Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: November 12, 1995
(Page 3 of 3)

According to guidebooks, the town of Zdiar was made famous in 1925 by a documentary film, "The Land Is Singing." I missed the movie, but I visited the village, and it was well worth the zigzagging bus trip into the mountains toward the Polish border. The driver was a dashing fellow who had decorated his instrument panel with a pair of crossed banderillas and a collage of lurid snapshots of busty naked women. Encased in a column of beveled wood, the gearshift jutted out of the floor like a bedpost, and he changed gears at every curve with a flamboyant flourish of the hand.

Zdiar was built in the "goral," or mountain people, style, whose hallmarks are split logs, Carpenter Gothic fretwork and colorful ornamentation. While parts of the town resemble a frontier settlement in the American West, with pine cabins chinked with mud, other sections call to mind Pennsylvania Dutch communities, with abstract designs and hex signs painted on houses and barns. A whitewashed church stands on the highest hill, and the brassy bell in its steeple beats out the hours off-key, echoing over mountainous inclines where skiers have left runic scrawls in the snow for miles around.

As I explored the village streets, a tractor rumbled past me pulling a load of split logs with a pair of red underpants flapping in back as a warning flag to following traffic. Then, on a narrow lane, I encountered a horse-drawn sled upholstered with lamb's fleece. When I stood aside to let the driver pass, he nodded for me to hop aboard. I did so, and the toothless old fellow gave me a tour of the rest of the town, accompanied by his running incomprehensible commentary and the melodic jingle of the horse's bells. Afterward, I gave the horse a chunk of chocolate and the driver a dollar bill and they both seemed delighted.

The return bus ride made me long for the quiet of Zdiar. The driver had his radio turned on at top volume, tuned to what sounded like a heavy metal concert in Cracow. I jumped out early, in Tatranska Lomnica, and visited the blessedly silent Tatra National Park Museum, which soothed my nerves with its displays of local flora and fauna and folkloric costumes.

By the time I came out, night had fallen and somewhere someone had switched on another sound system. It broadcast not rock or pop, but opera, and its source wasn't the town's loudspeakers, but a point in the foothills above. Curious, I stumbled through the darkness, drawn on by Placido Domingo's rendition of "E lucevan le stelle" from "Tosca." Eventually I found myself clinging to a chain-link fence that surrounded a tennis club. The courts had been flooded with water that had frozen to create a skating rink, and under arc lights two people were out on the ice. At first glance, I thought it was a father leading his little girl on skates, round and round the rink. Then I realized that although small, she was a woman, perhaps just learning how to skate, perhaps relearning after an injury.

She pulled away from the man and skated off, her hair streaming out behind her. It would be a misuse of poetic license to say she skated like a goddess, like an Olympian. In fact, her ankles wobbled like the crystal goblets that the maitre d'hotel set spinning each night after dinner at the Grand Hotel. Still, she didn't fall; she advanced over the ice at her own speed and in her own fashion, sufficient in beauty and competence to that time and place.


A double room at the 83-room GRAND HOTEL, Stary Smokovec 062 01, Slovakia (telephone: 42 969-2154; fax: 42 969-2157), costs about $75 during the peak winter ski season, including breakfast. Spring and fall rates are considerably lower. Amenities include a swimming pool, sauna and restaurant. Dinner at the restaurant, which specializes in hearty European and regional dishes of the meat, potatoes and cabbage variety, starts at about $10, with local beer or wine.

SLOVAKIA TRAVEL SERVICE, 10 East 40th Street, Suite 3601, New York, N. Y. 10016 (212-213-3865 or 800-753-0582), is a private tour company that organizes individual or group itineraries to the Tatras and other destinations in Slovakia and Central Europe. The company will also book hotel accommodations, including rooms at the Grand Hotel.

The SLOVAK INFORMATION CENTER, 406 East 67th Street, New York, N. Y. 10021 (212-737-3971), can provide cultural, historical and travel information about Slovakia, including maps and listings of hotels and museums. The office is open Tuesday and Thursday from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M.

Photos: Top: Traditional transport in Tatranska Lomnica. Horses alsodraw sleds.; Above: The trolley that connects Stary Smokovec to nearby towns.; Below: A path edging a slope near Tatranska Lomnica. (pg. 45); Above: A decorated window frame in Zdiar. Right, top to bottom: Stary Smokovec's barn-red miniature Roman Catholic church; the half-timbered, if somewhat less than grand, hotel; the theatrical maitre d'hotel in nightly performance at the Grand Hotel. (pg. 46) (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)