Slovakia as the Great Compromise

We invited our copy editors to share their reflections on life in Slovakia over the past year. This letter is from Francisco Mejia.

I first arrived to Slovakia in September 2002, over 20 years ago. I’d never voyaged so eastward from my point of origin, penetrating another dimension.

Those gray concrete paneláky scared me as my train from Vienna glided into Bratislava’s borough of Petržalka. I’d ventured too far into the European wilds and lacked sufficient funds for a quick retreat back to the West. No way but forward. Yet I delighted in the bleak aesthetic thrill of those buildings like giant tombstones beneath a sky bearing a deeper shade of melancholia. My imagination convinced me that my train had journeyed into the midst of a cosmic graveyard.

The image of that vast cemetery in which humans dwelled gradually took on the power of the immemorial. The remembrance of an event hinging on a Before and After, the mind a reliquary of sacred recollection. Customizing myself to what I referred to as “the other side” of Europe was a constant toil that chafed my soul. I forced my essence to surrender to this environment, which I perceived as crude and unrefined, lacking the gleam and polish of Western Europe.

I traveled to the former Eastern bloc for the promise of sour adventure, bittersweet escapades. As an American who prematurely discovered the hollowness of my nation’s dream, I yearned for a semblance of its European counterpart. However crass and boorish, Slovakia succored me with a heavily discounted version of that delusion.

Romance and subsequent family life varnished the path of the ensuing decades. Arriving alone I succeeded in creating my own ramshackle dynasty in these Slavic plains, peppering the land with offspring and spouses bearing my name.

Solitude leads to fecundity.

I have come and gone from time to time but still always here, ever-present. As a boy I used to study my pre-Velvet Revolution globe in my room, index finger caressing Czechoslovakia, ignorant of my destiny of one day inhabiting this part of the world. My mind furnished with baroque fantasies of Italy and Spain, I struggled against settling here. A war against spiritual and mental complacency. This was someone else’s Europe, not mine. But in the end it was my Europe, the one available to me. I brokered an uneasy peace with my childhood ambitions, relaxing into the era of the Great Compromise.

With enough effort you may encounter paradise in a junkyard, a sweetness to the dismantling of resistance impossible to overstate. Once dipped in honey the bitter root becomes palatable at last. You even learn to value this nourishment. I would have grown bloated on Milan, Paris and London. Give me the grim vegetables of Trnava (town in western Slovakia), the caustic vitamins of Poprad (town in northeastern Slovakia), the oracular mosquitoes of Komárno (town in southern Slovakia). Better to shatter one’s teeth attempting to bite off Gerlachovský štít (peak) than to fatten yourself on the light of Santorini sun pouring down your face like heavenly cascades of olive oil.

My present-day gratitude was hard-earned, squeezed from granite not fruit. I acclimated myself to the flavor, sustaining myself on Eden’s shadows instead of the garden itself. Grateful for the love slurped out of cracked desert floor. Embraces coaxed from the thorns. Wishing upon the light of a star that died a million years ago.

Slovakia is the rose that peers from the landfill mountain, thriving in the miasma.

Dreams do not come here to die. Instead they scale down, shave off the frills, economize. Megalomania in miniature, caged and trivialized. If Hollywood and Broadway refuse to succumb to your outrageous longing, Bratislava obliges, designed to quench the sad grandeur of your thirst.

This nation welcomes concessions, trade-offs, half-measures, bargains, cop-outs and sellouts. Your aspirations do not wither here. They give up the mansion for the condo. Big-time living in a shoebox. A mighty wave in a koi pond. The typhoon in the home aquarium. 

This is my Slovakia, in each past, present and future to be found, along with whatever waits outside time.

If you’d like to share your own letter to Slovakia for publication on our website, please send it to peter.dlhopolec@spectator.sk.