Bratislava
Dawn broke on a wide stretch of open water as we headed upstream from Hungary to Slovakia, this part of our journey reminding us that rivers are paradoxically both frontiers and cultural conduits. Paprika and marzipan in Budapest, coffee houses and filo pastry -as in apfelstrudel, for example - all came this way with the Ottoman Turks, in the centuries following the fall of proud Constantinople in 1453 when it was replaced by equally proud Istanbul. Before long the Magyar lands had fallen under the sway of the Turks, and the precious crown of St Steven, the symbol of the Hungarian monarchy, moved west. We saw its image on arrival in Bratislava, atop the spire of St Martin's, at the start of our afternoon walking tour. For during the years of Turkish occupation this was where the Hungarian monarchs were crowned, in a city known in German as Pressburg. Today Bratislava is capital of Slovakia, a country that negotiated an amicable separation from its sister Czech Republic in the early 1990s. Both speak a common Slavonic tongue but Catholic Slovaks and Protestant Czechs have followed differing historical trajectories for several centuries. This is the youngest as well the smallest of the several capital cities we are visiting on the banks of the Danube.
Its site is a commanding one, like a miniature Buda. It has great hill dominating the river, extensively fortified and fought over for centuries. It was here after Austerlitz, the famous 'battle of three Emperors', that Napoleon came to sign the peace with defeated Austria. Within months the thousand-year old first Reich had ended, Franz II abolishing the title of Holy Roman Emperor in order to prevent Napoleon from assuming it. After the walking tour, some of us visited the eighteenth-century Primate's House to see the Mirror Hall where the Treaty of Pressburg had been signed. As a bonus, we discovered that it also housed a rare collection of seventeenth-century tapestries from the English Mortlake manufacturers.
On the open water in the early morning, we had seen swans majestically circling. In the evening, as we departed Bratislava under the new post-war bridge over the Danube, there they were again. A poignant symbol of peace and continuity, one might hope, in a troubled world.
Dawn broke on a wide stretch of open water as we headed upstream from Hungary to Slovakia, this part of our journey reminding us that rivers are paradoxically both frontiers and cultural conduits. Paprika and marzipan in Budapest, coffee houses and filo pastry -as in apfelstrudel, for example - all came this way with the Ottoman Turks, in the centuries following the fall of proud Constantinople in 1453 when it was replaced by equally proud Istanbul. Before long the Magyar lands had fallen under the sway of the Turks, and the precious crown of St Steven, the symbol of the Hungarian monarchy, moved west. We saw its image on arrival in Bratislava, atop the spire of St Martin's, at the start of our afternoon walking tour. For during the years of Turkish occupation this was where the Hungarian monarchs were crowned, in a city known in German as Pressburg. Today Bratislava is capital of Slovakia, a country that negotiated an amicable separation from its sister Czech Republic in the early 1990s. Both speak a common Slavonic tongue but Catholic Slovaks and Protestant Czechs have followed differing historical trajectories for several centuries. This is the youngest as well the smallest of the several capital cities we are visiting on the banks of the Danube.
Its site is a commanding one, like a miniature Buda. It has great hill dominating the river, extensively fortified and fought over for centuries. It was here after Austerlitz, the famous 'battle of three Emperors', that Napoleon came to sign the peace with defeated Austria. Within months the thousand-year old first Reich had ended, Franz II abolishing the title of Holy Roman Emperor in order to prevent Napoleon from assuming it. After the walking tour, some of us visited the eighteenth-century Primate's House to see the Mirror Hall where the Treaty of Pressburg had been signed. As a bonus, we discovered that it also housed a rare collection of seventeenth-century tapestries from the English Mortlake manufacturers.
On the open water in the early morning, we had seen swans majestically circling. In the evening, as we departed Bratislava under the new post-war bridge over the Danube, there they were again. A poignant symbol of peace and continuity, one might hope, in a troubled world.
