With my excursion Saturday, I have brought my number of walled cities visited up to three (Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany, and Londonderry, Northern Ireland are the other two, for those of you not keeping track at home). It's becoming more clear to me that all walled cities are not made alike. My conception of walled cities was shaped by Rothenburg, as it was the first one I visited. There, because they have been restored in places, the walls completely surround the old city, without many major gaps. Even in Derry/Londonderry the walls are easily recognizable. In Levoča, in the Spiš region, the walls are more subtle. From what I attempted yesterday, it's not possible to walk around the whole city on them. The delineation between inner city and outer city is also not always clear.
I'll admit that the first triumph of the day is that I made it to Levoča all by my onesie, as Captain Sparrow says,
* and the second is that I made it back, too. I know it doesn't sound like much, but I think this was the first time that I'd been somewhere in Slovakia by myself that I hadn't been to before. I didn't miss any of the buses, and even though I had to ask a few drivers where they were going, I eventually got on all of the right routes. So, success.
It took me around four hours to get from Tisovec to Levoča, and about three hours to get back in the afternoon. That said, it's not a terribly great distance from one town to the other. Still, the landscape is different up there. Here in Tisovec we're surrounded by our spiky, wooded hills, which are part of the reason it takes so long to get anywhere from here. Poprad, which the buses drove through, has wonderful views of the Tatras; and though Levoča is less than an hour from Poprad, the Tatras aren't even visible from the town. The hills there are more rolling, and don't dominate the horizon. I do feel like Levoča is at a higher elevation than Tisovec, too.
the Tatras on the way home; the angle was an attempt to avoid a reflection in the bus windowI got to the main bus station in Levoča around ten to eleven.
Although there were no posted signs--"The stuff you came to see this way"--the steeple of the cathedral is visible from the station, and using that to steer by, I headed up toward the city.
The old center is based around a long square. In this square are the cathedral, Chram Sv. Jakuba, the (19th century?) Lutheran church, the old town hall, and the newer city government building. The sides of the square, Námestie Majstra Pavla, are lined with houses from the Renaissance, some of them still with their decorations, like the Thurzo House, below. One of them is the post office, painted yellow, of course, and others are museums and shops and cafés. The difference between the state of the main square and the buildings on streets just outside the square is remarkable. It's fairly obvious which buildings have been taken care of over the years. They're even now working on the old town hall; it's covered in scaffolding. But there are buildings nearby that appear to need much more work. Of course, these buildings off the square don't bring the tour buses in, either.
The cathedral is the main draw to Levoča. There is a thirty-minute tour in Slovak, but information sheets are available in English, French, and German. Levoča was the home of a sculptor called Master Pavel. His major work, an altar, is in the cathedral, and it's the tallest Gothic altar in the world at 18.62 meters. Although the altar is quite large, it's so tall because it has some pointy bits at the top. The three figures in the middle of the altar, St. James, Mary, and St. John, are all 2.5 meters tall--that's just over eight feet tall. There were signs posted against photography, but I snuck some pictures anyway. I hope in the future no employers read this and think that I'm a total scofflaw and have no respect for rules or antiquities. I would think that photography is forbidden for two reasons: to protect the art from degradation by bright flashes of light, and to keep people from making money from their art. To the first, I didn't use a flash anyway, because I know better; to the second, I won't make any money from taking stealthy pictures. So there. Here's the altar, wonky because of aforesaid stealth, and St. George, laconically stabbing the dragon.
As I mentioned earlier, there are three city museums. One is a museum of Spiš art; one is devoted to Master Pavel; one is the city museum. There is probably a particular order that you should visit them, but it was only two and a half euros for all three. I went to the city museum, then the Spiš art one, then the Master Pavel one (a copy of "The Last Supper" by the sculptor is below). An interesting thing I learned in the city museum was that the area was settled by Germans, so some of the documents in the museum are in Swabach, a German dialect. The city was first mentioned in writing in 1249.
Outside the Spiš art museum I saw a nice but slightly
dusty car that I found was an Aston Martin Vanquish S, all the way from England.
Once I'd gone to the museums and walked around the square a few times I had down one of the side streets and saw the Mariánska hora monastery. It's a very elegant-looking building at the top of a hill outside Levoča. During July there's a big pilgrimage to the monastery. It looked really nice at the top of the hill. I also walked around to what I'm thinking of as the back of the town, where there was some more wall. At this section you could see the extent of the hill that Levoča is built on. You could also see that it was a popular place to party. I walked that way for a while, then went back into the square, then tried to find one or more of the gates that are still standing. I found the Košicky gate, which is wide enough for cars to drive through. Then I walked in a sort of alley along the inside of the wall down toward the street that would take me to the bus station.
Levoča was a nice way to spend the day, even if over half the twelve hours I was gone were spent traveling. But traveling successfully! I would recommend visiting the town if you're interested in Renaissance art, or if you're traveling through the area and have some time to kill. I don't know if I would tell anyone to make a special trip all the way to Slovakia just to see Levoča, but it was a good trip for me. If only because I got to see this sign:
"Caution, guarded by
dog cat"
*Happy belated Talk Like a Pirate Day!
The first place we went was the zoo. It's up in the hills outside of Košice, in a nice location with good views. We didn't see all of the animals, but the ones we did see we saw very close. The last zoo I went to before this was the San Diego Wild Animal Park, where the animals get to wander around big enclosures, which is obviously nice for them, but which makes it a bit difficult to see them from a distance. At the Košice Zoo I figure we were about ten feet away from a pair of lions, who were fortunately very laid-back. When I actually thought about how close we were, and how little was between them and me, I was slightly terrified. We also saw a little goat escaped from its corral, and lots of bears. People were throwing food into the bears' pit, and at least one of the bears has learned to wait patiently for such tidbits.
Near the zoo there's a bobsled ride, which several members of our party enjoyed several times. Then we had a picnic before we headed back down the hill to the old town. Since it was Saturday, and the weather is still nice, we saw a lot of freshly-married couples having their pictures taken. We also saw several wedding parties going into and out of St. Elizabeth's. We ducked into the cathedral for a few minutes during one of the weddings, and our questions were how long each wedding is allotted, and how much must it cost to get married there. Not long and a lot are probably the respective answers there.
This time, the underground "museum" was open. On one end of the main square in Old Town there's an area where you can walk through some of the early fortifications of the city and its walls. There are also decorated bits of old buildings and a few former gargoyles. It is unspectacular, but not in a bad way. Below is a gargoyle in situ on Jacob's Palace.
After our subterranean exploration, some of us sat and watched the fountain between the State Theater and the cathedral, and some went looking for souvenirs. Then we went to a chocolate shop/café for a quick snack. The menu claimed to have milkshakes, and that is what I ordered, knowing that "milkshake" could mean almost anything. It turned out to be really, really good chocolate milk. Shortly thereafter we had dinner together at an Italian restaurant. After that it was time for the Tisovec kids to go to the bus station to catch our ride back home.
Sometimes you have those days where you end up thinking, "Well, that was unexpected." This was one of those days. The lesson is that good company can make all the difference in the world.
