Bratislava – a Puzzle of Poorly Fitting Pieces

Nothing I can possibly say about Bratislava can ever be completely true. This city encapsulates too many contradictions to justify any general comments about its true nature. The Slovak Republic is one of the most religiously and socially conservative nations in Eastern Europe, particularly in its rural areas. The Church and family values take on an importance not found in Czechia, (Czechia has the largest percentage of atheists of any country in the world), and these differences were probably one factor that led to the breakup of Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism. Antithetical forces, however, are clearly at work in Bratislava. Many of Germany’s top auto companies now make their cars in the Slovak Republic, and other European high and low tech firms have also moved their operations there. This influx of investment is due to the cheapness, reliability, and skills of Slovak Labor: In other words, due to the conservative nature of its workers. This industrialization of the Slovak Republic has brought a lot of new money into the country, and caused some of Bratislava’s contradictions. This money has done a lot of good by raising the general standard of living for all Slovaks, but money, as we all know, has a habit of corrupting whatever it touches, and Bratislava has become the the Slovak nexus where the corrupting influence of money and its phantasmagoria of freedom intertwines with the naivety and curiosity of its previously cossetted population.

This entwined dichotomy became most apparent on my second morning in Bratislava as I walked across a square in front of  government buildings at 6:00 a.m.. There I came across a priest officiating what seemed to be a combination protest/prayer meeting. As I stood looking at all the earnest participants, I could feel a booming bass shaking the ground beneath my feet that was issuing from a late night rave still going strong in an alley two blocks away. I have to admit that I didn’t initially perceive the city’s schizoid nature when I first arrived. Instead, I found a very familiar, middle American event taking place around my hotel that prevented me from immediately checking in. Thousands of women were running a 5k charity race that began and ended between me and my hotel. You may think I’m exaggerating when I say that thousands were participating. I’m not. There were so many entrants, that they had to be separated into shifts of about 500. Each shift waited 5 minutes after the last one left before setting off.

The event was held at a large shopping mall that could have been transplanted into any American suburb with no one being the wiser. Everything seemed pretty normal and healthy – that is, until I went out on the town later that night. I had read about a brew pub named “Be Unorthodox Craft Beer” on Facebook and set out to sample some of its brews. I found it looking out on a busy pedestrian thoroughfare with its front door located on a side alley. The young lady operating the spigots immediately drew my attention away from the beer chalk board menu. She was wearing a white tank top with tattoo “sleeves” running up both arms. I didn’t find this at all unusual. I had seen tattoo “sleeves” in the States. In her case, however, the tattoos ran not only up her arms but also over her shoulders and around her throat to form a three inch wide tattoo collar. I could only wince to think about how the tattoos over her adam’s apple must have felt when they were applied. She also wore multiple piercings: one on her lip, several through her nose, a half dozen on each ear and one through her eyebrow. I found the eyebrow piercing especially distressing, (her raised eyebrow now expressed something other than skepticism). The beers for sale there were either extremely novel and interesting, or positively revolting depending on the attitude you were wearing when you first walked through the door. There was a beer made with green tea, a beer made with kefir bacillus, and one made with stag blood. My description of the bartender probably has tipped you off about what attitude I possessed when I walked in. I ordered a rye beer, (which wasn’t as good as the one I bought in Brno). There was no place to sit where the bartender wasn’t shockingly visible, so I walked across the alleyway to another brew pub. No one seemed to mind that I was bringing in a beer purchased elsewhere. In fact the barmaid ignored me completely. I got a table overlooking the street, and outside a man sat at a table with his golden retriever. Both were watching people pass by. At one point the man poured some of his beer into a little dish and set it on the ground. The dog lapped up the beer with doggy gusto. I thought, “Maybe that stag’s blood beer does make sense if it was made specifically for our canine companions”. (I fear it is not however). Across the street was the Baudelaire “Evil Flowers Bar”. I had no idea what they served in there, but I suspected it was a lot more harmless than what its name implied.

The evening streets were filled with partiers, gawkers, and Savonarola wanna-be censors. At one point I stepped into a church courtyard to listen to a crazily made up DJ play “Highway to Hell” while some guy kept running back and forth in front of the stage waving a white flag and yelling “I surrender”” at the top of his lungs. Unfortunately it was too dark and crowded to get pictures of any of this, so I got up early the next morning to photograph brighter and emptier streets.

Bratislava during the day provided a much more family oriented environment. Sure, there was still some vomit to be found on the cobblestones, or an empty shoe peeking out from under a cafe table, but generally speaking the city appeared to be as innocent as Disneyland.

Not having to slalom around tourists crowding dark streets allowed me that morning to look up occasionally where I could sometimes see well conceived art work hanging above me. Yes, Bratislava could reflect more facets than its opportunities for decadence or redemption.

I continued to wander around for the rest of that day trying to fit the disparate images I confronted into a coherent understanding of this city’s true nature. I couldn’t do it. Later that day as I walked exhausted back to my hotel, I came upon one more unexpected image that erased any theories that I might have been contemplating. A bar sitting above the Danube had drawn in sand to create a beach with umbrellas, beach chairs, and other beach “props”. Bratislava was trying to be, (unsuccessfully, I might add), Florida.

On my last night in Bratislava I went out looking for something to eat. The city’s dining options, like every other aspect of the city, were incredibly diverse. After sensibly rejecting a Victorian themed restaurant that offered to rent me Victorian era clothes to wear while eating their Victorian era food, I ended up at a vegetarian restaurant who offered a much cheaper and probably much healthier meal. I still wasn’t sure what Bratislava was all about when I headed to the train station the next morning. On my way there I had to pass through a 20 block street fair. Thousands of people crowded the streets buying junk food, junk junk, wine, paintings, work clothes, jewelry, handicrafts, puppies, parakeets, and other items too numerous to describe. The street fair also included a free car show featuring antique Bugatti automobiles, and a free classical music concert. Several blocks further, a rock band played behind a fence in a courtyard while across the street people were trying their hand at karaoke.

Later while I was looking out a train window at Bratislava’s receding suburbs, I had to admit that I had no more an idea of what Bratislava was all about than I did when I first set foot in town. I didn’t even know if I liked the city that much. Its denizens were not all that friendly, and often seemed at odds with one another, each group struggling to impose its way of life on everyone else. The closest analogy that I could fabricate was that the Slovak Republic had become a lot like the Southern United States, and that Bratislava was a lot like New Orleans. This analogy quickly fell apart however, when I considered the history, religion, culture of the two areas respective peoples. I will return to Bratislava some day, not because I felt at home there, (like I did in Brno), but because it provided me with a puzzle I still haven’t been able to solve.