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This is Juraj Haulik, or at least about 70% of him, seen here emerging stoically from a canvas that’s spent the last century doing battle with humidity, moths and what I assume must have been a particularly enthusiastic caretaker with a mop. Once the Archbishop of Zagreb and later its very first cardinal, Haulik doesn’t look too put out by the state of his portrait, and to be honest neither am I. It has a certain battered charm, like a 19th-century version of one of those sofas that’s been in the family for decades and may or may not be partly held together by hope.

Conservators might struggle to look at it, but I rather like it as it is. There’s authenticity in all those cracks and scars and you could restore it but then you’d lose that rather lovely sense that it’s endured several empires, two World Wars and possibly a badly controlled climate system in a dusty museum basement at some stage.

Juraj Haulik was born in what’s now Slovakia in 1788, he eventually rose through the clerical ranks to become Archbishop of Zagreb, a position which, in true Austro-Hungarian fashion, came with elaborate robes and a sceptre of some sort. He was known for supporting Croatian national identity at a time when it wasn’t exactly fashionable in Vienna, which probably earned him a few awkward silences at imperial dinners.

The panel by the painting states that it’s going to be restored and there’s a very modern urge to fix things, to polish and restore until they gleam again. But sometimes, a bit of wear and tear tells a better story than any pristine restoration could and it may not be perfect, but it’s real and authentic. I hope that the museum leaves it just as it is.

This lovely aquatic number is a Škoda 1101 Tudor, a name which sounds like it might have been dreamt up in a PR meeting held over a warm and annoying Pilsner and some leftover goulash. Produced in post-war Czechoslovakia starting in 1946, the 1101 Tudor was Škoda’s way of saying “we’re back,” albeit in a very gentle, unthreatening tone and possibly with the odd backfire along the way. I accept that I don’t know much about cars and also that British manufacturers were struggling as well, but it does look a little basic whilst also I suppose being creative.

The colour is certainly striking, a sort of minty-fresh toothpaste green that suggests someone wanted to make a statement, but had access to only three pigments. It has that glorious post-war optimism baked into the paintwork, the sort that says “things may be bleak, but by God we’ll build a car with a front grille like a Venetian blind.” I suppose communism had to instil some positivity somehow.

The Škoda 1101 was powered by a 1.1-litre engine, and with my limited car knowledge this is about as powerful as a strong breeze. The name ‘Tudor’ genuinely comes from ‘two-door’, which is a stretch even by motoring standards and I thought for a while that it was some sort of urban myth. Inside, the car looked reassuringly basic, there’s a large wheel, a gear stick you could stir paint with, and seats that offer the comfort of a bus stop bench. This was a car for people who had somewhere to be and didn’t mind getting there eventually, but there’s a place for not being excessive or overly decadent. And that’s probably enough of my thoughts about communism era cars for today at least….

This is the sort of car that really makes you feel like you’ve gone back in time, not to a glamorous era of chrome fins and leather driving gloves, but to something a bit more, well, functionally beige although at least it came in a choice of colours. It’s the Trabant 601, East Germany’s answer to the question no one in the West was asking, namely “How can we make a car that sounds like a chainsaw and smells like a lawnmower?” And yet, it is iconic.

This particular example, now safely imprisoned in the transport museum, would have rolled off the production line sometime between 1963 and 1991 (the last one fell off the production line on 30 April 1991) which doesn’t narrow things down much, since the design changed about as often as the Politburo. In an admirable commitment to aesthetic consistency, they decided not to modernise it at all over its 28 year production run. But why update perfection and all that?

The body isn’t metal, because that would be far too decadent. Instead, it’s made of Duroplast, which is what happens when you take cotton waste and add a lot of hope. To give them credit, it’s very eco-conscious as if you leave it out in the rain long enough, it may compost. The doors feel like they were designed by someone whose previous job was building filing cabinets, and there’s every chance they were. The logo on the front – a sort of stylised “S” stands for Sachsenring, the manufacturer. You can still buy Trabant badges on eBay for about £4, which feels both entirely fair and somehow excessive.

Inside, someone’s posed a mannequin behind the wheel, looking like she’s about to pop to the Intershop (and I am referring to the East German shops during the communist period, this isn’t a new business venture for Richard) for a packet of tea and some state-authorised toothpaste. The whole set-up includes picnic rugs, plastic chairs and a general feeling of socialist melancholy. There’s something quite charming about how defiantly unglamorous it all is. It’s not retro chic, it’s just well, rather retro. And not even on purpose.

It’s easy to mock the Trabant, and I merrily have, but there’s also something genuinely admirable about it. People waited years to get one of these. It was the people’s car, assuming the people didn’t mind an annual cloud of oil-smoke and the occasional need to push-start it on a cold morning. It’s also probably the only car that improved in value after reunification purely because it became an ironic statement. So yes, it’s slow, noisy, smelly, and makes a Sinclair C5 look like a Bugatti. But it’s also got character, which is more than can be said for most modern hatchbacks. I’d never drive one, obviously, but I’m rather glad it exists.

It’s an old railway ticket machine at the Bratislava Transport Museum and I can’t imagine that this has what might be called mass appeal, but I rather liked it. It was rolled out by ZSR (Železnice Slovenskej republiky) who are the national rail network and I didn’t see a date on it, but it’s from either the late 1990s or the early 2000s. It would have spat out a thermally printed ticket and I imagine that they weren’t envisaging too many tourists given that the instructions are only in Slovakian. You put your coins in, pressed a button to say how far you were travelling and out came the ticket. The machine seems to have been made by Merona, but I can’t find out anything about them, but they were used by the public transport networks of numerous Slavic and Baltic countries.

I like it as it’s unsung infrastructure which gets removed, but it was an important part of everyday life for many years. It all looks a bit clunky and I’m glad that technology has progressed, but it’s positive that someone has shown the initiative to ensure its preservation in a museum for people like me to look at excitedly.

I did quite a lot of climbing up towers in Bratislava, this one was the Old Town Hall which is a museum I’ll witter on about aimlessly in separate posts. Here are the views from the top of the tower and it was a relief to be up there given that there was a noticeable breeze which was absent from being lower down. I did wonder whether those with an ability to do jumping and aerial parkour would have been able to jump from roof to roof and they likely could have done.

One thing I hadn’t realised is that when Hitler annexed Austria as part of his Anschluss, he also pinched a bit of land near to Bratislava which meant that the river in the city was the border between Czechoslovakia and Nazi Germany. Here he is in 1938 standing looking across the Danube at Bratislava Castle, which I visited last week. On 14 March 1939, the Independent Slovak Republic was formed, breaking up Czechoslovakia as Hitler had taken what is now the Czech Republic. This has since created a difficult situation, as at first look it appears that this was when Slovakia was formed, but it was effectively a client state of Nazi Germany, so it’s not looked back on with much excitement.

This is in February 1940, the reality of the new Slovak Government. The Russian Red Army liberated Bratislava on 4 April 1945, although they were then stuck under Soviet rule until the Velvet Revolution in November 1989 and then the Velvet Divorce in 1992 when Slovakia finally became independent.