Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia

6. Returning to the Landscape

6 Returning to the Landscape 157 if slovakia’s landscapes had changed significantly since 1989, one thing remained the same: in the summer Slovaks still left the city for rest and relaxation. Like elsewhere throughout East Europe, in Slovakia August is the traditional vacation month. A visitor to the capital city during this month, perhaps on a side trip from Vienna, just thirty minutes away by bus, will find many shops in town with signs on their doors reading “zatvorené: na dovolenku [closed for vacation].” During the time of my field research in the mid-1990s, only a small group of newly profit-minded merchants remained in Bratislava to take advantage of the fledgling tourist market. Everyone else, it seemed, had headed for the countryside. Only a few years had passed since the flood of East Germans, crammed in their cars, descended on Hungary in the summer of 1989, just after the country opened its borders to the West. This August migration of “vacationers” had marked the beginning of the end for the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. That same August, three months before the Velvet Revolution, Bratislava itself was virtually empty. But rather than daring to join the droves of East Germans fleeing the communist bloc, Slovaks made their own private escapes. A common destination was the man-made lakes of Senec, about thirty kilometers outside the city. Here Bratislavans spent the month in their bathing suits, sitting in beach chairs and sleeping in small wooden vacation huts along the water. Others swarmed to the Tatra and Fatra mountains for hiking and trekking. Small villages throughout the country filled up with urbanites eager to relax with their extended families for a few weeks. No one knew that only four months later they would be free to go wherever they wished for vacation. That same summer of 1989, the ochranári had also escaped Bratislava ’s streets to continue their work in the Kvaiian Valley near Liptovský Mikuláê. It was the summer before their surprising takeover over of the Central Committee of szopk, and the summer after they issued their Earth Day Proclamation, which had boldly announced their new role as the environmental conscience of the nation. The 1989 brigade to the valley managed to construct a new water wheel for the upper mill. It took eleven people just to lift it up and onto the wooden axle. But there were plenty of activists on this brigade. After all, it was 1989, and zo 6 of szopk had over 500 members in its ranks. Six years later, in 1995, the conservation of cultural monuments, a practice that had become the cornerstone of the volunteer environmental movement under socialism, was still alive in Slovakia. The Bratislava City Committee of szopk continued to work at the lower mill in the Kvaiian Valley. Some 50 kilometers further west, Mikuláê Huba and his brother Marko, along with other members of the old zo 6, were putting a new roof on a small chata at Podêíp. And much further east, in Brdarka, a small village not far from the Ukrainian border, a fledgling environmental ngo was having a brigade of its own. In the summer of 1995, I was invited to all three of these projects by the people who organized them. Each had encouraged me to come observe and contribute to the volunteer practice of preserving Slovakia’s heritage and landscape. But I quickly discovered that ochranárstvo had developed along different paths. The ochranári’s brand of landscape preservation, which thrived under totalitarianism as an escape from the gray life of the communist city and which evolved into a surprisingly effective critique of the regime, experienced some significant transitions of its own. Among older activists, the volunteer preservation of cultural landscapes no longer served as a point of confrontation with state power. Instead, it remained a form of recreation and a sort of withdrawal from and introspection about the post-socialist world. For a group of younger conservationists, however, the once quite subversive practice of historical preservation became a new expression of patriotism and ethnic consciousness in a post-communist Europe grappling with increasing tensions of identity politics. The three conservation projects to which I was invited in the summer of 1995 serve to illustrate this transformation. In comparing these, what appear to be similar practices of landscape preservation in fact represent 158 Returning to the Landscape quite different...