The view from Poľana Mountain. (source: One2We)
“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”, the French national motto. The war cry of the French revolution.
It opened the door not only to progress, the Enlightenment, but especially to romanticism.
And with romanticism came emotions, phantasy and isolation, collision between dream and reality. A romantic hero was an extraordinary personality, an outsider. He found asylum in love. In a tragic and an unfulfilled love. So he turned to nature, which he admired and glorified.
And thus the romantic bourgeois, the hipsters of their time, all over Europe started to write. And they wrote a lot.
The highest volcanic mountain range
Victor Hugo created Quasimodo, who suffered a tragic love for beautiful Esmeralda in Notre Dame; Goethe's young Werther suffered in Germany, because of an unfulfilled love, of course. And George Gordon Byron quested across Europe. And in Slovakia suffered Andrej Sládkovič, a popular romantic writer. His unfulfilled love to a Slovak poetical femme fatale was a theme for the longest love poem in the world, Marína. And later for Bank of Love in Banská Štiavnica.
