Let's start this post with a question. What do you call a Škoda on top of hill?
No, I'm not going to give you the response to that right now. We'll come back to the answer in a bit.
In my senior year of college at the University of Michigan, my daily journey to the Art and Architecture Building involved me walking several blocks from my apartment on Hill Street and boarding a bus to take me to the University's North Campus for the hours and hours I spent at my desk in the architecture studio every day. One day in the fall of that year (this would be 1989), I vividly remember sitting on that bus and looking out at the newspaper machines at the bus stop and reading something about the wall coming down. The headline was huge. This seemed like big news.
My first thought here, by the way, was why was the Detroit Free Press putting something about Pink Floyd on page one? Don't mock. At this point in my life, I was a little fixated on Pink Floyd. Of course, the headline wasn't about Pink Floyd's 1979 album. It was about the Berlin Wall.
The removal of the wall between the west and east sides of Berlin was a seminal moment in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of their almost complete control over most countries in eastern Europe. This sphere of control, which consisted of puppet governments in a series of nations to the west of the U.S.S.R., was referred to as the Iron Curtain, a term coined by Winston Churchill in a speech delivered in 1946 (in Missouri, of all places). The Iron Curtain in mainland Europe was the western border of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
I often equate the fall of the Berlin Wall as the first step in the collapse of the Soviet Union. It wasn't. While I probably didn't realize it at the time, Hungary and Poland had already taken official steps to move towards democracy earlier that same year with the blessing of the Soviets. Two years and a couple of months later, the Soviet Union would officially disband as a nation, leaving Ukraine, Georgia, several Stans and a bunch of other countries to various forms of self-government and freeing the citizens of countries locked behind the Iron Curtain to figure things out for themselves.
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| Bratislava here we come!!! Train waiting in Vienna. |
I've traveled a lot since my four years at Michigan. I've been all around the United States and the world and have hit six of the seven continents. Among other things, I've been on safaris; roamed all over western Europe; walked to Machu Picchu; looked for kiwis at night in New Zealand; and belted out karaoke at the top of my lungs in Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood. But until December of last year, I'd never set foot behind the Iron Curtain. That would change when we took a train north from Vienna to Bratislava, Slovakia. Our passage over the Slovakian border technically took us through the old boundary which was very, very real.
Our plan for our visit to Bratislava was pretty simple: (1) get a taste of what life under Soviet rule or influence or whatever you want to call it was like and (2) hit up the city's Christmas market. The second part of that agenda was simple and straightforward. Plus, why would we NOT visit a Christmas market? I mean, 11 in Vienna just wasn't enough, after all.
To do the first part, though, we'd need a little help. So we called in a professional. When we got off the train in Bratislava, we were met by Peter Chrenka in his 1993 Škoda car. Peter and his brother operate a company called Authentic Slovakia and one of the tours they run is specifically geared around what remains of the Soviet occupation (I don't know what else to call it, really) in Bratislava. Let the fun begin!
As a point of establishing perspective here, Bratislava was as close as you could get to the edge of Soviet control in eastern Europe in a major city during the cold war. It is right on the border between Slovakia and Austria (meaning it was right on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria between the mid 1940s and the late 1980s). It's so close that you can actually look across to Austria from many, many points within Bratislava. I don't like necessarily equating some societies as totally free and others as totally not free but literally, more freedom could be seen less than a mile away from Bratislava. It must have been an interesting and desperate time.
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| Our chariot for the day. How awesome is this vintage Škoda???? |
Our agenda for the day was set by Peter and that was fine with us. There are times on our trips where we like to have a lot of control over where we go and what we do based on a ton of advance research. And there are other times where we can't possibly come up with an agenda for an obscure quest like a visit to Soviet-era sites in city in eastern Europe. Plus on a day trip like this, we really wanted to talk with someone who had actually been there. OK so maybe Peter at 40 years old had limited experience with living behind the Iron Curtain, but he clearly remembered enough based on our few hours in his company that added a ton of value to our day.
First stop? A 1956 concrete panel housing block. I'm not kidding. The first place we stopped and got out of the car was an historic (also not kidding; check it out below) apartment building constructed by the Soviets out of prefabricated concrete panels. Now sure, we drove by a couple of other sights along the way. We also talked some history, including covering the 1968 invasion by the USSR to squash developing connections between what was then Czechoslovakia and the West and Peter being taken by his parents to a celebration of Slovak independence in November of 1989. He had no idea what was going on at seven years old but it's a cool memory to have been a part of that. But, yes, our first stop was at a vintage apartment building.
Speaking of Peter's parents, they were travel agents, which in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s meant that they booked holidays for people in eastern Europe or Yugoslavia (you weren't really allowed to travel anywhere else). Peter knew that sometimes his father would send 40 people on vacation to Yugoslavia only to have 30 come back, with the rest fleeing to the west. But his dad never really talked to him about it, thinking that if Peter said the wrong thing to the wrong kid at school with the wrong dad, it could mean some serious trouble. My parents never thought about stuff like this while I was growing up. Peter's parents had to.
But enough of that family stuff. Let's get back to that housing project!!!
Sexy stuff, right? This apartment building was actually one of the two main sites Peter took us to and talked to us about. Sure, we went to a local Soviet-era food market and drove past a couple of very totalitarian-looking pieces of architecture in the form of an inverted pyramid and a bridge that looked like it has a UFO on one side of it (the informal name of the bridge is actually the UFO bridge) but yes, really, we spent more time at the concrete panel apartment building than any of those three other buildings.
So by now, I'm sure you are snickering at us paying some dude in an antique Czech car to drive us around looking at some of the worst manifestations of 20th century building design in the world, right? I mean this tour must have been a total waste of time and money, right?
Wrong! In addition to being able to talk to Peter about what it was like to live in the former Czechoslovakia, there was a ton of value not only in the tour as a whole but also in stopping by some dull, light grey, concrete building in the middle of town.
I know I mentioned earlier in this post that the apartment building is historic. I was doing that a bit tongue-in-cheek but its historic status is exactly part of the narrative that we experienced this day. Sure, it wasn't the reason that we visited that spot in Bratislava (it was clear we were visiting because it was erected under the auspices of the U.S.S.R.), but its historic status is what's keeping it around and is going to keep it around for a while. Maybe forever.
So look, the building sucks, OK? Yeah, I know there's some vaguely cool bas reliefs (read: propaganda) of dancing Russians above the entrances to the building (both men and women, shown above) but it's just not attractive in any way. But it's here to stay because somehow, somebody thought this was something that needed to be saved and it's old enough to be protected by whatever preservation laws exist in Slovakia. It also, by the way, was not insulated properly when it was built and the building can't be insulated from the outside in because such an intervention would compromise the historic "character" of the thing.
This debate about "is everything old worth saving?" occurs all over the world, including in the United States. Just because something has survived long enough to make it quality for historic preservation doesn't mean it should have such protection. But there's another wrinkle to the debate in Bratislava. This was not built by Slovakians for Slovakians. It was effectively built by an occupying force and it's here to stay. Maybe forever.
How would you feel about having to keep in place reminders of decades of being controlled by a foreign totalitarian regime when all you wanted to do was move on with your lives and make your society your own? It must be tough, even if, as Peter suggested, about one quarter of Slovaks today would welcome, or at least not object to, a return to a more Soviet way of life. Apparently, some are having a difficult time adjusting to a more capitalist society.
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| What a creative bunch those Soviets were. Bratislava Castle (dating from the 1400s) is on the lower left. |
I don't know how many people day trip to Bratislava when on vacation in Vienna. I'm guessing we are not the only ones who have taken the just a bit more than an hour train ride east and north over the Slovakian border. I'm also guessing there are not many who go to see what we go to see and then go straight back to Vienna. We didn't want to follow a standard tourist agenda on our first trip behind the old Iron Curtain. So we didn't.
But this day in Bratislava wouldn't have worked without a guide. I mean, sure, we could have done the research or bought a guidebook and made our way to pretty much everything we saw that day. But without the commentary from our guide Peter, it would have been nowhere near as valuable.
So sure (and I know I already said this), Peter was seven years old when Slovakia freed itself from the yoke of the Soviets, but it's not like things changed immediately or anything in 1989. Change took time. It's also not like he can't remember things from his childhood and he doesn't have the benefit of hearing stories from his family who were far more aware of what life was like under Soviet control. His perspective was so valuable, right down to the Slovakian soft drinks he brought along for us and which we sipped on while we gazed at the concrete panel apartment building.
Kofola, a type of spiced or herbed (I got cinnamon out of drinking it) cola made in Czechia and Vinea, a grape based soda invented in Bratislava in 1973, if you must know, by the way. We got the red version of the Vinea. I'd drink that again. I'd pass on the Kofola.
The last stop we made with Peter was at an overlook of sorts with a view to the south and west of Bratislava across the Danube River and into Austria. The bridge that crosses the Danube today providing easy access between the two countries wasn't there when the Iron Curtain was up. It was consequently deliberately difficult to get from Slovakia over the Danube to a society that was fundamentally different than life experienced by the citizens of Bratislava.
One of the perks of being so close to Austria in the 1980s was that you could receive television signal from across the border, and while it was forbidden to watch Austrian TV, Peter did anyway (I mean, of course he would; why wouldn't he). It made quite an impression on the young kid, one which manifests itself today in Peter owning a Trans Am (he was a huge Knight Rider fan). Back then he used to watch whatever he could get over the illicit signal received from over the river and based on his time in fronf of the TV, he longed for some Milka, a Swiss chocolate, which was advertised all the time but was completely unavailable in Bratislava in the 1980s.
The first place Peter and his family visited after the fall of communism in Slovakia was Austria. And of course, he got some Milka. That was all he wanted.
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| Looking south and west into Austria. |
Finally, a word or two about our transport.
We went everywhere that day with Peter in Bratislava in his 1993 Škoda. He and his brother (through his grandfather) actually own one made in the 1970s but it doesn't really run too well in the winter and Peter hinted that he may have actually done a little (or maybe a lot of) damage to that car recently so we got the later model. If you've traveled much in Europe you may have seen Škodas around. Heck, you might have even rented and driven one yourself. If you have, odds are that they are pretty modern and reliable vehicles. They are, after all, made by Volkwagen these days.
Peter's version is pre-VW. At one time, 50% of the cars on the roads in Czechoslovakia were Škodas and they were maybe not quite as reliable as today's versions before Volkwagen got involved. But the 1993 version of the car got us around the city just fine, including to the top of the tallest hill in the city. Which brings me back to my opening question: what do you call a Škoda on top of a hill?
A miracle.
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