Do dielne, Počúvadlo: woodcarving courses near Banská Štiavnica

From scissors to chisel

Počúvadlo is a typical farming village in the Štiavnica Mountains, a few kilometres from the mining town of Banská Štiavnica. Here, in the quiet among the hills, works the small workshop Do dielne (“To the workshop”). Its owner Dušan Budinský ran a hairdresser’s in Bratislava for eight years, then swapped the city for wood: today he makes his own carving tools and teaches people to work with wood.

The workshop’s philosophy is simple: carving is not dry technique but a way to slow down. “When you touch wood, it is as if you came home for a moment,” says Dušan. The courses are designed both for people who have never held a chisel and for those who simply want a break from their phone. Everyone takes home something they made themselves — perhaps not perfect, but genuine.

Woodcarving is one of the oldest crafts of the Slovak village. Chip carving once decorated distaffs, chests, laundry beaters, shepherds’ spoons and ladles, so when you carve your first rosette you repeat the movements of generations of village craftsmen. Dušan combines this tradition with a modern approach: he explains safety, chooses comfortable wood and tools and adapts the pace of the lesson to the learner.

Why go

• Chip-carved ornament. The old technique of vruborez: rows of triangular wedge-shaped cuts form lines, rosettes and stars — classic Slovak folk ornament. The course takes 5–7 hours.
• Your own spoon. From an ordinary piece of wood, step by step with a carving knife and a hook knife, a functional spoon is born; the master teaches you to feel the direction of the grain. 2–4 hours.
• A wooden bow tie. A simple figurative piece to learn the basics of three-dimensional carving, 2–4 hours.
• Joinery and restoration. One-to-one courses: a wooden serving board, a stool or a mitred frame, as well as bringing grandma’s old chair or a flea-market find back to life.

What to buy and take home

Besides your course piece, you can buy a kit for carving kitchenware (a spoon, bowl or ladle) for €149, or a starter tool kit with an online chip-carving course for €99 — to carry on at home. For companies the master prepares craft team-building days.

Practical information

Address: Počúvadlo 51, 969 01 Počúvadlo. About 10 km by car from Banská Štiavnica towards Lake Počúvadlo; roughly 2.5 hours from Bratislava. The workshop is in the village itself, no mountain walking needed.

How to book (as of October 2026): courses are one-to-one, so date and length are agreed in advance: +421 908 727 577, [email protected]. The price is €25 per hour (plus materials for joinery courses). Besides Počúvadlo, Dušan regularly runs small courses in towns across Slovakia and sells online courses.

The courses suit adults and older children accompanied by parents; they take place indoors, so the weather does not matter. It makes a good “quiet” plan for a rainy day in the Štiavnica Mountains, when walks to the tajchy lakes or the peaks are cancelled.

Nearby

• Lake Počúvadlo — the largest of the tajchy, Banská Štiavnica’s artificial mining lakes, with summer swimming.
• Banská Štiavnica — a medieval mining town and UNESCO site with its Old and New Castles.
• Sitno — the highest peak of the Štiavnica Mountains, with a lookout tower.

Official website: dodielne.sk

Photos: dodielne.sk.