Hidden treasures

It's raining and cold today, but I walked up to the Main Square to see if I could get some pictures inside the Jesuit Church I visited briefly on New Year's Day. Unfortunately, it was locked up tight.

So I walked up a few doors to the north to the Franciscan Church, dating to the late 13th century, the oldest church in the city. It has seen many additions and alterations over the centuries and was used for parts of the coronation ceremony of Hungarian royalty once held in Bratislava. The exterior doors were open, but the interior was so dark none of my pictures came out.

Tucked into a corner in front of the church is this monument, with fresh tulips. The weather-beaten engraving is almost illegible, but I did find the date 1745. I often see fresh flowers in front of statues and memorials around this city. Somebody cares!

As I was heading back down to Billa's, I spotted this painted wall on a narrow little side street, Biela. No signs explain what this is. It appears that the blue paint has been carefully removed to reveal the drawings underneath, which seem quite old, and work remains to be done.

That bronze plaque on Biela, in Slovak and English, was another surprise. This building was the home for most of his youth of the great sculptor Arthur Fleischmann, who was born in Bratislava in 1896. As an adult, he travelled extensively and studied art and medicine in Budapest and Vienna, finally settling in London. For more on Fleischmann:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/dom.fleischmann/index.html

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More statues

A nice pedestrian park along the Danube has three interesting monuments. I have ridden by them many times on the tram and took a few minutes yesterday to get a close-up look at them.

Here's the park, often filled with people of all ages out for a walk. It's on the edge of Old Town, just south of the Philharmonic Concert Hall and the Slovak National Gallery. I took this looking to the east.

This one, at the far end of the park, commemorates October 18, 1918, the date of the establishment of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia after the First World War. This was the first time it had existed as an independent nation-state and it lasted two decades until Nazism intruded. The plaque at the base of the monument is only in Slovak. The building to the right is the Slovak National Museum.

This large engraved stone by the river is just a few yards from the monument above. The engraving, in Slovak and Russian, notes the liberation of Bratislava from the Nazis by the Soviet Red Army on April 4, 1945.

This one is the most mysterious, surrounded by trees in the center of that little park. The inscription on the statue itself, in Slovak, with no date or attribution, translates roughly to "After the battle, freedom does not die." A newer marble plaque, also in Slovak, has been added to the base, but the only word I can translate is "liberty/freedom". I don't know enough about military uniforms or paraphernalia to identify the soldiers.

UPDATE: 10 January: Today I asked a student with almost flawless English to take a look at the other shots I have of that mystery statue to help me with the translation. She would translate the one on the statue as "He who dies in a fight for freedom does not die." We also blew up the picture I have of the marble plaque and it translates to: "For heroic Bulgarian partisans who died for our freedom." Please also see the comment below from Erich about the Bulgrians who fought at the Slovak National Uprising (against the Nazis) in 1944.

NOTE: Click on any image in this blog to see it full-size.