JUNE 27 - Nothing much different to say about the first glimpses of Slovakia, just farmlands and rolling hills. Then the bus takes an odd detour to the west, past a truly vast Volkswagen assembly plant that seems to contain its own city of buildings and houses, to some canals paralleling the Danube that constitute the border between Slovakia and Austria.
Our time in Slovakia will be unfortunately short. The original plan was to spend a lot more time here, especially in the east, but the war in Ukraine altered my routing. Thus what we are doing is just the ‘rump’ of a failed plan.
We pass by the town of Devin, behind which I can see Devin Castle. This fortification sits on a prominent outcrop above the confluence of the Danube and Morava Rivers. Its obvious strategic value led to pre-historic settlement followed by construction of a fortress. It also had the dubious honor of sitting at the edge of the Iron Curtain, looking across to Austria and its bourgeois capitalists during the Soviet days.
Bratislava strikes me initially as quite a modern city. We disembark in the main bus terminal, which sits in the basement of a giant mall (like that in Wrocław). Take a tram to the 22nd Uprising Square where our 6th floor apartment has a good view of the city.
If you are old enough, you may remember the days when Czechoslovakia existed. Why was it a single country, and why is it split into two nations today?
Starting from the 8th or 9th Centuries, there was a lot of similarity between the peoples of these two regions. Both resisted powerful neighbors who wished to assimilate them: in the case of the Czechs, this applied to the Germans, and in the case of the Slovaks, Hungary.
The two regions were technically ‘united’ from the 15th to the early 20th Centuries due to their joint inclusion in larger empires. However, the Czech part, dominated by Austria, became more industrialized, with a large base of intellectuals, while the Slovaks, dominated by Hungary, stayed much more rural.
The chance to form an independent union between the Czechs and Slovaks came to fruition only in 1918 at the end of WWI, when the Austria-Hungarian Empire was broken apart. The state of Czechoslovakia was declared, and the Czech army forced Hungarian troops to leave Slovakia, as well as occupy the German-speaking areas of western Czechia (the ‘Sudetenland’). We all know now how Germany liked that!
After WWII, the nation fell under the control of the Soviet Union, and a bit like Yugoslavia, remained unified throughout the Communist era. When the Soviet Union broke up, however, the Czechs and Slovaks had to come to terms with the very real differences in their respective economies and political representation in the overall state. This led to some years of political deliberations, an almost entirely peaceful but intense process that resulted in the division into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in 1992.
Interestingly, a poll taken that year showed only a minority of both Czechs and Slovaks really wanted the state to be divided.
It is late in the day, and hot, so we just walk around to see a few things.
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