Courtesy of the Grand Hotel Kempinski
A view of the High Tatras in Strbke Pleso, Slovakia.There’s some travel advice you never forget. “The Tatras are the most beautiful place in Europe,” I was told in a cafe in Prague 20 years ago. “The Alps are like an old man’s teeth. The Tatras are sharp, intense and wild,” said my Czech friend.
Fast forward today to the Grand Hotel Kempinski, the newly renovated 90-room hotel in High Tatras in Strbke Pleso, Slovakia. The birch logs in the marble fireplace nearby crackled, while a pianist began playing Dvořák — a perfect choice for this handsome, high-ceilinged dining room.
After ordering a Mitteleuropean dinner of beef poached in bouillon and served with roasted potatoes, creamed spinach and applesauce (Slovakia was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), I watched a pair of Muscovite blondes snuggle with their stocky companions, who jabbed away at their Blackberries. (Since I’d just driven two hours from the airport in Kosice, western Slovakia’s largest city and a place with no direct flights to Russia, I couldn’t imagine how they’d reached this aerie until a waiter explained that they’d come in by private plane.)
Courtesy of the Grand Hotel Kempinski
A view of the High Tatras from the spa at the Grand Hotel Kempinski.I had been lured here by a few friends for a ski weekend, but since there are few guidebooks devoted exclusively to Slovakia, I showed up at Kosice in almost total ignorance of my destination. “Andy Warhol was Slovakian,” the young woman at the Avis counter at the airport told me proudly. (His parents emigrated from Slovakia.) If the locals are friendly in Kosice, eastern Slovakia’s largest city, it’s partly because U.S. Steel purchased the region’s largest employer, a hulking mill on the city’s outskirts, and has made a go of it, and also because many of them have family in North America.
Kosice still has a handsome old Hapsburg heart. This great European empire may be long gone from the maps, but in central Europe its living imprint is still found everywhere, from details like the once official mustard color of its post offices and their invariable symbol, a hunting horn, to a local Viennese-style love of cafes, pastry and good coffee that held fast even through years of scarcity behind the Iron Curtain. Even though there was light snow the day I wandered around Kosice, Christmas shoppers were treating themselves to elaborate ice cream concoctions mit schlag in the city’s cafes.
Kosice takes huge pride in its hokey fountain that jets in time to music and its cathedral of Saint Elizabeth, a handsome 14th-century church with impressive gothic vaulting. But the building that moved me most was an elaborate pink palace on Puskinova Street that brought to mind the golden age of movie theater architecture in the United States. Standing in front of this oddly mournful structure and wondering what it was, I noticed an orthodox rabbi carrying a plastic Duane Reade shopping bag coming toward me down the street. He said “Hello,” asked where in America I was from and told me I was welcome to visit the synagogue once he’d unlocked a side door.
Though he was shy about his English, he told me it had been built in 1927, when almost 20 percent of Kosice’s population was Jewish, and then he showed me a little yellowed note that had been found behind the opulently decorated walls during its recent renovation. “May 20, 1944,” he read. “We have all been gathered here, probably to be sent off to work camps in Germany, but I do not know for sure.” From May 16 to June 5, 1944, almost every Jew in Kosice was rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
Martin Moos/Getty Images
Kosice as seen from atop the bell tower of Saint Elisabeth Cathedral.Leaving Kosice, I followed an industrial valley north to the old town of Presov, and then headed west to the Tatras mountains. Seen from old roads often lined by black oak trees, the Slovakian countryside was mouse-colored and nude, an ancient settled European landscape almost untouched by the 20th century.
Emerging from a long apse of beech trees, I spotted a hazy ruin crowning a butte-like outcrop and spent the rest of the afternoon spanking my knowledge of European history as I puzzled over this spectacular citadel (who? what? why?), which has the same floating, otherworldly beauty as Mont Saint Michel in France. (I later learned it was Spis Castle, a major Slovakian landmark that was built in 1120 to protect a fledgling feudal Hungarian state and fend off Tartar raiders.)
Five minutes and 15 miles of hairpin curves later, the climate changed completely. The boughs of the huge larch trees everywhere were bowed under snow, and the streets of Strbske Pleso at dusk where filled with cross-country skiers, parents pulling their children on sleds and hikers with walking staves.
It wasn’t until morning, though — after that terrific tafelspitz — that I really clocked the Tatras. Pulling open the heavy drapes of my room, I was dumbstruck by the Ansel Adams-like mountain majesty it had taken me 20 years to discover.
When my friends finally showed up later in the day, our Slavic winter party really happened — one day, superb cross-country skiing; the next, heart-pounding Alpine downhill; and another, the goofy sweetness of taking the tiny Italian-made elektricka train to Tatranska Lomnica, the most important ski resort in the Tatras, for some staggeringly pretty views, a day on the slopes and some mulled wine at Kaviaren Dedo, the highest cafe in Slovakia. Unlike the expensive, often crowded label-conscious ski resorts of Western Europe, I found myself thinking that Slovakia’s Tatras really are “sharp, wild and intense.” They’ve already ruined me for Courcheval, Chamonix and Megeve.
A view of the High Tatras in Strbke Pleso, Slovakia.There’s some travel advice you never forget. “The Tatras are the most beautiful place in Europe,” I was told in a cafe in Prague 20 years ago. “The Alps are like an old man’s teeth. The Tatras are sharp, intense and wild,” said my Czech friend.
Fast forward today to the Grand Hotel Kempinski, the newly renovated 90-room hotel in High Tatras in Strbke Pleso, Slovakia. The birch logs in the marble fireplace nearby crackled, while a pianist began playing Dvořák — a perfect choice for this handsome, high-ceilinged dining room.
After ordering a Mitteleuropean dinner of beef poached in bouillon and served with roasted potatoes, creamed spinach and applesauce (Slovakia was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), I watched a pair of Muscovite blondes snuggle with their stocky companions, who jabbed away at their Blackberries. (Since I’d just driven two hours from the airport in Kosice, western Slovakia’s largest city and a place with no direct flights to Russia, I couldn’t imagine how they’d reached this aerie until a waiter explained that they’d come in by private plane.)
Courtesy of the Grand Hotel Kempinski
A view of the High Tatras from the spa at the Grand Hotel Kempinski.I had been lured here by a few friends for a ski weekend, but since there are few guidebooks devoted exclusively to Slovakia, I showed up at Kosice in almost total ignorance of my destination. “Andy Warhol was Slovakian,” the young woman at the Avis counter at the airport told me proudly. (His parents emigrated from Slovakia.) If the locals are friendly in Kosice, eastern Slovakia’s largest city, it’s partly because U.S. Steel purchased the region’s largest employer, a hulking mill on the city’s outskirts, and has made a go of it, and also because many of them have family in North America.
Kosice still has a handsome old Hapsburg heart. This great European empire may be long gone from the maps, but in central Europe its living imprint is still found everywhere, from details like the once official mustard color of its post offices and their invariable symbol, a hunting horn, to a local Viennese-style love of cafes, pastry and good coffee that held fast even through years of scarcity behind the Iron Curtain. Even though there was light snow the day I wandered around Kosice, Christmas shoppers were treating themselves to elaborate ice cream concoctions mit schlag in the city’s cafes.
Kosice takes huge pride in its hokey fountain that jets in time to music and its cathedral of Saint Elizabeth, a handsome 14th-century church with impressive gothic vaulting. But the building that moved me most was an elaborate pink palace on Puskinova Street that brought to mind the golden age of movie theater architecture in the United States. Standing in front of this oddly mournful structure and wondering what it was, I noticed an orthodox rabbi carrying a plastic Duane Reade shopping bag coming toward me down the street. He said “Hello,” asked where in America I was from and told me I was welcome to visit the synagogue once he’d unlocked a side door.
Though he was shy about his English, he told me it had been built in 1927, when almost 20 percent of Kosice’s population was Jewish, and then he showed me a little yellowed note that had been found behind the opulently decorated walls during its recent renovation. “May 20, 1944,” he read. “We have all been gathered here, probably to be sent off to work camps in Germany, but I do not know for sure.” From May 16 to June 5, 1944, almost every Jew in Kosice was rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
Martin Moos/Getty Images
Kosice as seen from atop the bell tower of Saint Elisabeth Cathedral.Leaving Kosice, I followed an industrial valley north to the old town of Presov, and then headed west to the Tatras mountains. Seen from old roads often lined by black oak trees, the Slovakian countryside was mouse-colored and nude, an ancient settled European landscape almost untouched by the 20th century.
Emerging from a long apse of beech trees, I spotted a hazy ruin crowning a butte-like outcrop and spent the rest of the afternoon spanking my knowledge of European history as I puzzled over this spectacular citadel (who? what? why?), which has the same floating, otherworldly beauty as Mont Saint Michel in France. (I later learned it was Spis Castle, a major Slovakian landmark that was built in 1120 to protect a fledgling feudal Hungarian state and fend off Tartar raiders.)
Five minutes and 15 miles of hairpin curves later, the climate changed completely. The boughs of the huge larch trees everywhere were bowed under snow, and the streets of Strbske Pleso at dusk where filled with cross-country skiers, parents pulling their children on sleds and hikers with walking staves.
It wasn’t until morning, though — after that terrific tafelspitz — that I really clocked the Tatras. Pulling open the heavy drapes of my room, I was dumbstruck by the Ansel Adams-like mountain majesty it had taken me 20 years to discover.
When my friends finally showed up later in the day, our Slavic winter party really happened — one day, superb cross-country skiing; the next, heart-pounding Alpine downhill; and another, the goofy sweetness of taking the tiny Italian-made elektricka train to Tatranska Lomnica, the most important ski resort in the Tatras, for some staggeringly pretty views, a day on the slopes and some mulled wine at Kaviaren Dedo, the highest cafe in Slovakia. Unlike the expensive, often crowded label-conscious ski resorts of Western Europe, I found myself thinking that Slovakia’s Tatras really are “sharp, wild and intense.” They’ve already ruined me for Courcheval, Chamonix and Megeve.
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