Bratislava – Old Town Hall (Eighteenth Century Map of the City)

This is a rather decadent old map of Bratislava, or Pressburg, or Pozsony, depending on how many empires you’ve been through and how particular you are about historical cartography. It shows the city sometime in the middle of the 18th century, back when people still called Austria-Hungary a good idea and maps were beautifully hand-drawn works of art rather than something you angrily pinch-zoom on while lost in a car park. It is a thing of beauty and the level of detail in the whole arrangement is high.

What we’ve got here is a proper Grundriss, a ground plan, the sort of thing a Habsburg official would have unfurled dramatically in a candlelit war room while saying things like “we must reinforce the bastion” and “who authorised this delightful fountain?” This large fortified lump on the left is Bratislava Castle, looking satisfyingly blocky and formidable, perched up on its hill like it’s judging the rest of the city for not being quite as symmetrical. But, the history of Bratislava has been for a long time the fortified heart and then the neighbouring castle arrangement.

I’m not suggesting that it’s a map to navigate by today, but the main street layout of the central fortified area hasn’t really changed that much. It’s a beautiful snapshot in time of a medieval walled city, albeit with many later redevelopments, not long before all the city walls were pulled down on the orders of Empress Maria Theresa in 1775. Although it was likely a sensible idea in terms of giving more space to the city and the threat of the Ottomans had somewhat diminished, it’s always just a little sad I think for a city to have lost its walls.