Slovakia, Our Home for 12 Years

Currently I am writing a memoir of Joe Ann’s and my twelve years in Slovakia. Each month I will be adapting an excerpt from the book to post on this blog. This first entry gives you an idea of where we lived for the first eight years.

On August 12, 1997, Joe Ann Shelton and I left the U.S. to make our home in Slovakia. Woefully ignorant of world geography, most Americans ask us where Slovakia is. When explaining to Michiganders, I hold up my hand to show them the mitten shape of the lower peninsula and then draw a line through the center of my hand while explaining that if you split the lower peninsula from top to bottom and take the Western side of the state you will have an idea of the size of Slovakia with approximately the same population.

When in Texas, I was able to picture for people the country of Slovakia fitting into the panhandle of Texas with room to spare. With both pictures, I suggest they think of each state that touches these areas as other countries each with a different language, as Slovakia has Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the southwest, and the Czech Republic to the northwest.

I had been to Slovakia on a mission trip for the first time in 1993. The young man who interpreted for me was Dalibor Smolnik who was a seminary student at that time. Dalibor came to visit Joe Ann and me in the spring of 1994 to help prepare our high school choir from Calvary Schools to travel to Slovakia in the summer.

In 1995 Joe Ann and I went to England to attend Dali’s wedding to Laura Williams. He then took his bride to Banska Bystrica where he was the pastor of the Baptist church. It was a city in the middle of the country – on the map just above the word Slovakia – which we had not visited on either earlier mission trip. A couple of years later Joe Ann and I felt led to serve in Slovakia, it was Dali and the elders of the Baptist church in Banska Bystrica who extended the invitation for us to come.

Arriving in Vienna the morning of August 13, we loaded our things in a van belonging to Kelly, an American missionary Dali had recruited to pick us up. Soon we started the four-hour drive to our new home. After crossing the border from Austria into Slovakia, we traveled around the capital city of Bratislava, stopped for lunch, and then drove for a couple more hours.

Right after entering Banska Bystrica, Kelly turned onto a long street with eight-story maroon buildings stretching from one end of the block to the other. Each building was a single flat deep. Our address was 25 Bernolakova and our flat (apartment) was on the third floor.

Where we lived was important to us; we wanted to live among the Slovak people and these buildings, called panilaks because they were built out of concrete panels, put us in a densely populated area. From our two mission trips to Slovakia in 1993 and 1994, we had some idea of options. We were not interested in living in a single-family house. We were two older single women. When Dalibor told us he had been looking for a suitable place for us, we were glad that what he found turned out to be a flat in the block of flats on the street where he and Laura lived.

Dali had visited us in Holland, Michigan the year we traveled to Slovakia with the high school choir. He lived in our condominium for the time he was there and had his own imagination of what kind of place would be suitable for us. Consequently, the day he showed us through the 3rd floor flat in the panilak he apologized and suggested we could live there temporarily until we found something else.

Parked in front of the building, Dali said, “Leave the suitcases and trunks in the van. We can get them later. Let’s go up.”

We climbed the four or five open stairs made of cement onto a wide cement slab with a locked double door in front of us. Dali rang a bell that soon buzzed and unlocked the door so we could enter. From the entryway, we walked up one flight to a landing where there was a door to an open elevator shaft. On each side of the landing was a door to a single flat. Dali pushed the button next to the elevator door and we could hear the elevator descend. Once it stopped at the landing, the door could be opened and we stepped onto the elevator floor, a small space designed for about three people. When the door shut behind us, Dali pushed the button for the third floor. The flat on the left as we exited the elevator would be our home for nearly eight years.

Three members of the church, an older woman and two young people, were finishing up some cleaning when we arrived. They greeted us and Dali showed us through the flat. I will describe it in my next blog post.

Once the others had gone, we walked with Dali down the long block to 13 Bernolakova, in the middle of the first building, and rode the elevator to the top floor where he and Laura lived. Their flat was owned by the church and was provided to him as the pastor.

They lived in a block of flats with eight outside entry doors like ours that had flights of stairs and an elevator. On each floor there were two flats, one to the left of the elevator and one to the right, a total of 16 flats times eight entries for a total of 128 flats in the single long building made of concrete panels.

Their building ended at 19 Bernolakova and ours began at 21 Bernolakova with a small walkway between buildings covered with graffiti. Ours was a longer building with 12 entry doors and a total of 192 flats. The last entry door was at 43 Bernolakova. Altogether there was one long block with 320 flats on one side of the street.

Although the four buildings on the other side of the street were shorter and at right angles to ours, together they contained another 256 flats.

Much larger densely populated areas like this could be found in most Slovak cities. They were built under the communist regime as the government took the land from rural families to create large state-owned farms and in exchange moved the families into small flats in cities.

By having just two facing flats on each floor, it was always possible to see the comings and goings of your neighbors. This made it easier for authorities to keep track of people and contributed to creating a deeply fearful, suspicious population.

Communism was overthrown in 1989 in Czechoslovakia in what was called the Velvet Revolution. In 1993 the country was divided into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. When we arrived in 1997, the country was newly independent but the effects of communism on the thinking of the people remained.