The name is derived from Proto-Slavicstǫpa (Slovak: stupa) - a wooden bowl carved from a tree trunk, but also the name of various crushing and pressing tools.[5]
The town is located in the Záhorie lowland, under the Little Carpathians, around 15 km (9 mi) north of Bratislava at an altitude of 182 metres. It has 15, 095 inhabitants as of 2021 and has a land area of 67.17 km2 (26 sq mi). Apart from the core part of the city, Mást (German: Maaßt, Hungarian: Mászt), located just south of the core part of the city, is another part of Stupava. It has been initially a separate village with ethnic Croatian majority, which was formally annexed by Stupava in 1953.[6]
However, traces of habitation go back to the Bronze Age, and the first known inhabitants were the Celts. The Romans built a military station as a part of the near Limes Romanus on the Danube. The first written mention about the town was in 1269 in a document of the King Béla IV under name Ztumpa. In the second half of the 13th century the now-ruined Pajštún Castle in the Little Carpathians was built. It was developing mainly as an agricultural and trading settlement. The name of the town comes from the pressing mills called stupa on the Stupavský potok brook, which were used for extracting oil from flax and hemp.
According to the 2021 census, the town had 12 595 inhabitants. 96.7% of inhabitants were Slovaks, 1% Czechs and 0.5% Hungarians.[7] The religious makeup was 70.4% Roman Catholics, 19.5% people with no religious affiliation and 2% Lutherans.[7]
^Závodný, Andrej (2010). "Vodné názvy slovenskej časti Pomoravia". VARIA XVII(PDF) (in Slovak). Ružomberok: Katolícka univerzita v Ružomberku – Filozofická fakulta, Slovenská jazykovedná spoločnosť pri SAV. p. 778. ISBN978-80-8084-550-6.
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Media related to Stupava at Wikimedia Commons
