Miners believed in supernatural beings that they did not want to anger under any circumstances.
That is why they were not allowed to kill any living thing in the mine, or to shout or whistle. Nor would anyone go down the mine without a prayer. To this day, miners greet each other with ‘Zdar Boh!’ (‘Good luck!’). The academic traditions of the Mining Academy are just as unique, the best known being the Salamander Parade. The winding procession recalls the movement of a salamander, the symbol of Banská Štiavnica. Parades were held when a professor or student died, but also to welcome first-year students. The freshmen were admitted into the mining fraternity through the ‘šachtág’ (a gathering with strict rules for keeping order and high spirits – the so-called beer law) and the ‘leap over the leather’. The old ‘štyavnyčtyna’ dialect grew out of borrowed German words, and people here always spoke and wrote it with hard consonants. Štyavnycký Náco, whose statue you can see on the upper Trotuár, depicts a mischievous, good-natured and cheerful miner who lives on in local folk tales to this day.
