slovakia 2017

i have been many times in slovakia this year, you know? well, my mother is ill and this time i took care of her for one week. why? because my youngest brother and his wife, who take care of her all year, were 2 weeks on holidays in turkey ...

liptovska tepla

we have had many stops this time:

• bratislava ~ my brothers place. the funny stuff was that when i came the 
• dubnica ~ we met my cousin vierka for a lunch
• ruzomberok (rosenberg)
• lucky / kalemeny / liptovska tepla ~ i took a bath and filled up all bottles i had in the local thermal and healing spring in kalameny. let's hope it helped a lot ...
• einsiedel (mnisek nad hnilcom) - my mothers birth place and her sister's house was our 'base camp'. yes, we have met relatives, walked a lot in the village, cemetery, i met all my friends in the village pub (and wifi hotspot) each night ...
• spitzenberg mountain (703 m) ~ i've managed to climb up the spiky landmark for the very first time. i went alone as my mother have been up there in august during the yearly spitzenberg tour with music and goulash and she prefered to stay with her elder sister ....  i have seen many, many mushrooms and a deer in the forest. the mushrooms were much more photogenic than mr. deer
• schmöllnitz (smolnik) ~ my cousin renate lives here and we have visited the orthodox catholic church built by the victims of the chernobyl nuclear catastrophy (ukraine) who were moved to eastern slovakia
• lake uhorna ~ the ice cold artificial lake built by the mining industry some 200 - 300 years ago. anyway, i swum three times there. my dears, we have had end of september ... and water temperature about 13-14 degrees celsius. of course, we have also walked with my mother around the lake + drunk some tee / coffee or had lunch in the nearby restaurant.
• göllnitz (gelnica) ~ in the center of the göllnitz valley we have visited the eldest sister of my mother and an aunt of mine
• kaschau (kassa, cassovia, kosice) ~ my birth city and a place where we visited a doctor with my mother this time and of course my father, who still lives in kosice 
• bratislava again
• melk abbey in austria ~ we enjoyed to take a break from driving in this beautiful benedictine monastery 
• anger (bavaria) ~ small but nice

bridge SNP over the river danube in bratislava

my mother loves to go out in order to drink a coffee and to eat some cake - an easy to provide joy :o)

bratislava castle

ruzomberok (rosenberg)

thermal and healing spring in kalameny

countryside in liptov area of north slovakia

einsiedel (mnisek nad hnilcom) below the spitzenberg mountain was our final destination

inside the catholic church

watch out, spitzenberg - i'm coming up :-)

einsiedel as seen from the cross at the top of the spitzenberg mountain

deer goulash with family 

orthodox church built by ukrainian tschernobyl victims in schmöllnitz (smolnik)

lake uhorna

the block where i spent my childhood in kaschau (kosice). 

good-bye, dear mother ... i think i see you again soon

kosice / kassa /  cassovia / kaschau

R.I.P dear grandparents, uncle, aunts

more pictures here

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Gelnica ~ Göllnitz ~ Gölnicbánya, SK

coming closer to my ancestors' place and visiting next mining city in the area, Gelnica (Göllnitz) in the region spis (zips) in eastern slovakia ~ gold, silver, copper, iron ore, lead, quicksilver, ...

a praying miner in front of the mining museum

a hammer instead of a cross on the top of the local church? yes, the people here used to believe in mining, if you asked me 😄

praying miner

1230 came the germans to this part of eastern slovakia because of an invitation by hungarian king after the mongols (wrongly named tatars?) killed huge parts of the slavic polulation here

source: the wikipedia page about freiberg, erzgebirge, saxony, DE 

part of the city square + the surrounding hills

do you want to read what wikipedia has to say? or see few more pictures?

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einsiedel

home sweet home? not really mine, but of my parents and thus an area i like soooo much even if zips (spis) is since centuries so poor ...the former mines (copper, iron ore, silver, gold, quicksilver) are closed, the forests + fields don't provide enough outcome for the people here ... so sad, my dear einsiedel an der göllnitz aka mnisek nad hnilcom

hot, my youngest daughter knows :-) ... and 2 years ago we visited also an old disused shoemaker's house with even much older oven + shoemaker's tools (einsiedel pictures in the middle part of that thinny album)

spitzenberg, there used to be a golden cross on top before ...

all saints? yep, let's visit the cemetery + evangelic church (waldfriedhof einsiedel)

an orb? a ghost? both?

R.I.P dear grandparents

catholic church

fire depertment house

spitzenberg

former house of my father's family

former house of my mother's family, the 2nd last one at the end of the village

adios sweet göllnitz valley

the other side of the mountain ~ the south ~ the conifers are gone, leaf trees came :-)

castle krasna horka after the fire (approximately 1 year ago, before fire here)

enjoy more pictures here and let's go back to the valley centre göllnitz and then back my birth city of kosice, the european city of culture 2013

ps: i think i have made some better quality pictures last time. i hope i will have some time to find them in my computer and upload few of them instead the current ones ... but you know, to keep my memories alive also bad quality pictures are good enough :-)

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