Places to visit

Museum of Handmade Paper Production

The Museum of Handmade Paper Production is a unique museum, where visitors can learn a lot about the history of handmade paper production.

It is situated in the town of Ludrová, approximately 7 km away from the centre of Ružomberok.

Visitors can not only learn about how paper was made in the past without the use of modern machinery, but they can also try making their own paper. The museum is situated in a wooden house, in the vicinity of which there is also a frequently visited mineral spring.

Located in the larger room on the ground floor is the equipment used for paper production. The most important machine is the hollander beater: it is a specially designed machine, which serves for milling of the raw materials needed for paper production. There is also a wooden vat, which is filled with water, as well as a press, sieves and a drying rack. There is a sketch displayed on the wall, in which you can learn interesting facts about the history of paper production.

Upstairs, there is a lounge room, which will be available mainly to the younger visitors during school trips.

The tradition of paper production in Slovakia goes back almost 500 years. Over the time, it has changed significantly, but the basis remains the same. Since the beginnings, it has been about producing a compact sheet from fibres of vegetable origin by creating felt material using the sieve and by separation of water from the sheet of paper. In handmade production, the paper maker used small sieves to form a sheet of paper. In today’s machine production, sheets of paper are made smoothly on an infinite sieve.

Almost 500 years have passed since the establishment of the first manual paper mill in Slovakia. 105 manual paper mills were built during that period. The earliest records of paper production come from 1530. The first paper mill about which there are a lot of preserved archival documents and records is the one in Liptovský Michal, which was founded in the period of 1596 – 1606. The Ružomberok’s paper mill was established in the southern part of the town’s territory, in the neighbourhood of Biely Potok district. It was situated in the area of Jazierce, where the Hlboká Valley falls into the valley of the Revúca River, at the place of a former iron plant. It probably existed already at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries.