Bratislava Day 2

Since I failed to enter the Blue Church on the previous day, I woke up at 6:00 the next morning to visit during the narrow slot when the church is open. From Monday to Saturday, its hours are 6:30-7:30 and 17:30-19:00, which leaves very little time for flexibility (or sleep). Skipping breakfast, I arrived at the church slowly after opening hours and took pictures as the congregation slowly trickled in.

For half an hour, the amplifiers boomed a crackly recording of a monotonous female voice reading the Slovak Ave Maria and Pater Noster. Some of the believers sat in silence, while others repeated the prayers, taking advantage of the pauses in the recording. At around seven, a priest began to officiate, and I hastily took my leave as I felt making an exit in the middle of a mass would have been rather awkward.

It was a hazy morning. The darkness departed only very slowly; indeed, I managed to eat a croissant and drink a potent ginger tea at a nearby restaurant by the time the pitch-black night turned into a deep grey dawn. Reluctantly, I carried on with my programme. I walked down to the new Slovak National Theatre Building and the riverside, where the national hero Milan Rastislav Štefánik looks out over the Danube. Interestingly, following the direction of his gaze would lead one through Austria to Hungary, the erewhile overlords of the Czech and Slovak nations.

I walked along the riverfront for a while before crossing the Old Bridge to Janko Kráľ Park. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the place prides itself on being the “oldest public park in Central Europe,” which sounds like it could be a big or small claim depending on where we draw the boundaries of Central Europe and how we define a public park. An interesting feature is a former church tower converted to a bower. The gothic gem was damaged during an earthquake and had to be replaced, but instead of being destroyed entirely, it was lovingly relocated to the park.

Crossing the Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising, I arrived at Saint Martin’s Cathedral. Although it was closed yesterday, I was told the building would be open again from 9 AM, and so it was. I found the Cathedral a bit strange. Despite its massive size, it emanates the simplicity of a Central European village church, having few of the frills that cathedrals abound with in Prague, Vienna, or London. Nevertheless, this is where the kings of Hungary were crowned for a quarter of a millennium, between the years 1563 (shortly after Székesfehérvár was taken by the Ottomans) and 1830.

My dad arrived at midday by car, which offered the perfect opportunity to visit more distant and more elevated places. As the mist suddenly cleared up, we stopped on the southern shore of the Danube to look at the city in its full glory before driving west to the castle Devín. The castle, whose origins date to the Great Moravian Empire, is majorly associated with the Slovak National Revival, featuring in the works of Ján Kollár and Ján Hollý. Significantly, it is located at the confluence of the Danube and Morava.

After our excursion to Devín, we returned to Bratislava, enveloped in the meantime by a thick fog. The weather was very changeable that day, which we attributed to the influence of the vast Danube. We visited the Church of Our Lady of the Snows, which stands at the top of a local Calvary and sacred grotto, as well as Slavín, a memorial to the Soviet soldiers who died in the liberation of Bratislava. I believe the hill is meant to offer nice views of the town, but due to the fog we could barely even see the top of the monument.

Because we had skipped lunch and subsisted on tangerines, we still had some daylight to spare. We decided, therefore, to make one last visit. While searching for tourist attractions on google maps, I came across a Roman outpost called Gerulata just south of Bratislava. Allegedly, Marcus Aurelius wrote a significant portion of his Meditations in the area; the Danube was, after all, one of the natural boundaries of the Roman Empire.

Nevertheless, it would have been impossible to make my dad interested in what appeared to be a few pillar bases and some broken stones. Instead, I searched along the Danube until I came across a much more well-preserved settlement just across the Austrian border. Capital of the Pannonia Superior Province, the city of Carnuntum had 50,000 inhabitants, and its ruins include an amphitheatre for 15,000 spectators and a massive monument possibly built by Constantinus II.

On our way to Carnuntum, we also stopped by the town of Hainburg an der Donau, once home to a young Joseph Haydn. Besides a few pretty gates and towers, Hainburg also boasts some presumably impressive castle ruins which loom over the city from a nearby hill. I say “presumably,” as we could hardly see them through the fog, and only had a vague impression of their size despite hiking all the way up and peering out from the walls into vast nothingness.

The castle has had a long and interesting history. The hill it rests on was first settled by Illyrians and Celts, but the first proper castle was built in 1050 by Holy Roman Emperor Henry III. In the 1220s, the castle walls were reinforced using ransom received for Richard the Lionheart, who had been captured – contrary to medieval public law banning the detention of crusaders – by Leopold of Austria. While Leopold was excommunicated for this transgression by the Pope, Richard I passed into the hands of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who only let the king go for a hefty sum.

The castle was destroyed in 1683 by the Second Ottoman Campaign during an attack that killed 8000 people.