The Ghosts of Europe by Anne Porter

Author:Anne Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000
Publisher: D & M Publishers
Published: 2010-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

THREE

SLOVAKIA

THE USES OF HISTORY

FOR OVER a thousand years, Bratislava was Pozsony for the Hungarians, Pressburg for the Austrians and Germans, a free royal town under Hungarian rule, then, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the Ottoman Turks ruled the lands below, the capital of Hungary.1 What is now Slovakia was Hungary’s Felvidék, or “Upper Lands,” an integral part of the Kingdom of Hungary from the tenth century until 1920, when the victorious powers of World War I gave their blessing to the artificial construction of the new country of Czechoslovakia from bits of former empires. The winner of the high-stakes negotiations at the Versailles Peace Treaty was Tomáš Masaryk, with his vision of the new state. The biggest loser by far was the old Kingdom of Hungary. Slovakia, having had only a short interlude of independence during World War II, finally shook off its ties to the Czechs (and vice versa) in January 1993.

Bratislava Castle—huge, hulking, yellow-grey, with its four red-roofed, pointed corner towers that make it look like a giant upturned spider or, as the locals refer to it, an upside-down table—still dominates the city. It is hard to discern its original fifteenth-century design, perhaps because the castle was often rebuilt and overhauled, gentrified and beautified to suit different rulers’ personal tastes or the styles of the times. Gothic, then baroque, then mid-Renaissance, it nonetheless retains its original fortress look, and the seven-metre-thick fortifications that might well have withstood a Turkish attack, had the Turks decided to approach Vienna from the north. (They did not. They came from the east and were defeated at the gates of Vienna with the able assistance of Jan iii Sobieski, the king of Poland.) Vienna is only sixty kilometres away, a couple of hours on horseback or by rail, as the Viennese used to travel from the Habsburg capital to what they saw as an extension of their own city. For them, Budapest is just down the Danube, the grand river of “Mitteleuropa” that cuts through all three of the cities and adds lustre to Bratislavsky Hrad, the castle, just by being visible from many of its windows.

The interiors of the castle had once been opulent, the walls festooned with silk tapestries and drapery, the furniture decorated with gold leaf. Kings, queens and their retinues lolled about in landscaped gardens and high-ceilinged rooms. This is where the gold-braided Hungarian nobility plotted the overthrow of the Habsburgs once the Turks departed. Their attempts, though undeniably and romantically heroic, were doomed to failure as neither national pride nor exquisite horsemanship made up for the Habsburgs’ superior armies.

My Hungarian histories featured heart-rending stories about Prince Ferenc Rákóczi and his lion-hearted mother, the evil Austrians and the brave kuruc volunteers who fought unequal battles against the Habsburgs’ merciless mercenaries on blood-drenched fields. Although the Rákóczi family castle was in Munkács (today’s Munkacevo, Ukraine), there is a Rákóczi house in Bratislava, and the Rákóczi crest is embedded in numerous buildings in Slovakia, including the wall of the fifteenth-century Gothic Cathedral of St.

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