Štefan Sališ and his daughter. (source: Romana Vicianová)
Štefan Sališ is an amateur history enthusiast and has been contributing to uncovering the past of the Liptov region for years.
He always walks around the villages of Martinček, Likavka and Lisková, northern Slovakia, with his eyes wide open, usually finding a talisman from ancient times that he takes back home.
A 50 million-year-old fossil
Even today, one can find quite a few traces of ancient times on the surface of the earth. According to Sališ, the structure of the long-gone sea that used to cover the area near Ružomberok where he currently lives was varied.
He acquired his love of history from his uncle, with whom they discovered a Late Stone Age burial site in the Liskovská cave.
The two also found a rare fossil. They think that workers who were removing wood from the nearby mountain made it appear on the ground.
(source: Romana Vicianová)
"We thought it was a fungi growing on a tree, because its shape and size resembled one," he cites the rare discovery, showing how it opened in the sea. "What you're holding in your hands is 50 million years old."
The 20-centimetre oyster is nicely shaped and resembles a freshwater pearl mussel.
As a boy, Štefan walked in the fields and found many historical objects, which he handed over to the Liptov Museum. "The experts taught me how to restore objects and various other secrets," he says.
A skull in a cave
Štefan Sališ is a member of a local spelunking club and as such he often visited the cave near the village of Lisková. A thin crooked path, darkness, mud, but also a mystery. That's how he describes the cave, a central place of various legends that are told to this day.
So far, experts have not been able to clarify how the cave formed. They believe that the cave was created by the waters of the river Váh, specifically a side arm entering the underground. People have been hiding in caves such as this since prehistoric times, and often got lost because they didn't know the way back.
According to Sališ, the Liskovská cave is typical in that many human remains were found in it, and it also served as a burial ground. In 1997, at the beginning of their adventurous journey, Štefan and his uncle Ľudovít had no idea what they would encounter in the cave.
"At the end of the narrow crawl, a human skull was staring at me. Next to it, we found shards, other bones, a burial site and a copper fragment of jewelry," Sališ described.
(source: Archive of Š. Sališ)
These were the five thousand year old bones of people from the Late Stone Age, a rock tomb where the dead were purposefully buried.
"I gave both the skull and the copper fragment to the Liptov Museum. For the archaeologists it was a small miracle that something like that was found there. A quick archaeological investigation began at the site," the history enthusiast describes.
©My Liptov
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