An older village house in Ďapalovce. (source: Courtesy of J. T.)
Last week was a strange one in Upper Zemplín, an area of rolling, wooded hills in eastern Slovakia.
On the evening of Monday, October 9 it was hit by Slovakia’s biggest earthquake in almost a century. The epicentre was about 50 kilometres east of Prešov, and the shudders were felt as far away as Poland and Hungary.
No one was seriously hurt, and major infrastructure – in particular, the nearby Domaša dam and reservoir – seems to have emerged unscathed.
But a string of small villages in the area took a battering.
An ordinary place
Ďapalovce, which I visited over the weekend, is a fairly typical Slovak village.
It ranges along the valley of the Ondalík river, and contains a large Roman Catholic church, a small COOP Jednota grocery store, a primary school and couple of hundred houses. There are farms on the shallower slopes around the village and forests on the steeper ones.
A couple of fancy cars are parked among the Škodas and Hyundais that dot the main street, and some of the houses have been nicely renovated, but it is not a wealthy place. Most people commute to the nearby district towns of Vranov nad Topľou or Stropkov, to bigger regional centres like Prešov or Košice, or work in Bratislava or abroad. It is not uncommon for people to spend weeks at a time away on work.
The village does not have mains water or sewerage, in common with most in the area. Water is drawn from wells, meaning that in dry spells families must conserve supplies.
Most houses use wood burners as their main heat source, and many older homes still have traditional wood-fired stoves in the kitchen, although families typically use electric or gas-bottle ovens for day-to-day cooking.
There are a lot of unoccupied houses, whose owners live and work elsewhere. Most houses are large, reflecting the size of a typical family in this region until quite recently.
