The Foreigner's Guide to Living in Slovakia

One of the dominant styles of architecture found in Bratislava, and across much of Slovakia, is a style called socialist realism. This style of architecture originated in the Soviet Union and then was spread to many other communist countries. In Wikipedia, socialist realism is described as follows:

“[Socialist realism] depicts and glorifies the struggle toward socialist progress… . Its purpose was to elevate the common worker, whether factory or agricultural, by presenting his life, work, and recreation as admirable. In other words, its goal was to educate the people in the goals and meaning of Communism.”

In Slovakia, common landmarks that are done in the socialist realism style are fountains, monuments and statues, as well as mosaics and reliefs inside and on the facades of buildings.

For one academic year, I taught at the Technical University in Bratislava, in the department of Architecture. Walking around to the entrance of the building gave me the opportunity to look at the reliefs on three sides of the walls visible from the streets Nam. slobody and Jánska. There must be something like 15 or 20 images, mostly depicting the noble life of the proletariat.


These reliefs fascinated me. Though a few have very straight forward meanings, there were others that I could never decipher. Take for example the image of the woman worker and the cow. What does the second woman holding the scale represent? My first guess at interpretation was that a woman brought her cow to the market to sell, and the scale symbolized that she was getting a fair deal, by having the cow’s weight measured. I mentioned my theory to a friend of mine who was visiting me from Vienna and it was comic how she looked at me, as if she was amused by my naïveté. She said, “Under communism they would have simply taken the cow”. Well, so much for that theory.

Take a look at some of the other reliefs and see if you can interpret what roles these figures play and what they are supposed to represent. My guesses are below.

Click on the picture to start the slideshow

1. These are clearly two workers greeting each other.

2. The man on the left looks like he is creating something from glass. I’m not sure what the role of the man on the right is.

3. Here’s a real mystery. The man and the woman on the right look like a couple. I don’t know what she is holding in her hands or what kind of workers they are supposed to represent. The man on the left is a designer of some sort (notice the angle by his head). He looks like he’s carving something out of wood. I have no idea what all of this is about.

4. This one is confusing. The man on the right is a designer (notice the pen and ruler in the breast pocket) and the other man is a worker. What is the worker doing? Tanning leather? What’s that big machine? What does the designer have in his hand? It looks like a brush.

5. This one is also confusing. To me it looks like they are making bells, but it’s a wild guess. The woman worker is holding a tool that looks like a wrench. What’s that round object to the left of the man’s head?

6. This looks like two workers fixing a radiator, though I don’t have any idea what the worker on the right is holding.

7. A collective farm woman worker and a veterinarian examining an animal.

8. A scientist with a female assistant.

9. I haven’t the slightest clue.

10. This looks something like a “self portrait”. The man on the right is holding an angle and is dressed with a tie. He must be the architect. The man on the left looks like an artisan. He has his hand on a relief. The third man in the middle is looking at the wall behind him. Possibly he is in charge of hanging the reliefs.

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