The Gavurky reserve features ancient oaks. (source: Sme - Ján Krošlák)
PUPILS and teachers at the Dobrá Niva elementary school in Zvolen District wrote a book titled Gavurky which won first prize in the Slovak competition for the most beautiful book and promotional document about Slovakia in 2009. The book describes a unique natural reserve which contains several hundred oak trees from 200 to 400 years old. It won in the competition category of books about regions.
“Gavurky is a place where mainly foreign natural scientists – and connoisseurs of flora and fauna – have come in recent years, but many Slovaks did not know anything about it,” the school’s head, Mária Slosiariková, told the TASR newswire. One of the book’s aims was to at least partially change this. Apart from these precious oaks – the biggest ones have trunk diameters of more than six metres – several rare plants and many animals can be found on the 57-hectare reserve.
The school received a grant of €3,300 from the Education Ministry to publish the book. Five hundred copies were published last summer and the school is offering it to other schools in the region as a supplement to biology textbooks. While developing the book the pupils and teachers were aided by scientists from the Institute of Forest Ecology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Zvolen and historians from Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica. Part of the book features drawings and essays by the pupils, inspired by their visits to Gavurky.
