The Bratislava Pálava - Part Two of Two

If you missed The Bratislava Pálava - Part One, here's a link

https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/bratislava-p%C3%A1lava-part-one-two

But if you didn't, here's Part Two...

For the entirety of our voyage the sun shone on the green grassy banks of this broad majestic body of water and, to my surprise, the further we sailed from Austria (a country supposedly famed for its spectacular mountains) the less flat the landscape became. Devin Castle (Slovak: Hrad Devín), high on a rock at a bend in the river, was built in the fourteenth century, much to the delight of Danube day trippers but much to the annoyance of the poor employees of the construction company who would have had to drag all those huge lumps of rock, cement mixers, hods, cheese and pickle sandwiches, flasks of tea and Daily Mirrors all the way up there every day in very hot weather or very cold weather except for a couple of weeks in the spring and the autumn when the effects of northern hemisphere continental meteorological systems are more bearable. Prior to that it had been a settlement and strategic site since Neolithic times. Neolithic people obviously didn’t see any point in overexerting themselves, not even to bring in the tourist money. For us it was the highlight of the trip and for many fellow passengers it was a good reason to give the selfie stick its first airing of the day.

The fine vessel on which we travelled was operated by the Twin City Liner Company and was coincidentally called Twin City Liner. We were told by the lady at the ticket office on the quay in Vienna that it would be moving quite quickly because it was a catamaran; not to be confused with a lemon meringue which has a flavour more citrusy and less fishy. I asked her if it stopped off anywhere else other than Vienna and Bratislava (we had fancied a trip to Linz) and sensed that in her mind she was growling, ‘It would be called Triplet City Liner if it went to a third city’ as she gave me a hard, silent stare.

Within five minutes of disembarkation at Vienna’s twin city we felt that we had stepped into a different world. Significantly less-than-gorgeous concrete buildings from the significantly less-than-gorgeous Communist era occupied the spaces between the beautiful buildings of earlier gorgeous eras in this place where round about 200 BC, the Celtic Boii tribe had founded a fortified town. Since then, visits by the Romans, the Slavs, the Huns, the Ottomans (or Ottomen?), Napoleon Bonaparte, the Nazis and members of English stag parties had left their mark on the architecture and culture of the place. In recent times it was one of the foremost centres of the anti-Communist Velvet Revolution of 1989 and in 1993 the city became the capital of the newly formed Slovak Republic following the Velvet Divorce and the division of Czechoslovakia. During the course of our stay we got the impression that as part of the separation deal the Czech Republic (also known as Czechia) had, metaphorically speaking, taken custody of the cat and kept all the books, CDs and vinyl records except for those by Phil Collins and the one I’m sure we all bought in the 1970s in a pedestrianised shopping centre from a man dressed in an orange robe claiming to be a close friend of George Harrison. With each step of our walk from the landing quay to our guesthouse we saw more and more features that reminded us of our home in Bulgaria and which might, in the opinions of some, be improved with either a lick of paint or a bulldozer, but which characterised our end of the continent. It had been nice to be in central Europe for a few days but now it was good to be back in the more relaxed, more friendly, less manicured and less expensive east, even though we had travelled less than a hundred kilometres to get there.

For the rest of the day, in my head I sang ‘I’m still Turlough from the Bloc’ feeling like I was the Slavic world’s very own Jennifer Lopez.

Bratislava’s a great place for wandering about. A gem of a city with impressive remains of medieval ramparts, a labyrinth of narrow quiet streets with tales to tell and a café culture that sporadically spills over into a pub culture. It has an impressive 15th century castle, built during the reign of Sigismund of Luxembourg apparently as an anti-Hussite fortress, and it’s certainly effective because during our three-day stay we didn’t see a single Hussite. There are beautiful old churches, impressive bridges spanning the Danube and high on a hill in the Slavin district to the north of the city, a colossus of a Communist era memorial to those members of the Soviet Red Army who sacrificed their lives in the 1940s to liberate the country from the Fascists. In the searing heat I scaled the west face of Ulitsa Pažického (which is Slovak for Pažického Street) in the hope of finding some evidence of the life and work of the famous classical pianist, Peter Pažický, after whom the street was named. I wanted to stop and ask local people what they knew about him, because at that stage I’d never heard of him before, but I couldn’t pronounce his name. So I walked on in the pretence that I was an authority on Slovak musicians whilst whistling all my favourite Slovak tunes, just as all the local passers-by seemed to be doing. At the peak all I found was a chronic need for a change into clothing a little less dripping wet with sweat and a giant stone edifice, a cemetery and mass graves to remind us of what super people the Russians could be if they put their minds to it. Set in beautiful gardens it commanded magnificent views of the city and the river and it had an ice cream van but there were hardly any people which I assumed was because either word had got round that Communism hadn’t turned out the way Marx and Engels had suggested it might or the ice cream van had run out of Flakes to enhance the ice cream cone experience. This was a great pity because I believe that no matter what your feelings are towards totalitarianism it’s still a momentous part of the history of that poorer side of Europe and it’s interesting to know how it all began and finished and how people coped while it was all going on, particularly for the likes of me living in Bulgaria but visiting neighbours with a similar story to tell; and it’s possible to enjoy ice cream without a huge wadge of chocolate poked in the top in that western consumerist way.

The Communists have gone now (probably, though not definitely) but Bratislava still lives a nervous life in the company of other threatening groups, they being members of the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club and members of English stag parties.

There were hundreds of Hell’s Angels about the place and we had no idea why so we looked them up on our pocket Google machines and discovered that their 2023 annual international get together was taking place that very week in and around Bratislava. We also learned that the organisation had been founded in California on St Patrick’s Day in 1947 (it’s amazing what can happen after a couple of nice pints of Guinness) and that the people who write for the American Government website really don’t like them, suggesting that no attempt should ever be made to interact with them, photograph them or even look at them because they tend to be in a bit of a bad mood all the time and have been known to beat to death people who may have accidentally glanced at their bikes or inhaled a petrol fume or two without invitation. I’ve never had any time for them myself because when they write ‘Hell’s Angels’ on the backs of their leather motorcycle jackets they always omit the apostrophe. I was tempted to point out to them this unforgiveable error of punctuation because they didn’t seem all that threatening to us; particularly the ones who were wearing sandals and white socks pulled up to just below their knees.

The twenty-four-hour party people from the stag parties also weren’t as threatening or as twenty-four-hour as we might have imagined. Having had their first beer(s) of the day with their all-day full English breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning they tended to be comatose on benches in public gardens by late afternoon. Beer in Slovakia is very strong and very cheap but probably not as cheap as in Tesco in Croydon so I couldn’t really understand their reasons for making the trip. Perhaps they just wanted to interact with a Hussite.

The local food in Slovakia is very meat based and tends to be drizzled with the bits of the animal that might be described as more fluid than meaty. After the disappointment of Viennese cuisine, we had hoped for something a bit healthier and along the lines of the Balkan food that we were accustomed to at home. In saying this I feel like I’m turning into my mother who always took a supply of teabags and a jar of marmalade with her whenever she set foot outside of England. Maybe my aversion to the tourist food of central Europe is down to the fact that I’m getting old and probably due a heart attack, though our doctor said I’ll be grand as long as I continue to eat healthy Bulgarian food. We decided that my mother’s arrangements for getting exactly what she wanted to eat and drink whilst away on foreign holidays were a bit extreme but on future trips we would take our doctor with us and a foldaway travel defibrillator and a big bag of Bulgarian pink tomatoes.

It came to pass that we gave our looking for something to eat in the evenings routine the title Operation Pig Fat and abandoned the restaurants, resorting instead to buying food in our local supermarket to prepare and eat in the comfort of our guesthouse studio room with kitchenette, defibrillator and spare bed that our doctor could have slept on. Incidentally, the supermarkets we visited during our time in Slovakia were absolutely wonderful places with wholesome and delicious food presented in an appealing way and served by friendly staff in modern, clean and attractive premises. We couldn’t understand why the pig fat people didn’t go there to buy the ingredients for the greasy wobbly offerings listed on their menus.

A week or more before we even got on the plane to start the trip I had decided that this piece of writing would be called The Bratislava Palaver. It just sounded right to me. So you can imagine my feeling of utter delight when I discovered in my favourite local supermarket that in Slovakia, on the south facing slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, beautiful golden yellow coloured wine with an irresistible aroma of nutmeg and vanilla is made from the Pálava grape. It was a perfect fit! Hence The Bratislava Pálava came to be. And I’ll wager that you were thinking I had misspelt my title!

As we sat on the train waiting for it to pull out of Bratislava Hlavná Stanica (the main railway station) ‎ we wondered if Emmanuel Macron had enjoyed his stay in Bratislava as much as we had. We wondered if the bar across the road from his guesthouse served all-day full French breakfasts at eight o’clock in the morning. We wondered if Zuzana had taken him out on the town and treated him at her favourite Operation Pig Fat haunts, or Les restaurants de Opération Graisse de Porc, as he might call them. And we wondered what his wife thought of him being away on a foreign trip to meet up with this Zuzana woman. If I was the President of France, I would take Priyatelkata with me everywhere; I would have to because she’s French and the only words of the language that I have learnt from her are the abusive ones she shouts at our cats when they’re trying to help themselves to a portion of our pig fat or bring their own food, which is often still alive, into our house.

Image:

Every image I use is from a photograph I have taken myself. 

On this occasion - A corner of the labyrinth of narrow quiet streets with tales to tell.