Yet Another Trip to Slovakia, Part 2: Castles, Castle Ruins, and More

Continued from Part 1:

On our last trip, in 2019, I noted how a lot of the locals out here in the Slovak countryside seem to have this perma-scowl like someone crapped in their potatoes. I've noticed they crank up the death-glare a notch or two if you're a stranger they've never seen before walking down their street in whatever small town or village they live in. Early in the trip when we went to visit Terezia's dad's grave in Tomášovce, we took the train there and walked the three or four blocks from the train station to the cemetery. As we were walking, I noticed several older women out in their front yards giving us some of the nastiest looks I've ever encountered. This was more extreme than the stares I used to get walking the streets of my hometown, Castro Valley, as a teenager when in my full-on Goth phase. It was like we were aliens from another planet, and our very presence seemed to be a complete affront to humanity. 

On the way back to the station, a young boy, maybe about nine or so but scarcely taller than Simon, was walking his bike up the street in the opposite direction, and he eyed Simon suspiciously, sizing him up with this unwavering, mean tough-kid expression on his face, not even giving the faintest hint of a smile. Maybe people start adopting the death-glare at a young age?

I occasionally get these sour death-glares when walking around Terezia's mom's village, Podrečany, though some people have some vague idea of who I am, so I very occasionally get a "Dobrý deň," or some people give me a look of mild bemusement.

It's weird because when you're from a more densely populated place like the Bay Area, you kind of feel invisible, and you get accustomed to not being noticed, because there are so many people around everywhere. But here strangers are a novelty (I mean, who the hell is going to go to Tomášovce?), and are to be regarded with extreme suspicion and contempt.

I'm too scared to take photos of grumpy strangers in Slovak villages, so here's a photo of Simon playing some melodic percussion in the main park/playground in Lučenec.

 

Divín Castle (Again)

In the days since my last post, we did just about the only thing there is to do in these parts: visit castle ruins. As I've already written ad nauseam on this blog, castles in various states of ruin (some partially rebuilt, and a couple completely reconstructed) are scattered about the country's landscape like popcorn on a cinema floor at the end of a film, and some of them are pretty fun to visit. 

On Tuesday, we visited Divín, the ruined castle that overlooks the village of the same name, located just nine or so kilometers northwest from Podrečany. I know - I wrote about it pretty extensively in this post, but what was different about this visit is now Simon is old enough to kind of understand what a castle is, not to mention what a ruined castle is, and we could actually explain to him why it was destroyed and when.

He kept asking if it was destroyed by bombs "like in Ukraine" (which is so sad that that's his frame of reference), and I was trying to describe to him old cannons and how they functioned. I'm not sure if he totally got it, but at least he's curious and asking questions.

The other nice thing is that Simon can now navigate most of the place on his own two feet, whereas the last time he was here, he was a year and a half old and needed to be carried around half the time.

Just a brief summary if you don't feel like taking the time out of your day to click on the above link to my older post and reading through my tortured prose: Divín castle was built in the 13th century, captured by the Ottomans and occupied for 20 years in the 16th century, and blown to pieces in the 17th century when one of its most infamous occupants, a dickhead named Imrich Balassa, was arrested by the Hungarian Imperial army due to his annoying tendency to raid and terrorize the nearby villages. Balassa's Hungarian captors destroyed his castle for good measure, and subsequent owners never bothered to rebuild it.

While the castle was pretty thoroughly destroyed, the ruins that remain are still big and tall enough to give the impression of a pretty substantial and imposing structure. I wish I could find an illustration of it from before it was destroyed. However, someone has done a detailed 3D rendering of it based on how it apparently looked, and they've made this video that offers a 360 view:

The views of the surrounding lush, green hills and colorful villages below are, of course, always stunning.

After visiting the cemetery where Terezia's dad's remains are located earlier in the trip, Simon is now kind of curious about cemeteries. There happens to be a small cemetery at the base of the castle hill around the back side, by the entrance, so we had to check it out. Simon asks me to read him the names and dates from the headstones.

After the castle, we got some ice cream at a small but apparently popular spot near the museum at the base of the castle hill, right smack in the center of "downtown" Divín. It was decent, but definitely not as good or flavorful as Záhradná in Lučenec. They did, however, have a small collection of plastic toy tractors and trucks by the outdoor seating, which Simon was eager to play with with once he'd finished his ice cream cone.

All the locals seemed to be stopping by the place for an ice cream cone - from sweet little kids about Simon's age with their grandmothers to big, burly, deep-voiced, middle-aged male workers with buzz cuts and blue coveralls.

Šomoška Castle (Again!)

On Thursday, we drove down to Šomoška Castle, which straddles the Slovak-Hungarian border. We've been to - and written about - Šomoška before, most recently in 2014, but this was the first time we took Simon there, in part because the foot paths are quite a bit more jagged, steep, and hazardous than other castle ruins in the area, and it just didn't seem like a safe or easy place for a toddler to navigate. I don't want to repeat myself too much about Šomoška here, so please take a gander at my post about it from 2014 for more information about the place.

It rained the whole drive down until just before the Hungarian border, which had us kind of worried, but then it abruptly stopped and the weather cooperated for the rest of the outing.

It's a striking ruin with a bit of a mysterious vibe to it. It looks especially imposing from the roads below as you approach it.

Of course, part of what makes Šomoška unique are the distinctive hexagon-shaped basalt rocks from the adjacent rock "cascade," formed by volcanic activity from millions of years ago, which were used to make the castle. Long, slender streams of hexagonal basalt rock flow in cascade-like formations down the hillside, resembling a frozen stone waterfall, and these rough cylindrical basalt streams were broken up and used as some of the stones to make the castle's walls.

 

Like most castles in the area, Šomoška sits dramatically at the tip of a steep hill and rocky outcropping overlooking a ramshackle and slightly run-down looking village and a surrounding valley of vibrant green fields and forested terrain below. It was originally built in the 13th century, then enlarged to its current plan in the 16th century. Ottomans occupied it for over 20 years in the late 1500s, but for most of its life it had a series of different Hungarian owners. While it managed to survive the Ottomans unscathed, it was a stupid fire in the 1800s that destroyed most of it

Šomoška has one fully intact bastion (its conical wooden roof was completely reconstructed at some point), but it used to have three. Previously, only two levels of the bastion were open to the public, but a third level has been made accessible since our last visit, with a new wooden staircase leading up to it. The horseshoe-shaped southern bastion appears to be mostly intact, but I believe it used to be higher. It seems it was the northern bastion, over the main entrance, that was largely obliterated and never reconstructed. The complex has a triangular floor plan.

The surrounding views from the castle atop the steep hill are gorgeous. When looking south into Hungary, the next hill in the distance is capped with yet another castle, called Salgó, named for the nearby Hungarian town Salgótarján. The castles in the region were built just far enough apart so that they could be seen from one another, so that if, say, an invading army of Ottomans was coming from the south, the southernmost castle would light up its big torches as a warning signal to the next castle up, that castle would then light its torches to alert the next castle, and so on, so that all the castles along the route to the north would be prepared for the oncoming invaders.

After tromping around the castle grounds, we walked down the short path at the rear of the castle that leads to the aforementioned rock cascade. I thought Simon would think it was cool, but he actually seemed more impressed by a large and super shiny green beetle that we saw walking on the trail. 

With the exception of an out-of-breath couple who appeared to have hiked up from the Slovak side (approaching the castle from the Slovak side requires a long, steep hike), we had the whole place to ourselves. Our car was literally the only one in the parking lot, and with no staff on site and the ticket booth closed and shuttered, the castle was free of charge. However, as we were driving back down the insanely steep hill, a horde of about 60 elementary school-aged kids was trudging up the street on foot, which must've been a school field trip. We were relieved to know that we missed all of that! At the bottom of the hill was a parking lot where three or four large buses were sitting and vomiting out a stream of even more kids. 

Fun Story About Terezia's Dad

Back in the 80s, during communism, long before things like EU membership and Schengen zones with free and open borders were even imaginable for eastern European countries, it was not particularly easy to cross the border into a neighboring Soviet state or satellite country. It involved a certain amount of planning, preparation, and red tape. In the 80s, however, it was not uncommon for people in Czechoslovakia to go to Hungary because, for whatever reason, during that decade, Hungary started to kind of open up its market to certain Western products. If you knew where to go, you could, for example, find a pair of Nike sneakers or even certain name-brand electronic components.

One time Tono had acquired a bunch of raw tripe, and I'm told that people in Slovakia, or at least in Terezia's family, don't really care for tripe, but apparently it's quite popular in Hungary. So, Tono carefully packed up his pile of tripe and smuggled it in a bus across the border into Hungary, and traded it for a new stereo boombox with a radio and cassette player. He had to cram the tripe into a bag which he stowed in the luggage compartment beneath the bus, and in doing so he was certainly taking a risk.

A young Tono with (from left to right) Tony, a cousin, and Terezia. (That suspicious look on Terezia's face is still one she wears often today.)

If the authorities had discovered his tripe at the border, I'm not sure if they would've carted him away in handcuffs, but he could have gotten into some sort of trouble, possibly having to pay a fine or something. At any rate, he managed to get it across the border undetected, and he took it to the aforementioned Salgótarján, which is just several kilometers south of the border. Details on exactly what transpired are fuzzy, but he was able to successfully offload the tripe, and he came back home with the boombox. His family was quite proud of his achievement. Terezia and Tony were at an age when they were starting to get into pop music and buying cassette tapes, so the boombox came at the perfect time.

Another detail about Tono's life that occurred to me was how, as I mentioned in the last post, he worked as a machinist in a factory making transmissions for Russian tanks - the very tanks which we now know, due to the war in Ukraine, have a fatal design flaw which causes the turret to pop off like a jack-in-the-box when hit by a missile. While it would be nice to imagine he had a direct hand in that design flaw, he was actually making the transmissions. Of course, if he were alive today and saw that tanks which he could have conceivably had a hand in manufacturing were being used in Ukraine against Ukrainians, he would have been devastated.

At any rate, here's a great photo of Tono at work, probably from the mid-80s:

Halič Castle (Again)

Halič is yet another castle I've written about already, but we went there again with Simon, this time to get some coffee and hot chocolate in its cafe, which inhabits the vast space that once was the castle's courtyard. Their hot chocolate is insanely good, and so thick you can eat it with a spoon. 

The last time we went there and actually went inside to the cafe, Simon was nine months old, and as such, it was not a particularly relaxing experience. He was incapable of sitting still at that age, and he was being kind of loud and fussy, and I kept having to get up and carry him around the premises so that Terezia and her mom could at least enjoy their coffee in relative peace.

This time Simon was still a bit of a wiggle worm, but at least he could more or less stay in the vicinity of his seat and was able to enjoy a cup of their amazing hot chocolate (only after it had sufficiently cooled off, of course). Naturally, it wasn't until we were getting ready to leave that we discovered a small Simon-scaled table and chairs in a rear corner of the room with a collection of coloring books and cups of crayons. Simon found a blank piece of paper and immediately started drawing a monster with seven pairs eyes, 14 eyebrows, 14 nostrils, and seven mouths.

If you don't feel like clicking on the link above and slogging through my older blog post, Halič is located in the colorful but slightly scrappy village of the same name, just several kilometers away from Podrečany, and it's visible from atop its hill for miles all around. Dating back to the 1300s (and possibly earlier), it is notably not lying in ruin today like almost all the other castles in the region. It was actually badly damaged in some mid-18th-century conflict, but quickly rebuilt in its more Baroque style, and reconstructed again in the 1800s. The castle remained under the ownership of one family, the noble Hungarian Forgáchs, from 1554 to 1948, which is unusual for a region where castles seemed to change hands often.

 

I like how the castle's website says, "Two world wars, the onset of Communism in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and the activities of the collective farm established on the castle grounds during socialism did not benefit the castle in any way." You think? 

In fact, during communism, the castle was used as a mental hospital from the 1950s until the 80s, which adds a dark layer to its history given what we know about most mental hospitals from that period. It's sometimes hard not to imagine the tortured howls of mentally ill patients echoing through the grand corridors, or people sitting around catatonic in straight jackets. The castle underwent considerable reconstruction in the 1950s to convert it to a psych ward, all of which had to be completely undone for its recent restoration as a five-star hotel.

As I mentioned before, it's honestly a bit posh and formal in a Habsburg/Hofburg Palace kind of way for my tastes; the castle would probably seem more at home in Vienna or Bratislava, and its cafe feels like the kind of place where you're supposed to eat Sachertortes while listening to a Baroque string quartet. But even so, it's quite nice (and almost weirdly decadent) for an area known more for high unemployment and relative poverty. Plus, the village below and the surrounding panoramic views of the rural scenery are quite picturesque, so visually, at least, it's a fitting location for a hotel of this ilk.

Simon and "Farm Work"

Simon has always loved helping with various chores around the house, whether it's sweeping, gardening, vacuuming, cooking, washing dishes, cleaning the bathroom, etc. I've always assumed that he just wants to be doing whatever it is that we're doing, and since we can't afford to hire a maid service back home, we're always the ones doing the cleaning.

So, with Terezia's mom's quite large yard and garden, there is always lots to do outside, and Simon LOVES following Terezia's mom around and helping her with whatever she's doing. One day they were brushing moss of the concrete base of the fence around her front yard, and the next morning he helped her plant onions in her garden. What's cute is that he keeps referring to it as "farm work," and the first thing he says when he wakes up in the morning is "I want to do farm work with Starka!"

Sometimes he invents strange projects for himself. For example, one day he made a speed bump out of dirt that spanned the width of Terezia's mom's street, directly in front of her house. He shoveled dirt from an area several feet away from the road into buckets, then brought the buckets to the road and scattered the dirt on it.

When Tony came back the following weekend, Simon insisted that they cut the grass again with the lawn mower. I hope this work ethic continues into his teens.

Click here to see all the photos taken so far on this trip.