Bratislava: Once and future princeling of the Danube

On a snowy afternoon, we finally arrived in the little big city of Bratislava - all many ever associate with Slovakia, and the once and future princeling of the Danube (or Dunaj, as the famous river is know in Slovak).

Below: Bratislava Castle and historical prominence, all water under the bridge.

Once and future princeling, or forgotten king?

Bratislava was the first of three cities (the other two being the usual suspects of Vienna and Budapest) we would visit on the Danube, accounted mighty amongst Europe's rivers. Yet many travellers would typically devote more time to Vienna and Budapest, and Bratislava would be for them a place to break the journey between the two - a lesser light amongst shinier jewels and where visitors may proclaim there I've been to Slovakia.

It wasn't always the case. The site occupied today by the Slovakian capital had always been valued as a place where north-south and east-west trading routes converged. The Celts and then the Romans were there long before Slavs, Germans and Hungarians arrived on the scene. Centuries before the city officially became Bratislava in 1919, it enjoyed a celebrated history as Pressburg (in German) and Pozsony (Hungarian). Under the above names, the city became the capital of the Hungarian kingdom between 1536 (when the previous capital Buda was taken by the Ottomans) and 1784. During this time, Buda (still separate from Pest) by contrast was a relative backwater. It was the fateful decision by Joseph II in 1784 to move the capital back to Buda which consigned Bratislava to the slide into its present provinciality.

Below (top to bottom): The yard at St Martin's, the cathedral where Hungarian monarchs were crowned; St Michael's Gate, the northern entrance to the Old Town and the sole surviving gate from its medieval fortifications.

Bratislava in a day, or ten minutes

We set aside three days in Bratislava in yet another of our periodic slowdowns amidst being constantly on the go. One day, however, is enough to take in the main sights in town. If city panoramas from a lofty viewpoint suffices for you, then that figure can be further reduced to ten minutes. (Time was when travelling as a student in a bygone era without smart devices, I would make a city's highest point the second stop - after the tourist information centre.) This can be obtained from several places, most notably from Bratislava Castle, the viewing deck atop Novy Most (New Bridge, popularly called the UFO Bridge because of its saucer-shaped viewing deck at its atop) and St Michael's Gate. We recommend the second if only because both the castle and the entire Old Town can be seen together.

Above: Views of the Danube, or the Dunaj as it is called in Slovak, and the Old Town from the Novy Most (New Bridge) viewing deck.

Below (top to bottom): From the same vantage point, one can peer into Hungary (wind farms); and Austria (hills) too; Novy Most looking most convincingly like its nickname on a foggy evening.

 

The good, the bad and the ugly

We remembered Bratislava less for its landmarks than for the people we met there. Nothing serves up the universality of humanity - immeasurable yet intimate, familiar yet foreign - more thrillingly than meeting people on the road. With one's perceptiveness heightened by a profound vulnerability, kindness is for the spirit ether to rudeness's brimstone. Good, bad and ugly were juxtaposed as if in a morality play.

We started with good, thankfully - for good is harder to mar when established than to make when absent. Igor lives with his family in the unit next to our hostel, and gave us so comprehensive an introduction to the city that we might as well have taken it for sightseeing. He also teaches at a school for the visually impaired. The hostel job was taken on to supplement the meagre salaries teachers received in Slovakia. (Incidentally, there was a teachers' strike the following day.) Knowing Braille is useful though, I later remarked. A half-smile formed on Igor's face. Yes, but we hope we won't need to use it, was his terse response.

Below: Another view of the castle from Obchodna Street where our hostel was.

We had a vastly different reception when we went to the train station to get tickets for Prague. The cashier's glare as we approached her (we'll refer henceforth to her as Nemesis) counter would have turned even Medusa to stone. Her volcanic outburst came when we discovered the price we paid was twice that advertised on the Internet. To cut a long story short, her (much) friendlier colleague at the customer service centre explained that the discounted fares can only be obtained online (which didn't exist) and then wrote us a refund note in Slovak. When we returned to Nemesis and later asked (very nicely) if she could reissue the tickets at the discounted price, she flew inexplicably into a rage. Internet! Internet! she thundered. I raised my hands in mock surrender. It's okay, don't be angry, your internet isn't working. If condescension could be honeyed, this would come close. Inexplicably it softened her tone, although she still had unapproachable written all over a sullen face.

I suppose it all adds to the romance of the unheralded train journey we earlier wrote about - travellers still have the run the old-school gauntlet of buying tickets from cantankerous cashiers.

Below (top to bottom): Watching mechanical chefs air-bake imaginary confectionery outside a lavishly decorated tea room. If only all our interaction with service staff could be so deliciously straightforward.

Now, the ugly - Nemesis might have been a mere inconvenience, but what follows is a lot harder to swallow. As we posed sillily near the iconic Cumil statue downtown, a Kazakh girl approached us hesitantly. Can I walk with you? We hesitated too. And then the reasons came along - a gaggle of well-dressed girls on her tail, Romani by the looks of it, one of whom shoved an umbrella into the Kazakh lady's face as we watched in stunned silence. They walked away soon after, and our expanded party broke again into its constituent components by the next junction.

Where do we even begin to unravel these tangled layers of discrimination? Although not all the facts have been established, the act we witnessed seemed to confirm one thing. In a world (outwardly at least) aspiring to be colourblind, only that pathogen we call prejudice really operates regardless of colour. At this point, green seems to be the only unaffected hue.

Not for long methinks. Race, religion, language - they're all fair game.

Below (top to bottom): Mary puts her foot down on voyeurism, at the iconic Cumil statue where we witnessed a very disturbing instance of public (read, racialised) bullying; elsewhere, disturbance comes in the form of my wife's preference of tin men over me.

The latest Green movement

We visited just five weeks before Slovakia's next parliamentary elections. Everywhere the benevolent faces of candidates courted from billboards and buses the votes of passers-by, delivering pomp and promises as bread and beatitudes. Moving Slovakia forward, one said. Slovakia, a better place to live, another read. One of the more eye-catching ones (it has certainly caught the attention of the foreign media) declared, next to the steely gaze of present Prime Minister Robert Fico, Protect Slovakia. In a recent widely-reported rally, he announced that if elected he would close Slovakia's doors to Muslim migrants. - bold claims made on behalf of a city with a distinctly un-Slovak history.

Below: A scene from a city cemetery on our last morning in Bratislava, eerily  representative of the latest turn in Slovak politics.

Having said all that, I'd still urge readers to visit Slovakia. The mountains are really worth seeing. They are probably the only places in Slovakia where white, green and brown sit by each other harmoniously.