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| St. Martin's Church, Bratislava |
We took a side trip to Bratislava, Slovakia today, an hour's train ride from Vienna. Even though I had read some of the history of Bratislava and checked out what we should do and see there before, I didn't have a good idea of what it was I was going to see.
I had read that Bratislava had a long history as the seat of the Hungarian monarchy and that in the early twentieth century the population was mostly Hungarian and German; only a small proportion of the population was Slovakian. After WWI the Czech and Slovak areas become one country, Czechoslovakia, which was taken over by the Soviets after WWII and which, in the early 1990s, a while after the Iron Curtain came down, split into two countries: The Czech Republic and Slovakia; Bratislava became the capital of Slovakia. By the end of WWII, the Hungarians and Germans were mostly gone (many Germans were expelled).
The city certainly looks like a a former Communist city for the most part. It's grey, the buildings are in disrepair, and there are huge blocks of concrete apartments spread across a wide section of town. But in the center is the jewel...the enduring structures of that long history before the Communists took over. A castle, churches, town halls, palaces, cobble stone streets, beautiful narrow passageways and wide open squares. While we were looking at these sights, reading about the places, and taking pictures, I suddenly got it. Bratislava is the Slovakian name for the German city that was there for centuries--Pressburg.(of course, there's a Hungarian name too). Lots of big historical events took place there, such as the Peace of Pressburg, signed in 1805, effectively ending the Holy Roman Empire.
When I understood Bratislava as having been Pressburg, I felt like I understood the city and its past much better. It all made sense, and it made me miss Germany too.
