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.
This statue was created by a German carver in around 1450, but is a copy of an earlier work from between 1330 and 1340 which is known as the Madonna of Altötting. There’s more about this original carving at the Abbey’s official web-site, and Altötting has some significant religious significance, it has been the location of Catholic pilgrimages for over 500 years to honour Mary, with Pope John Paul II visiting in 1980 and Pope Benedict XVI in 2006.
This copy is made from lindenwood (limewood) a relatively large amount of the original paintwork has survived, indeed so much that I wonder if it has been restored at some point. Given that it’s around 600 years old, the condition really is quite impressive and it’s notable that people have been sufficiently careful with it so that no fingers have been snapped off. The omission here is not knowing its provenance, where has this been for 600 years? A few museums are providing more details of the provenance, but this one will have to be a mystery.
I stayed at a hotel that was, as estate agents would say, “conveniently located” which was only five minutes from Bratislava Airport. This meant I could rise at the decadent hour of 06:00 and still breeze through security by 06:30 for a 09:25 flight. I could’ve slept longer, but I’m a creature of paranoia and prefer to hover near departure gates like a Victorian ghost just in case something happens to go wrong in the 250 metres between the hotel and airport.
The airport terminal.
All good, my flight looked on time.
This is the airside area with plenty of seating. The security process took just three minutes and the staff were helpful and upbeat.
My quick visit to the airport lounge which I wrote about separately.
The gate area was also suitably calm and the Wizz Air staff here were efficient, with the queueing process being made clear. The border control desk had no queue of note and the border guard didn’t sit and count my passport stamps, but he did ask for help finding the Bratislava stamp that the airport had put into the passport last week.
The aircraft was G-WUNA which I went in December last year from Poznan to Luton which happened to be its first anniversary (the aircraft, not Poznan).
Boarding the aircraft and I was pleased that the seating Gods had given me an aisle seat near the front. The flight was yet another one operated with care and precision by Wizz Air, the crew were friendly, the pilots made clear announcements and the aircraft was spotless. There were a couple in the middle and window seat who were quiet and calm, which meant that I didn’t have to be annoyed at anything.
Luton was colder than Bratislava and this pleased me. There was no wait to go through border control, so I was able to leave the terminal within fifteen minutes of landing. Another well spent £9 with the Wizz Air Multipass.
The Pearl Lounge at Bratislava Airport reopened a couple of weeks ago and it’s free with my Priority Pass card, so I went for a breakfast visit. I’ve never flown out of this airport before, so this is all new to me. The airport itself felt calm, spacious and organised, with numerous power points, which probably gives other people fewer reasons to pay to enter here.
There’s a rather impressive view from the lounge over the landside area and a First World War military aircraft, the Caproni Ca-33.
It wasn’t very busy in the lounge when I arrived with just one table occupied, although it got a little busier later on. The lounge is spacious with a variety of different seating, plenty of power points and easy to access wi-fi. And some shrubbery on the tables, but I suppose they have to make the space look premium.
The food and drinks counter.
The cold food selection, although there was a hot food offering of sausage, baked beans and scrambled egg as well which didn’t tempt me. This really was sub-optimal from a cross-contamination point of view, as there was just one set of tongs to take the food out, which meant that the whole lot was cross-contaminated. If you were a strict vegetarian, you couldn’t go near this as it was used for the ham. The options here are lettuce, cucumber, ham, cheese, feta and olives, which is the sort of breakfast that I like.
The coffee machine and drinks fridge. The espresso coffees were decent with a richness of flavour.
The beer options, along with Heineken, but it was too early in the day for me to partake.
My little breakfast selection. The pastries were OK, nothing too decadent, but I liked the salad elements although the ham was a bit insipid. Incidentally, every airport lounge should have olives and that feta cheese was very agreeable as well.
The on-line reviews for this lounge, bearing in mind it has only been open for a couple of weeks, are very poor. For my purposes, this lounge was fine as it had coffee, juices and some breakfast food items, but it seems that the food options are not surprising and delighting people. I didn’t have beer as it was too early in the day, but the selection was acceptable as there was a choice of three, although the other alcohol options seemed limited.
The lounge was generally clean, but they perhaps need to sort out the cleanliness of the plates and bowls, which were a little sub-optimal. Surfaces were also sticky in places on things such as the jugs of juice. Bearing in mind I didn’t pay for this particular visit I was entirely pleased, but I can see where all of these negative reviews are coming from as the entrance is usually over £30 and is going up soon, which is quite a lot of money. As I’ve written about before, the problem is that the only way customers really get value from lounges like this at these prices is to drink lots of alcohol, not something which is really ideal for multiple reasons.
Entrance into Bratislava’s Natural History Museum was included with the Bratislava Pass, so this seemed a useful distraction on what was a very hot day with a hot weather warning. There were a few fans dotted about, likely as there wasn’t obvious air conditioning, that I frequently positioned myself near.
An exhibit about human evolution.
A bone with rickets. This blog never fails to offer exciting content.
And a dinosaur that I thought looked quite cute in its own way.
This is apparently the oldest common ancestor of today’s apes and humans, the primate Pierolapithecus catalaunicus from Catalonia in Spain which lived around 13 million years ago and had African ancestors.
A woolly mammoth and the museum explains that the word ‘mammoth’ comes from the Estonian language meaning ‘earth mole’, which other sources sort of confirm, with some saying that because the remains were found underground some people thought that the horns were for digging. I’m not entirely sure many people of however primitive an education thought that, but there we go, I’m not going to pick a fight with Estonian linguists.
And an actual mammoth tusk and these could grow to up to four metres in length.
I thought this was some sort of shark, but it’s a great sturgeon. It’s like the museum was trying to catch me out, and succeeding…… As a fun fact these great sturgeon, if they’re not lifted out of the sea by hungry humans, can live for up to 100 years and can grow to seven metres in length.
Some wildlife scenes with stuffed animals and don’t those bears look cute? Although I’m still in a mood with polar bears.
A European bison and as a fun fact, although perhaps not fun for them, they went extinct in the wild in 1927 with every living one being located in a zoo. Breeding programmes have saved it and it’s back in the wild, although nowhere near as common as it was before.
I rather liked this museum, although there were some bits on things such as rocks that didn’t engage me personally, but each to their own. It wasn’t overly busy but there was a fair amount to see across the several floors. It’s well reviewed on-line and entrance is currently €6 for those who aren’t using the Bratislava Card. It’s a small price to pay to leave knowing more about bones, beasts and miserable fish.
Weaving some whimsy into the urban fabric seems to be something that suits Bratislava rather well, sometimes it’s just more appropriate than yet another fountain. This is Čumil, a bronze sewer worker lounging out of a manhole like he’s clocked off early and decided to spectate modern life from street level. Installed in 1997, Čumil is one of the more enduring symbols of the city’s post-communist renaissance. His name translates loosely as “the watcher” or “the peeper”, though that sounds more sinister than the reality. He’s not creeping, he’s just more resting. Or thinking. Or possibly trying to avoid doing any actual work. Relatable really when it’s this hot, although I might have already mentioned the sub-optimal temperature around here.
Created by sculptor Viktor Hulík, Čumil was part of a wave of playful public artworks that began to appear after the Velvet Revolution, as Slovakia sought to forge a new identity following decades of rigid Soviet-era architecture and, let’s be honest, quite a lot of grey and depression (or is that repression?). The 1990s were a time of transition, and this chap emerging from the underworld felt like a small but symbolic break from the past. Although I did at first think it was like one of those installations that I’ve seen in Poland where this had some sort of link to the Second World War and trying to resist German occupation from the sewers.
He’s been through a few bumps in the literal sense as Čumil has been run over more than once by inattentive drivers (I can imagine someone I know who would run this over but I won’t give names), leading to the installation of a warning sign which adds a strangely bureaucratic flourish to his otherwise relaxed presence. His nose has now been polished to a golden sheen by the constant attention of passers-by who’ve been told, with great confidence but very little evidence, that rubbing it brings good luck. Perhaps in the sense of “I survived kneeling in a busy intersection to fondle a bronze face” which is an achievement in itself. But at least he’s a grounded chap….
I rather feel that I could have taken more photos, but there we go, Bratislava is a peaceful but vibrant city at night.
And the next in my theme of what I consider to be interesting medieval carvings, carefully placed between beer posts to add some variety for my two loyal blog readers. The gallery states that this is Master of Hronský Beňadik, but I don’t quite understand that as this is a place name of a Slovakian village, so I’ve relied on AI to explain and the answer is apparently that it comes from the abbey there but they don’t know who created it. Either way, the abbey was seized by the Ottomans in the 1520s who kept the building but knocked some of the Gothic bits down and fortified it.
That might explain why this wooden statue isn’t still there, apparently made from lindenwood (I had to Google that, but it’s lime wood) as it’s from around 1470. A fair amount of the paint has survived, it’s in remarkably good shape for its age. I’ve never quite understood why statues from this period give the Madonna such long fingers, especially as that must have been harder to carve than short stubby ones. The young Jesus is already showing a blessing hand signal, which seems very astute for someone so young. I do wonder where this has been kept over the years, I couldn’t find anything of its provenance, but I still like that for a period this was an important devotional artwork that would have been important to at least a couple of generations (and likely more).
As some of my more astute friends have realised, and perhaps quietly judged when they wanted a white wine spritzer, I like a craft beer bar and I was pleased to arrive at Damian Beer Garden especially as it took me a few minutes to find it. It was well reviewed on-line and I did wonder if it would be quite busy on a Friday night, although it transpired not to be which seemed more unfortunate.
I went inside to the bar area where there was a friendly welcome and it was apparent that they prefer table service and so I actually went outside which I thought was brave of me. It was a sheltered courtyard and there didn’t seem to be any pests about (as in insects, I don’t mean English stag groups).
I like a simple food menu, less faffing about choosing.
The bar’s menu is on Untappd and I had my eyes on the Joe in the Garden gose, but that ran out when they tried to pour it. But, that’s the excitement of craft beer bars, they’re always changing and there’s something new and decadent around the corner.
The beer is the Danny Boy 16 from the Barn Beer Co who are from the Czech Republic, this hazy NEIPA was hoppy with tastes of stonefruit, perfectly agreeable. I’m not sure how big the Slovakian craft breweries are, but there’s certainly a lot more emerging from the Czech Republic. I clearly made a mistake here in not ordering a beer from the brewery itself, I’ll have to fix that omission at some point in the future.
The food was one of my favourite things, a perfectly proportioned meat to bread ratio of pastrami with sauerkraut and gherkins underneath, along with some inoffensive Swiss cheese. I’m picky about melted cheese, but this behaved itself and let the other ingredients have their moment.
While I was still admiring the structural integrity of the sandwich, a new beer appeared on the menu from CRAK brewery in Italy, a country dominated by wine but with a fast emerging craft beer scene. It’s the Giant Guerilla CRAK the Rules, a double dry hopped DIPA which was 8% ABV and was creamy, hoppy, smooth and really quite fluffy. Juicy, refreshing and decadent, this was a really decent beer.
I very much liked this bar, this is the kind of place that every city should have more of. The service was friendly, the beer list was well curated, the surroundings were clean, the atmosphere was relaxing and the food completely met my expectations. I hope that the venue is doing well as it was quiet when I was there, locations such as this deserve to prosper by focusing on high quality food and drink rather than verging towards generic rubbish.
