Tuesday Voice: To There and Back Again: Part 3

Košice

By James T. Carney

[Sequel to "Budapest"]

We were met at the train station in Košice by Hack Boscovich, who was Merrill’s successor as the minder for the Americans in Košice, and by one of the fellows who worked for Hack (and had worked for Merrill before). They took us to a night club next to our hotel where we stayed until about 1:00 a.m. watching the Slovaks dance to American music. The Slovaks love dancing and will dance till all hours of the night. One of the mildly depressing things about this trip to Europe was to realize the extent to which all of Europe has become Americanized—seeing all volumes of Harry Potter translated into Slovak and CDs with parental warnings (in English) on them because they are made by rappers may manifest the supremacy of American “culture” but it is not a development that I particularly welcome.

    In the morning we walked around Košice, which has an amazing wide main street (on which our hotel was located). We then drove out to the plant and went off for lunch in a very nice country-club type restaurant with Hack Boscovitch and one of the fellows from the plant. I had a very good trout. We then had a tour of the plant, including the casters, the tin plating mill (the last steel mill I had been in was the J&L Aliquippa tin plating mill which had been bought in 2000 only to be shut down), and a radiator manufacturing facility.

L-R: Rich, Hack, the author, Merrill

The next morning we drove up (with Hack) to the Tatras, which are the Carpthinian Mountains. It reminded me of my trip to Zermatt with Dad in that it was totally foggy. We couldn’t even see the mountains when we were at the base of them. This was my other hike that got knocked off due to wet and cold weather. We did visit a wonderful castle on the way there. It was a real medieval castle built in the 1200’s after the Mongol invasion had receded. It was of course a Hungarian castle given to the local nobility by King Bela IV.

Slovak castle (L-R: the author, Rich, and Merrill)

    After our disappointing trip to the Tatras, we went about two hours to see a minor league professional soccer team starring the brother of Valeria, who was the secretary for the Human Resources operation at the plant. We got invited into the bar during half time by the owner of the team who had also built the best golf course in Slovakia.

The author (foreground left), Merrill & Rich (3rd & 2nd from R, respectively)

The game ended in a 0-0 tie but Valeria’s brother was clearly the star of the show. We were seated at the game with Valeria, her sister-in-law (the soccer star’s wife), and another woman who worked as a secretary in the steel mill in this town. (We were unclear as to whether this steel mill was an electric-furnace operation or simply a finishing mill. We drove by it and found that it took up a lot of land and that it had several huge scrap piles, which is one reason that I think it may have an electric furnace.)

That's Rich in the foreground left, Merrill & Valeria behind him to the right

    We then drove back to Košice and had a wonderful dinner there with Mickey (who was one of the group from the HR operation at Košice) and his significant other—Elana with whom he had been living for the last dozen years. Not having had an opportunity to give anyone advice for some days because of vacations, I happily told him to marry her. I have a very good steak at the restaurant.

The next day was really the last of our trip. We went to what was described to me as a flea market but was really more like an open air market where everyone was selling the same stuff and where it took us almost an hour to find our way out of the labyrinth and back to our car. I hate shopping anyway and this was claustrophobia at its best. We also went to a department store that was at least less crowded. The shopping carts are all stored outside the store and one pays a quarter to get a cart but gets the money refunded upon returning the cart.
    We then went to see another “castle” which really turned out to be more an 18th-19th century palace of the Andrassy family (which was one of the chief families in Hungary.) One of my friends in Pittsburgh was descended from the Andrassy family and she had told me how her grandmother had talked to her about life in Hungary before the First World War and about riding in the family carriages. The castle had the funeral coach for one of the countesses along with a model of her dog who had been buried with her. There was a small village below the castle with a graveyard that, like most Slovak graveyards, had stones laid out horizontally as opposed to standing vertically.

Thatch roof

    One interesting thing that Rich and I explored was a life-size replica of a catapult which had been placed on the ground below the castle. We had a good time figuring out how it actually worked. One interesting thing we had seen in the military museum in Budapest had been a model of a medieval castle under attack. The model showed the catapults in operation as well as one of the three-story towers that were pushed up against the walls to enable the besiegers to cross the walls.

Catapult

    We drove back from the castle to the village where Valeria’s parents lived.

L-R: Rich, Merrill, Valeria, Valeria's mother & father
(the author took the picture)

We had tea with them and they told us how Franz Joseph (the next-to-last emperor of Austria Hungary who had ruled for almost 60 years) had stayed in one of the houses on their property when he was making a trip to Košice. I suggested they put up a sign saying “Franz Joseph slept here.” Her parents had once owned more property but had lost it under the Communist regime, which had turned gardens into building sites. Certainly their experience indicated that legal problems resulting from the restoration of private property in former Communist regimes would be significant because of the claims of former property owners.

Restored village

    Two or three other houses were located almost on the same property that was owned by other members of Valeria’s family. Valeria’s father had built his own house—in part I think to make sure that he did not lose the land. He raised pigs among other things. He seemed to be much better off than most of the Slovaks that I met.
    We then headed back to Košice and went to tour Mickey’s and Elana’s apartment-condominium, which Mickey was having gutted and rebuilt. It was quite small—two bedrooms plus a kitchen and a living room—but they were doing a nice job and were rightfully proud of it. Slovakia seemed to me to be much poorer than Slovenia or even Hungary. The top Slovak in the HR department made about $1,200 per month and Valeria made about $400. Košice is filled with apartment houses—generally rather ugly looking things built by the Communist regime.
    One major problem in Slovakia is the Romi (i.e., gypsy) problem. I think the current theory is that gypsies are Indian in origin. Certainly, the ones I saw were smaller and darker than any European. For whatever reason, they are concentrated in Slovakia, much to the dislike of the Slovaks, who view them as many Americans view blacks. Indeed, Slovak comments on what the Romi had done to the subsidized housing given them could parallel American comments on what the blacks have done to public housing in this country.
    We had tea with Mickey, Elana, Valeria, and another couple from the HR group—Carl and Maria. (Carl had been the one who went with Hack to pick us up from the train station.) Maria was a history teacher who spoke some English and who taught American History. She was the most American-looking woman in Slovakia in the sense that if she had walked down the street in Pittsburgh, she would have been noticed only because she was very pretty and not because she looked foreign. While I told her that, she had no interest in leaving Slovakia. They had a 7-year-old who had just won a prize in school, so we were all making a big fuss over him and gave him a small present.
    Carl, Maria, and their son then left us and the remaining troops went off to an Italian restaurant where I had very good Italian spaghetti. (To be non-discriminatory, I also advised Elana to marry Mickey.) Finally, however, we had to leave since we were getting up at 3:00 to take a plane to Prague and then to Newark and then to Pittsburgh. It was a good thing that I could sleep on planes because I did not get back to Pittsburgh until 6:00 a.m. Košice time, Tuesday morning, and I got up and went to work after six hours of sleep in my own bed. We did have a six-hour layover in Prague so we went into the city and walked around for a couple of hours before taking the subway and bus back to the airport. Prague, like Budapest, is a place where you could spend a week easily with a couple of day trips. It is the one capital in Central Europe which was not damaged in World War II. It was even more Americanized than Ljublijana, Budapest, and Košice.

I must give a special word of thanks to my traveling companions, Rich Gainar and Merrill Kline, who put up with—although not necessarily in this order—my driving, my snoring, my beer-drinking (not that they didn’t have a little pivo themselves), and my historical lecturing. We were already planning a trip the following year to Slovenia and Austria. However, USS has a mill in Serbia, so maybe I would be able to talk the group into venturing down there.
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Copyright © 2013 by James T. Carney

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