H E R O O M UNDER THE SQUARE

The Room Under the Square is a novel in ten generations, set in Banská Stiavnica, the UNESCO mining town that stands inside a collapsed volcano. The town and its documented history are real. The family, the house, and the vault under the square are invented. Nine days after the fire of 2023, Marek Pilch goes down into the cold stone room beneath the square and opens a family box no one has ever fully read. From that night the novel moves back through eight centuries: Slavic valley people and Tyrolean miners in the twelfth century, the mining charter of 1328, Reformation and counter-reformation, the powder blast of 1627, the tajchy lakes and the first mining academy in the world, languages spoken across one counter, the deportations of 1944, the academy leaving by train in 1919, the last shift in 2001. The book is not about heroes. It is about what a place keeps when the record is incomplete: a trade, a habit, a room held without knowing what it is for. An afterword separates documented history from invention and names its sources.