Bratislava
I arrived in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, on a crisp evening in November 2022. This newly-minted capital of a country created in my own lifetime is sandwiched at the center of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, on a bend of the Danube thirty-odd miles below Vienna, on the rail line directly between the Austrian and Hungarian capitals. For all its centrality, what impressed me most about Bratislava was its littleness – and I mean that in the most complimentary way.
I had begun my journey in Berlin, a throbbing chamber of the European heart, despite being perhaps more vivisected and re-sutured than any other city of the 20th century; I proceeded to Prague, the Paris of Bohemia, thronged with holidayers and partiers; in Budapest I found a great grey empire of broad thoroughfares unrolling itself like a carpet over the Hungarian plain; and I was set to end my travels in Vienna, the Imperial City of old-world Europe, barnacled with palaces and occupying the diplomatic nexus of east and west. But as soon as I ducked under the grassy railroad embankment to make my way into the center of the Slovak capital, I felt a great calm descend upon me. The sun waned, warm and yellow, and sunburnt leaves rustled in the autumn breeze, but despite the lovely day there were no great crowds, no clamor of traffic; only the comings and goings of a gentle city in the late afternoon. I passed a ruined house, abandoned long enough for a tree to grow up inside it and burst through the roof two storeys up. The Presidential Palace was white, like our own, but it had no fenced-in rose garden; it sat on a rather ordinary public square, and it’s backyard was a park filled with people walking their dogs and pushing perambulators. Beyond this lay the old city, a little clique of pedestrian streets inside the city walls, in which a good schnitzel can easily be found. So much for the evening.
Like Berlin, Bratislava’s unfortunate history as a Soviet satellite has left it with the silver lining of Socialist Modernist architecture to compliment its medieval and rococo core, including a bridge which appears to be poised to launch its UFO saucer into the stratosphere, should its cables ever be released. It also has a church whose blue color reminded me so much of the frosting on one of my earliest childhood birthday cakes that I felt I could taste it from across the gap of thirty years, and developed a craving.
Up the hill to the northwest, past the old Jewish quarter (which was unfortunately largely demolished to build the strange bridge), sits the castle, which has watched over Bratislava since it was old Pressburg, and just beyond it perches Parliament, which has only been there since 1986. This has what must be one of the greatest views of any legislature in the world; unfortunately it is also too small for its current function. West of the castle is a suburb of palatial houses interspersed with trees; in the warm sun I felt it could not be beat by anything in our own California.
No longer needed for defense, as Slovakia is ensconced within the leaguer of both the EU and NATO, Bratislava Castle has been refashioned into a museum which carries one from the stone age all the way through to the student revolutions against Communism and the Velvet Divorce of 1993. Here there are nameless idols; the skull of an ancestor – not only of Slovakia, but probably of most humans alive today, if they managed to have any children; bronze swords and steel, withered and reproduced in modern replica; a Roman Galea from when the local garrison of Dowina formed a part of the great Limes, the northern border defenses of the Empire; and even some fragmentary icons depicting winged angels, which are some of the earliest physical traces of Christianity in this corner of Europe.
There is also a rich collection of medieval art, griffins, royal charters, the warding angel of the flaming sword, worm-eaten wooden saints, and Christ glorified. Outside, the air purples with dusk, as the calm city settles down to another night of pleasant slumber.
