Emil Parizek with the old trunk that started the adventure. (source: Archive of EP)
Following the footsteps of his great-grandfather abroad, Emil Parizek found his cousin Pablo, a descendant of immigrants. All that because of an old dusty trunk.
"My father kept mentioning that we had some family in Argentina. When my grandmother died, I found a dusty leather trunk in the attic full of old black-and-white photographs, a preserved ship ticket from Prague to Argentina, various documents, bank statements, papers," Emil Parizek from the town of Turany, northern Slovakia, says about the beginning of his adventure in Argentina.
He also found a passport from 1939 for Emilio Parizek and a letter from Argentina.
"There was a return address, so I wrote a letter. And my cousin Pablo wrote me back," he continues. His cousin Pablo Parizek from Buenos Aires then contacted the Slovak embassy in Argentina and started looking for him. That was 25 years ago.
Three brothers
The whole story of two cousins from opposite sides of the Atlantic began during the 1st Czechoslovak Republic. That was when brothers Jozef and Ján Parizek went to Argentina in search of work and a better life.
The women they loved accompanied them, whom they married in Argentina, starting new families. After five years, their third brother Emil came. However, life in South America was not for him and he returned home at the age of 28. The other two brothers stayed to in their new homeland.
Both brothers and their descendants maintained contact with their Slovak family for some time. However, over the years, as the generations changed, contact gradually dissipated, until Emil Parizek found the letter.
A love of Slovak delicacies
At first, both cousins wrote letters to each other. Later, as computers evolved, they switched to e-mails, to video calls. Then, 11 years ago, Pablo visited his relatives in Slovakia for the first time.
"Pablo is from the third generation of Parizeks living in Argentina. He speaks Slovak beautifully, I just have to talk slowly to him," says Emil.
"I was in Vienna at the time to pick him up at the airport. He liked it here very much. We took him wherever we could," says Emil. They went to the Lomnický Štít peak, to the spa towns of Rajecké Teplice and Turčianske Teplice in the Žilina Region.
"He skated on a frozen lake, tried to ski, saw a hockey match. We also went to the Múzeum Slovenskej Dediny (The Museum of the Slovak Village), he saw folklore, carnivals. We travelled quite a lot around Slovakia in those three weeks he was here," Emil recalls.
