THE MORAVA Hotel in the High Tatras has based part of its hotel business on nostalgia for the former regime. It organises retro holidays in the style of the communist trade unions, while Czechs are the most responsive to this retro style, the Hospodárske Noviny daily wrote on April 10.
When Iveta Šestáková rented the Morava Hotel in Tatranská Lomnica nine years ago, she complained that all hotel items like towels, table cloths, glasses and cutlery, were marked with the ROH abbreviation, meaning Revolučné Odborové Hnutie (Revolutionary Trade Unions Movement). But she turned this disadvantage into an advantage, kept the hotel as it was and began to organise, 17 years after the fall of the communist regime, retro holidays with ROH requisites.
“Ninety people booked for the first holiday stay [in this style],” she recalled for the daily, adding that now she organises five ROH-style holiday stays year round.
According to Šestáková, another key to the success was the story of the hotel itself. It was exactly this hotel in which the legendary 1955 Czech film Anděl na horách (Angel in the Mountains) about Gustav Anděl (which translates as angel in English) was shot. The programme for holiday-goers is inspired by the film.
“But everybody knows in advance that this is a reenactment,” said Šestáková. “We do not praise the previous regime and its ideology at all.”
Czechs make up as much as 99 percent of the clientele.
“We tried to address also Slovaks, but they did not respond,” said Šestáková. “Czechs like a different kind of fun; they can also make fun, in this way, of themselves.”
