Buried under monuments
Magda VàsàryovàMagda V âsâryovâ - actress, sociologist, politician and dip
lomat. She gave up acting (both in the theatre and the cin ema) in 1989. Subsequently, she served as the Czechoslovak Am bassador to Austria (1990-1993) and later as the Slovak Ambassador to Poland (2000-2005). In 1993 she founded and supervised the non-governmental Slovak Foreign Policy Soci ety (Slovenska spolocnost pre zabraniem politiku). Between 2005 and 2006, she was the Secretary of State at the Slovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2006, 2010 and 2012, she was elected as a member of the National Council on behalf o f the Christian Democratic s k d u-d s (Slovak Christian and Democratic Un ion). She has published: Kratkę listy jednému mestu about her hometown of Banska Stiavnica, Kto su Slovaci? Historia. Kultûra. Identita, a collection o f essays со-edited with Professor Jacek Purchla, Hlavicka statu, and her latest work, Polnocny sused, about Poland and Polish-Slovak relations, as well as essays and articles in the Slovak and foreign media. In 2010 she received the Golden Medal o f Gloria Artis for her long experience of foreign policy and culture politics.
Buried under monuments
Magda VdsdryovaHearing experts talking about heritage, I have realised that you are talking mostly about beauty, about vibrations, and about love. So with respect to emotions, it is good, it is correct, that we mostly talk about irrational things. But as a politician working with the budget, the opposition, and coalition parties, etc., I have to ask some questions.
Who?
Only rich and educated societies protect the monuments o f their an cestors. The poor demolish them to build houses.
Where?
Today, the modern style o f buildings is so far from what our ancestors built that only idealistic reconstructions are taken into account, rather than the adaptation o f old buildings to the current fashion.
How?
How should we change medieval towns into modern functioning cities which correspond to the 21st century? Without this, we create museums such as Venice, while emptying out the centres o f these towns.
Poor people in Slovakia have contributed to the development o f our historic ruins by collecting bricks and historic stones to build their houses. The Communist regime allowed them to plunder the castles o f noblemen and the libraries o f scholars. Despite all this, every Slovak village still has at least one Gothic church and cycle o f the Stations o f the Cross. In my opinion, we are buried under historic monuments and relics, yet we still feel we are a poor country and must save everything.
Why should we save and study our heritage? Because in the centre of Europe heritage has shown us that the values we have on the surface are most certainly our common creation. Not only for the generation of our
national ancestors, but also of many other nations, our neighbours, as well as for current European cooperation.
So with respect to our heritage, this is evidence that we must not keep nationalistic attitudes. On the contrary, we desperately need to cooperate to understand the values we have.
Today’s wealthy citizens and societies, which we are also part of, pre serves and restores all possible heritage sites and monuments. It is a new priority for civilisation which is honoured not only as an architectural link of our ancestors, but also a spiritual one. Priority, both socially and politically, is appreciated and required.
I f you don’t agree w ith this perspective you are punished by activ ists and the media. How different it is from the times when Haussmann knocked down a large part of medieval Paris to set out the broad boule vards and made room for its modern palaces which we are now trying to save. The same happened when the walls of Vienna were knocked down, turning the moat into a four lane road around St. Stephen’s Cathedral. In Bratislava during the late 1960s, however, they demolished the red light district with its easygoing girls in the doorways, and yet we still don’t for give them (not the girls, o f course). Today people do their best to restore it perfectly to how it looked on old photographs, and store old dried wooden spoons without any real value except a sentimental one - that of belonging to their grandmothers.
Could we ever imagine rebuilding the tower o f St. M ary’s Church on the M ain Square o f Krakow according to the latest fashions, just as our an cestors turned Gothic churches into the Baroque style? Or would we ever reconstruct Bratislava Castle without the glittering glitzy rococo tschotske, which had probably never been there in the first place, despite the fact that it looks so rich? At most, we are only able to build something modern and functional in the old castle: toilets, are the only really modern rooms. Many Slovak cities still maintain their medieval layout, but when you walk through Levoca, Bardejov, Stiavnica, Bratislava, and Keżmarok late in the evening, you won’t meet a living soul. The tourists are already having dinner in the modern hotels and the thugs no longer live in the city centre. We have pushed them out to the horrible but suitable satellite neighbour hoods with their modern bathrooms and corner shops. Therefore, I won der to what extent we should keep the Middle Ages in our cities. And how can we allow the city centres to have a normal life, not just for the tourists and the authorities? It seems to me that people are being forced out o f our cities by monuments.
Aesthetic manuscripts of Romanesque and Gothic churches and castles are still considered to be most valuable in our societies. Should we help our citizens to identify themselves with the 21st century, at least with structures such as the glass pyramid at the Louvre or the National Bank building in Slovakia? When we remember the battle around the “Danc ing House" in Prague, however, and despair with Jan Kaplickÿ, the archi tect who regretted his "Octopus" - the green and purple blob design for the modern art library - which cost him his life, we should slow down with our passion for spending public money purely on restoration.
So my next question is, are we able to create really modern cities in Central Europe as a symbol o f our modern life which are valuable to us?
We must realise that in our Central Europe we are not able to save ev erything that swept through our territories, and we will have to sort it out. Haussmann no longer threatens us, but we still risk lovingly maintaining not only the 19th-century palaces, but also Hotel Kyjev in Bratislava, which is disregarded evidence of the architectural loss o f the senses in 1970s.
We don’t only have the finances to preserve all the sights, but more importantly, we don’t have roles and content for all the ruins and palaces. Because empty palaces, churches, and ruins are only for foreign tourists, and this is not a good way of handling these monuments. All heritage must live with us, and be filled with children, love, young families and our style of life. This is why I am here, to listen to the experts’ arguments, and then to win elections to ensure that some part of our finances from the social programme go into heritage.
I was born in the medieval city of Banska Stiavnica, and the date 1562 was engraved above my cradle. Should I also be preserved?
We don’t just want to be buried under the lifeless and scholastic monu ments unless they have some real life inside them.
