12^th Visegrad Symposium on Biomolecular Interactions

Venue

The conference will be held in the Magnólia Hotel in Piešťany. Piešťany is small town (cca. 28 000 inhabitants) located in western part of Slovakia. It is the biggest and best known spa town in Slovakia.

The first human settlement in the area is dated to the prehistoric times, about 80,000 years ago. A small female statue representing female fertility called Venus of Moravany was found in the nearby village Moravany nad Váhom. It is made of mammoth ivory and is dated to 22,800 BC. It currently resides in the Bratislava Castle museum.

Piešťany was first mentioned in written records in 1113 (under the name Pescan). The medicinal springs were already popular in the Middle Ages. They were visited by the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus. The first book mentioning the Piešťany springs was De admirandis Hungariae aquis hypomnemation (About the Miraculous Waters of the Hungarian Monarchy) by Georgius Wernher, published in 1549 in Basel. In the 16th century, the Piešťany spa was also mentioned by two prominent physicians, Johann Crato de Crafheim (who served to several Holy Roman Emperors) and Andrea Baccius Elpidianus (a personal surgeon of the Pope). The first monography (Schediasma de Thermis Postheinsibus by Ján Justus Torkoš was published in 1745. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, Piešťany also suffered from Turkish raids and anti-Habsburg uprisings.

Throughout the centuries Piešťany was owned by several noble families; the last of them, the Erdődys, owned the area from 1720 to 1848, and the spa until 1940. The Erdődy family built the first spa buildings in 1778. They were damaged by a destructive flood in 1813. In 1820 the spa buildings were expanded and remodeled in neo-classical style and named Napoleon spa.

Piešťany is situated in the western part of Slovakia, in the valley of the Váh river, at an elevation of 162 metres. The Považský Inovec mountains form the eastern boundary of this part of the Váh valley. The highest hill of these mountains, Inovec 1,042 m, is about 25 km north of the town. The hills immediately east of the town (10 km away) reach a height of about 700 m. On the western side, the valley boundary is formed by the Little Carpathians, which are somewhat lower and further away from the town. The valley is open to the south, and thus has a warm and sunny temperate climate.

Major cultural attractions in Piešťany:

Because of frequent floods in the past, most buildings are dated to the 19th and 20th century.

Exception:

• Ruins of a medieval monastery, 13^th century
• Napoleon Spa, constructed 1822 - 1862
• Catholic church, form the same era as Spa
• Kolonádový most (The Colonnade Bridge), constructed 1930–33