ILAVA / Illava / Illau castle was called Leva in the beginning and when it first emerged in history it was owned by the oligarch Máté Csák. It was granted a town charter of immunity by King Charles Robert I of Anjou (1308-1342) and was commanded by castellans (Lat. castellani = royal officers). Under Leopold I of Habsburg (1657-1705) it was a demesne of the Crown. The castle and its appurtenances were then purchased by Count Bräuner for 80,000 fls. He only used the lower castle as a residence and had the upper castle rebuilt as a friary. In 1692 he moved Trinitarian monks (Ordo Sanctissimae Trinitatis redemptionis captivorum) to the friary, which thus became the first house of the Order in Hungary. In 1855 the Viennese administration purchased the upper castle from the family and made it into a state-run prison. Ilava market town lies in the vicinity of the castle and had ca. 1000 Slovak inhabitants in the 1850s. Joseph Adalbert Krickel travelled through the Váh valley and remarks in his book that the beer brewed in Ilava was even better than the one that could have been drunk in Bavaria.

Bibliography: Fekete Nagy, Illava, Kerekes, Krickel, Lovcsányi, Mednyánszky 1844, Mednyánszky 1981, Pázmány, Rupp

VÁH / Vág / Waag. A left-side tributary of the Danube, the Váh has two headstreams. The Biely Váh (White Váh) rises in the Zelené pleso Kriváňske in the High Tatras and takes on the waters of the Mlynica stream; the Čierny Váh (Black Váh) takes its source in the Nízke Tatry at Král'ova hol'a. The united headstreams become the Váh and are joined by the Belá river at Liptovský Hrádok. The river then describes arcs to the west in the Liptovská kotlina and takes on the Orava, then flows through the gorge at Kral'ovany, the Turčianska kotlina, the Malá Fatra gorge, and the breathtaking Strečno gorge to reach Žilina. There it bends southwest, and reaches the plains at Trenčín, to bend southwards again. It enters the Little Danube, and is then named Váh-Danube, takes on the Nitra river, and finally enters the Danube at Komárno. The Váh stretches over 375 km. It has always been an important natural transportation route. Its lower course is navigable but its rapid and steeply falling upper course was also used for flotage and rafting. Although there had been plans for the regulation of its course, work on it began only in the late 19th century. Since then numerous training banks and storage lakes have been constructed always with an eye to the needs of agriculture, flood-prevention, navigation and industrial energy production. It is worth noting that the look of the Váh valley has been changed to a great extent since the time it was depicted by Thomas Ender.

Bibliography: Bolgár, Konkoly, Lovcsányi, Pechány