How the corona-virus darkness has started to lift on our little mountain city in central Europe

How things that came around come around again in our Covid world… this story was written almost a year ago to the day in 2020. Our world had begun a slow creaking revolution in the universe and we thought we were making our first clod-hopping, aching steps back to normality. How wrong we all were, across Europe, the UK and so many other parts of the world.

And so today, step by step, hope by hope. shop by shop we began to follow the path we followed in 2020… the sun was shining, the icy breath came down from the mountains, some people wore mask, many others didn’t and three kebab shops were open for business.

Well, fingers crossed as we go outside again after more than four months of lockdown, this time we will be out for good…

A couple of days ago my ‘small-town’ city at the foot of the High Tatra mountains came back to life.

After three years living here we’d got used to its gentle bustle, its unsmiling-ness and the lack of eye contact and realised it was all down to to the virus of communism that permeated every aspect of life for decades.

It gave Slovakia a tough exterior which hung a shell across the softness and friendliness of its citizens.

It was fear you see, that made them look at their bootlaces as they walked down the streets.

But once the people in Poprad – our home now – got to know us we liked the way they ribbed us about our lack of ability to talk their language and how they had fluently mastered our own.

I even like its fizzy beer and Andrea love its biele vino, we love its cafe society, restaurants and its dark tower block memories.

We love the cold breath coming down from the broken shark’s teeth of the mountains… and the snow in the winter up to our ankles and the sun baking us into alcoholic dehydration between July and September.

Then about seven weeks (sorry, it has gone by in a timeless blur) one midnight, Poprad became a ghost town.

It was put to sleep by the authorities who said they were saving us from ourselves and corona virus.

The shops and the bars and the restaurants began to die before our eyes and the city council took all of their park benches inside so we and the homeless couldn’t linger.

Egidia Square became as quite as a mouse, the four lane Route 66 through ‘town’ became empty except for police cars and the bleating noise of rushing ambulances.

The snake of our river still ran through and it still stank of sulphur but AquaCity, once classed as the world’s greenest hotel, leaned against the mountains like some tired old captain of industry.

It’s power was gone its lights had gone out.

And the only things landing or taking off at Poprad-Tatry airport were pigeons.

Bears and wolves began coming down from the forests and falls to check out what was going on.

Dutifully, Andrea and I remained locked down in our penthouse apartment with plenty of wine and beer and shelves of food.

We marvelled at the silence.

Even the trains had stopped.

The only sounds we heard were the mechanical bells of St Egidia and the clarion cry of emergency sirens.

We were stranded together in high-rise dystopia and it was quite nice really.

Text would fly across the world from family member to family member, Skype would cough and splutter, then Zoom zoomed in and it all got a bit better.

Old friends out of the blue began to re-appear on Facebook or in emails.

In so many ways it felt good, lazy, lethargic a bit drunk. We were getting flabby and unfit, but we didn’t really care.

All around us the borders were closed for the first time in half a century, the police held their guns across to their crotches like metal snakes, politicians made things up, the news was full of emptiness and fear.

Thousands were dying across the world.

And then something happened.

We climbed down the nine flights of stairs from our eerie and stepped out into the light, not like moles coming out of their holes blinking, but like we sensed our world had come back to life.

Because we both have English phones we didn’t receive any texts from the government telling us what was going on – but we felt it!

We walked past the nurses from the old folks high-rise opposite the duck house in our garden and watched as wheelchairs and zimmers were socially distancing in the home’s garden and gazebo.

The nurses coughed in unison, not because of the virus, but because of the fags they were rabidly consuming in the cool clean mountain air. The old folks too, lock-down might have made them healthy, but now these craggy faced women needed chimneys on their straggly grey old heads too.

And the regular old men, bleary in donkey jackets, those who had spent their youth under communism, were sitting on steps outside potraviny after potraviny, guzzling slivovica, beer or rot-gut cider. It was only 2pm but it’s what they are used to.

Trash-can pickers in shell suits and parkas dangled deliriously from plastic roadside bins gathering the detritus lock-down had jettisoned.

And the shops were open too – the supermarkets had hardly closed throughout except for Sundays when hard-worked staff were allowed to rest.

Yep, shoe shops, kitchenware emporiums, haberdashers, chemists, bicycle shops, clothes shops, flower shops, booze shops, book shops, record and CD shops, blue-ray shops … almost everything was open. Even some of the park benches had been put back.

The bars were serving frothing beer through holes in the wall and restaurants were serving beef burgers and chips across rickety trestle tables in hallways and ginnels.

Joseph Bonk’s small shrine outside a traditional Slovak restaurant in the square has even had its flowers changed…

Yes, in our ‘small-town’ city we are halfway home … but what will it really look like when we finally get there?

TAGS: Coronavirus, covid 19, lock-down, Slovakia, communism, Poprad, High Tatra mountains, music, Roman Vitkovsky