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A Girl in the Tatras

Tourists discovered the High Tatras a century ago and there are precious collectors’ postcards dating back to that time.

Old postcards are not just an object of interest for keen collectors but are period documents of value to a whole range of different people, from historians to architects and designers.

The book “The Tatras in the Times of the Monarchy” contains rare and precious photos of Tatran spa communities at the turn of the 20th century, many of which have not been previously printed in any similar publications. Unlike other books of a similar kind, the book deals not only with architecture but also with the people who lived in or near these communities. There are also pages about transport and sporting life in the Slovak mountains.

Zuzana Demjánová has drawn from period literature written in English, Hungarian, German, Slovak and Czech and has tried to present the Tatras to the reader in the way visiting foreigners saw them when they first arrived there.

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”My interest in the history of the Tatran spa communities started when as a student I bought a paperback edition of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’,” says the author. ”In the very first part when Jonathan Harker describes his arrival in Bistrica, I was really struck by his description of the Slovaks. Given that at the end of the 19th century we were just one of many ethnicities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I was impressed that a Briton even knew who the Slovaks were. In his depiction of them, in fact, they were the most remarkable people Jonathan Harker met in the Bukovina region and reminiscent of a band of Oriental thieves while being, as he was told, quite harmless (which incidentally contradicts another part of the novel in which a brutally murdered body is found and someone immediately said:´It must have been a Slovak who did it.’) After reading the book I started to look for any other references to Slovakia and Slovaks in foreign literature of the 19th century.”

The author found other historical references mostly in the published writings of various adventurers and travellers. It seems that both now and a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, the same rule applied: that people who came to Slovakia (or Upper Hungary) also came to the Tatras.

The American traveller John Paget described Starý Smokovec as a settlement similar to the first towns in North America. A few years later Tissot’s Unknown Hungary, Dowie’s A Girl in the Carpathians and the author’s personal favourite, Mazuchelli’s Magyerland, the narrative of our travels through Hungary…were all published.

Of these, it is Mazuchelli who devotes the most attention to Slovaks and the Tatras, vividly describing her impressions of her visit to Nový Smokovec, the personality of Dr. Szontagh (founder of Nový Smokovec) and last but not least, the common Slovak – superstitious, courageous, proud and wild.

In a publication by Sir Percy Alden is the interesting claim that the Slovaks have very different thermoregulation from the rest of Europe. The author bases this on the fact that in summer he saw men wearing warm sheepskins while in winter they worked effortlessly in the severest frosts dressed only in shirt and trousers.
”Of course I have also read publications written by prominent Slovak historians. I wanted to look at the Tatras, however, through the eyes of a foreigner, of a traveller from abroad.”

By coincidence, the author’s father is an avid collector of old postcards and so, along with looking for old books, she also started looking for old postcards. These have helped her form a clear idea of what the Tatras looked like at around the turn of the 20th century. Amongst their collection are such rare images as a photo of the Bissingen family villa in Tatranská Lomnica (the building stood for only three years) as well as photos beautiful for being so lively and animated (illustrations of winter sports or social life in the Tatran spa communities) and postcards of not only historical but also great artistic value (the work of the Slovak photographer and ethnographer Pavol Socháň).

”Behind the writing of ’The Tatras in the Times of the Monarchy’ lie both a strong sense of nostalgia and my sincere admiration for those people who were active in developing these mountain communities” says the author. ”The book captures a time which will never return.”

Author: Martin Búr