We cruised all night and through breakfast until we got to the Gabcikovo Lock which is the second largest on the Danube. It was very interesting watching the whole process again.
We didn’t arrive in Bratislava, Slovakia until the afternoon. After we arrived, a local historian, Dr. Nora Grancay came abourd and presented, “Velvet Revolution and the Making of Slavakia.” She was an excellent speaker and gave us a short history of Slavakia and how they came to have a democratic government now.
Slovakia was part of Czechoslovakia from 1918 until 1993. From 1952 the country was under Soviet Union control and the “Iron Curtain” was created between Slovakia and the West. Austria is only a few kilometers away so a fence was put up between Austria and Slovakia since Austria was considered ‘the west.” 500,000 people were able to escape before the “curtain” went up.
Many people were happy with communism at first because everyone was guaranteed a place to live and had food to eat. It was illegal to not have a job so if you didn’t have one, you were assigned a job even if the job didn’t really exist. However, nothing is free and the Slovakian people realized that they had lost their personal freedoms, especially the freedom of speech. For example, one time Dr. Grancay’s (our speaker’s) father made an offhand comment “the only good communist was the one six feet under.” The wrong person overheard this and so he lost his job at the university and certain privledges were taken from the entire family such as the ability to go to college. She is the first person in her family since then that was able to attend university. Her young daugher’s generation will be the first to have not known life living under communism. After hearing this I thought about why some of the older people we have come across, especially in Bulgaria, seem grumpy. Maybe it just takes time for people who lived through it to learn to express their emotions freely.
On January 1, 1989, Slovakia and Czechoslavkia separated peacefully. Some call this the “Velvet Divorce.” Czechoslavakia is now called the Czech Republic. Our tour guide said both countries get along except for once a year when the hockey championships are played!
Later we enjoyed a walking tour of Bratislava which is the capital of Slovakia. Barb and Antonio had visited here in the early nineties with our parents. This was shortly after the country had become independent and Barb remembers that it was a sleepy little town. Now it is bustling with many shops and a mass transit train. We enjoyed walking around the historic area of Bratislava and even got to taste Sachartorte which is a deliciously dense cake that originated in Vienna.
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