There is Where Truth Happens
Slovakia, the Absurdity of Place and of Hospitality
I wasn’t kidding before when I said I will probably bring this up every fall. But in just a few days, I will again overlap the time I was visiting family in Slovakia. This was a part of the 100 days of solo travel, and I was on the long train ride across the length of the country.
While I was writing to my cousin about visiting, all I heard about was the Tatras. Slovakia isn’t known for big cities, but for its natural beauty, especially the mountains. They came up in every conversation until I arrived. They are a mountain range between Slovakia and Poland with the majority on the Slovak side. They are massive and a point of pride.
Rodná Zem
One of the first things I recall of that time was a movie we watched. I was introduced to my nephew’s favorite movie, and my heritage, Our Native Land (Rodná Zem). “He likes it for the songs,” my cousin said with a smile as her son emerged with a toy drum. The movie was directed by director Josef Mach in 1954 from Czechoslovakia. It is a movie where only traditional problems exist. By that I mean, all issues don’t actually threaten the traditions but merely amplify the way things were done. And by the time I arrived at the movie, in 2017, it was objectively hilarious.
For example, someone’s cousin is to be married; however, it is with a stranger from over the mountains. Folks in this village do not know him. They have not been able to verify and assess his temperament and conduct to see if he is a just man. He is strange.
And so it is that they eventually meet him. He is in the mountains when the men from the village happen upon him. They decide to test him. There are three different duels that he must win. He must earn the respect and approval of the others.
First, a villager tried to show him up with a ballad; however, this fool could not out-bellow the power of the stranger’s bagpipes. Next, axes. The champion ax thrower launched a vicious blade into a tree. The stranger, having no ax at all, was laughed at as too many axes were offered to him at his feet. He grabbed a large one, flung it in the sky for some reason, caught it, and threw it to split the first ax down the middle. Finally, a dance off. The village dance lord pulled a move and the stranger had to repeat then respond. Sadly, the villager could never have known the stranger had iron lungs and was shortly winded. The enter village then nodded to the stranger in approval saying, “they must have good men over the mountain.” They then danced, right there, all together, again, in celebration that the stranger was, after all, an honorable man.
I still replay this scene in my head from time to time. It’s too rich to forget. And it also showed me how richly beloved and beholden the mountains are for the cultural history of Slovakia. Despite the humor here, there is where truth happens.
To the Mountains
Later, I was taken there. My own American winter clothing was apparently insufficient, and I was given other clothes to wear. For example, my Columbia jacket was replaced with Adidas. I accepted the gift. We drove up to the lower level of the mountains to see the lake. It was frozen and there was still fresh snow on the ground in places from a few nights before I arrived. We walked around the lake. There was a ski resort where I was told many weddings happen, and there was a home near on the lakefront where the poet Maša Haľamová used to live.
It was a touching experience for me to see this place. Riding on the train back, time was mine to hold as I watched through the windows and saw so much of another place that isn’t mine. I wrote in my journal. Generations ago, lifetimes away, I could have been a Slovak.
It’s an uncanny thought, strange, even, in many ways, but what is life without a sense of absurdity?
Watching from my train window, the hills rolled past me again and the mountains just beyond were different this time. I thought of the movie I watched with my family and their own excitement to show me the mountains. “Look what we’ve used to make ourselves,” it all seemed to say.
Certainly, there is identity in place, but what moved me was the hospitality to know a place so closely in the face of the absurdity that this could have been my life. The bounty and reality of living off the mountains are what they use to know the world, their historic reach into now and now and now and into the open world.
Trevor
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