourist board notes that the special one was the right of coinage.

The mint was already running by then. Mint masters were invited from Kutna Hora in Bohemia, and the first Old Hungarian groschen were struck in 1329. From 1335 came golden florins and then the famous Kremnica ducats, praised across Europe for their quality and their consistently high gold purity and used as an international means of payment. It became the most important mint in the Kingdom of Hungary, then the only one, and carried on through Czechoslovakia into modern Slovakia. The town's nickname was Golden Kremnica.

Power followed the money. In 1331 Kremnica became the seat of the Chamber Count, head of the kingdom's most important mining and minting chamber, who administered every mine and mint across twelve counties. By the end of the 14th century the town was capital of the mining towns of central Upper Hungary, and in the 15th it was the second most important city in the whole kingdom, its deputies seated second in the Hungarian Diet behind only Buda. Mining and coining peaked in those two centuries. The population reached 10,000 in the 1840s and is about half that now.

Come in summer if you can. The town fills up for Kremnicke gagy, a festival of humour and satire, and the church at nearby Kremnicke Bane marks a claimed geographic centre of Europe.