St Martin's Cathedral in Bratislava and a Brief History of Slovakia

Bratislava is less than 125 miles from Budapest.

Vienna is just 37 miles away from Bratislava, making them the geographically-closest capital cities of any two nations in the world.

Overshadowed by world-renowned Vienna and Budapest which came before and after Bratislava on our Danube River cruise, the vibrant capital of Slovakia is approached by many guests with few preconceptions and possibly as an after-thought.

Coronation of Maria Theresa, 1741, Pressburg by Johann Daniel Herz

One reason you may not have heard of Bratislava is that until 1919, it was known by the Germanic name Pressburg.

During the Ottoman occupation of Central Hungary, Pressburg became the de facto capital of Royal Hungary as well as its coronation site.

The ceremony held here for Maria Theresa included her well-rehearsed horsemanship that revealed her deep respect for the equestrian traditions of the Magyar people that in turn indirectly resulted in 60,000 Hungarian troops heroically riding to the rescue of her royal claims.

Beautiful St. Martin's Cathedral served as the coronation church for Maria Theresa and 18 other Kings, Queens and Consorts between 1563 and 1830, beginning with Maximillian II and ending with Ferdinand V.

Julie and I had taken AmaCerto's Active Walker Bratislava Castle Hike Tour, which did not include St. Martin's, but fortunately Julie had written this historic site into the "Itinerary Guide" furnished by AmaWaterways as a must-see.

The stained glass is exceptional, but it was the statue of St. Martin by Georg Rafael Donner completed in 1744 that most grabbed my attention.

It's supposed to represent St. Martin sharing a coat with the poor, but to me it looks very much like an Ottoman Turk revealing a scimitar from behind a cloak intent on slashing a defenseless man.

A Google search shows several takes through history of the exact same subject with similar representations of this fourth century Hungarian Saint as a man on horseback brandishing a sword of some sort and sharing a coat.

To me, most of this art seems to represent a hidden danger behind the cloak of charity.

St. Martin's father was an officer in the Imperial Horse Guard of the Roman army.

As a young man, Martin himself was in the cavalry, so perhaps this is just showing he was a horseman who had served in the military as his father had.

In a History and Appreciation of Art at Golden West College, however, I learned that sometimes artists make political statements that could not be safely voiced in a more direct manner, so I always wonder about the motivation of artistic choices.

Artists often adapt subjects to conform with the cultural norms within their own homelands and eras to make them more relatable to their audiences

So was this some kind of political statement with the fez and scimitar, or does it say more about how I personally perceive the current influx of Islamic refugees who seem to have no interest in assimilating?

Art is always subject to interpretation, just like politics, but political statements are more likely to be quite direct.

I should note that our Hiking Tour brought us past several interesting sculptures, often revealing Slovak good humor.  On the weekend day of our visit, so many tourists pushed to have their photos taken with them that it seemed silly to jockey for position, especially when photos are available on line.

In stark contrast, we had remarkable St. Martin's Cathedral and its beautiful art essentially to ourselves.

Getting back to an earlier point about historical perspective, knowing this city was once Pressburg, you may wonder why the name changed.

As World War I concluded, the new country of Czechoslovakia earned freedom from the talons of the Habsburgs.

No longer dominated by Austria, the new country chose to change the city's Germanic name of Pressburg to the Slovak name Bratislava.

Under the leadership of intellectual idealist Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a parliamentary democracy emerged with great promise, combining Slavic peoples with slightly different languages and complementary economic strengths into a new country, but it would not have been possible without support of the Allies who defeated Austro-Hungary and Germany.


The Czech part of Czechoslovakia was an industrial powerhouse, while Slovakia was primarily agricultural.

From the outset, some Slovaks felt somewhat under the thumb of Czech leaders, but the alliance generally worked.

Almost exactly two decades after the founding of this peaceful democratic republic, Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland, the primarily German-speaking border areas of Czechoslovakia which Hitler considered a natural part of his country.

Not incidentally, this happened to be a heavily industrialized part of Czechoslovakia, which would subsequently feed the insatiable Nazi Blitzkrieg machine.

It also contained Czechoslovakia's border defenses, damning the fledgling country to inevitable conquest by Germany.

Under the Munich Agreement signed at the end of September, 1938, Great Britain's Neville Chamberlain infamously declared they had achieved "peace for our time."

Not quite.

As has been the case repeatedly throughout history, appeasement of evil failed.

Hitler immediately began making plans to crush Czechoslovakia.

The agreement between Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy became known as the Munich Betrayal to those whose fate was decided without their input.

On March 15, 1939, Hitler's Nazi forces conquered the Czech region.

Meanwhile, after years pushing for independence for Slovakia from perceived Czech domination, Joseph Tiso and his Slovak People's Party met with Hitler and struck a deal for an independent Slovak State.

Tiso's deal with the devil brought his "independent" country into Hitler's evil Axis, and there would be a heavy price to pay for this sin.

Unlike the Czecholovak Legion that fought on the side of Russia against their own country, Austro-Hungary, in World War I, the Slovak Army fought against their Slavic brothers in the Soviet Union in WWII.

No political movement is monolithic, as we might like to imagine.

Far less than all Slovakians supported their country's alignment with Nazi Germany, and an uprising by the Slovak resistance in 1944 continued clandestinely through the end of the war.

The "liberation" of Czechoslovakia by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics led to Russian communist domination for the next 44 years.

The heavy hand behind the Iron Curtain attempted to crush all dreams from that initial bold, successful experiment with democracy between WWI and WWII for this region that had previously been ruled by royal monarchies for centuries.

However, a spark of freedom ignited.

In the last two months of 1989, emboldened by the words of American President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, Czechoslovakia threw off the confining shackles of communist Russian rule with the non-violent Velvet Revolution, which had morphed from a communist-sanctioned memorial for a martyr killed by Nazis.

Happy to be free from decades of one-party Communist rule, they were nonetheless unable to reach suitable terms for reestablishing that pre-war union of Czechs and Slovaks.

Slovakia and the Czech Republic amicably decided to go their own ways, and on January 1, 1993, the independent Slovak Republic, more commonly known as Slovakia, was born.

Slovakia has embraced American traditions of capitalism, freedoms as found in our Bill of Rights, and democratic governance.

As a result of this mindset combined with their intelligent, highly educated workforce, Slovakia has made itself an advanced economy with one of the highest standards of living in the world.

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