Old Bratislava has been restored in the last two decades, and tourists crowd its narrow streets, but it is still scarred by the legacy of communist Czechoslovakia, with boxy housing and a motorway that cuts between the castle and the cathedral. There are modern eyesores too: shopping malls and featureless office blocks with the names of foreign companies. Their profusion suggests a return to prosperity, and experts talk of ‘robust economic performance, with strong growth backed by a sound financial sector, low public debt and high international competitiveness drawing on large inward investment’.
Where the Danube meets the Morava, below Devín Castle, there’s a memorial to those killed trying to cross the iron curtain to the West between 1948 and 1989; further south, the huge Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros dam, opposed by ecologists in the 1980s, is now a destination for ramblers. The Bratislava region is one of the European Union’s six richest by GDP per head. so it’s hard to explain Slovakia’s anti-Roma rhetoric and rejection of migrants, its indifference to European elections and the growing popularity of nationalist parties. Understanding these means looking beyond the concentration of foreign investment and corporate headquarters in Bratislava: elsewhere, incomes are barely half the EU average.
The real central Europe starts beyond the suburbs of Bratislava. On a train heading east, a schoolteacher from Košice told us: ‘Schools and hospitals are in a terrible state. We’re short of everything. Most of my colleagues have gone to work in banks or insurance companies, or abroad. Only people who really love the job are still hanging on.’ She teaches history and the arts to 10-15 year-olds. She wouldn’t tell us her name, but did say she earns €600 a month. ‘At least it’s more than nurses are paid: my sister was getting €400. In the end, she went to Austria.’
Most teachers in her school were ready to strike over pay, but the headmistress knew how to manipulate (...)
