If you enjoy reading the Letters from Slovakia, don't forget to purchase a copy at the Slovakia Heart of Europe Store
A few weeks ago my wife and I borrowed my father-in-law's old, red Lada and drove across the Czech border to the town of Zlin, in Morava, to visit my wife's best friend, Veronika. She was actually staying with her parents for the summer, so this was a great opportunity for them to catch up on old times.
Ria and Veronika first met at college in England about four years ago and, despite the fact that the Czech and Slovak languages are so similar as to be perfectly understood by both, they have always insisted on speaking to each other only in English. This has always rather amused me, especially when early on when they would prefer to struggle with phrases in English, rather than taking the easy option of conversing in their mother tongues.
This was my first visit to Zlin and indeed my first time in Morava. Many of Maria's friends and family had told me that the people of Morava were extremely friendly and had a very similar mentality to the Slovaks. I was soon to experience Moravan hospitality firsthand, as straight away we were made to feel very welcome by Veronika's family.
We were hardly in the door, when we were invited to the dinner table to try some typical Czech cuisine. Veronika's mother is an excellent cook and we were soon tucked into a scrumptious meal. We were also introduced to a local red wine that Veronika's father had especially bought in for the occasion. Both parents seemed to very impressed at my level of Slovak, and to my surprise they understood me extremely well. I, on the other hand, found it extremely difficult to follow Czech, whereas a native Slovak would understand perfectly. They might as well have been speaking Polish as far as I was concerned, but fortunately Ria was there to translate what they were saying into Slovak, which was pretty bizarre.
As the early evening progressed, we retired to the lounge and it wasn't long before plates of cheeses, hams, sausages and cakes were brought out to nibble on while we continued to drink the wine. This reminded me straight away of a typical scene when visiting relatives in Slovakia. You have just finished your evening meal and are now paying a visit to an auntie or uncle, when suddenly you are bombarded with a table full of snacks. You make a feeble attempt to say that you can't possibly eat anything more but end up having to soldier on so as not to appear rude. As it turned out, in this particular case, it was lucky that the snacks were offered when they were, because they helped line my stomach for the incredible amount of alcohol I was about to consume that night.
As more and more glasses of wine were consumed, I began to get more of an ear for the Czech language and I began to decipher certain phrases, which from my perspective sounded like heavily accented Slovak that had been slightly mispronounced. Having seen how much I had enjoyed the Czech wine, our hosts decided that I should experience a tour of Zlin's Pubs, so that I could sample the many different Czech beers. I was told that there were a total of 77 pubs and bars in Zlin, which is an incredible number for such a small town. Our particular tour that evening consisted of seven pubs, where we enjoyed a different pint of the local brew in each one. The Czechs certainly enjoy their beer, more so even than the Slovaks, and I must confess that after all the wine I'd had I struggled to keep up the pace.
By this time of course I was very confident speaking Slovak, I was even speaking a little Czech. We talked, amongst other things, about the Velvet Revolution, the Velvet Divorce, the European Union and the up-and-coming General Elections in Slovakia. We also talked about the state of the economy, the exorbitant house prices in Great Britain at the moment, the Slovak rock group Elan and of course we talked about soccer.
All in all it was a really enjoyable night and a great start to the weekend. Needless to say we slept well that night, and didn't surface until late morning the following day. After eating a light lunch on the Saturday, we went into the town center, where I vaguely recognized certain haunts from the night before. Zlin is a beautiful town, with a very unusual history. It is probably the only town in the Czech Republic that was not built around a castle or a market place. Zlin was built around a shoe factory.
In 1894, the son of a shoemaker, by the name of Tomas Bata, founded a shoe factory, which soon began attracting workers from the surrounding countryside. By the beginning of the 20th century there were about 3,000 inhabitants in the small town that rose up from the factory. Bata then managed to secure the contract to supply the armies of the Habsburg Empire with their boots during the First World War. This meant that the factory was able to expand further and as it did so the town of Zlin grew. By 1930, Zlin had already grown to a population of more than 21,000, with Bata having designed much of the town as a modern, working environment for his staff.
Bata died in a plane crash in 1932 and the reigns of the factory were handed over to his son, also called Tomas. When the Communists took power after the Second World War, the factory and shops were nationalized and so Tomas Bata Jr. went to Canada were he successfully built another factory town, Bataville, near Ottawa. Zlin, meanwhile, was renamed Gottwaldov, after Czechoslovakia's first Communist president, Klement Gottwald. The Bata shoe factory was also renamed, now it was called Svit.
The Bata legacy is still very much evident today. This is especially so with regards to the simple, square-shaped, red brick houses, which Bata constructed to house his workers. Many of these houses remain in Zlin, and are some of the best accommodation in the town. It was in one of the Bata built houses that we found ourselves that Saturday evening, visiting Veronika's auntie and uncle. We sat out in the garden, enjoying a wonderful summer evening, talking, laughing, drinking wine, and of course eating a never ending supply of snacks.
So it was with much reluctance that we left Zlin, early on Sunday morning, and headed back for Slovakia. Veronika's family gathered round to wave us goodbye, and as we drove off I noticed that her father had his camera with him. The reason for this, as I later found out, was that he did not want to miss the opportunity to take a photo of an Englishman driving away in a 25 year old Lada. We would certainly miss Morava.
