August 22, 2025 From our base in Veľké Leváre we travelled to Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia. On the way to Bratislava we made a quick stop in Stupava, home of the legendary potter Ferdiš Kostka. His home and studio in Stupava is slowly being renovated to become a museum. At this time however his significance is heralded by a marker seen upon entering the town of Stupava, and there is a plaque attached to the front of his home to identify it as his and a banner announcing the promise of the museum to come.
In Bratislava we visited the Bratislava Regional Craft Center of the Centre for Folk Art Production (ÚĽUV), which aims to safeguard and develop traditional crafts and folk art production in Slovakia. It is located in a historical building in the centre of Bratislava and contains a gallery space, a gift and book shop, studio, and presentation space. ÚĽUV is working to keep the tradition of Anabaptist/Haban ceramics alive. We saw Masters of Tradition, an exhibition of works by contemporary Slovak artists. All of these artists have been deemed masters of their respective media and are reproducing traditional folk craft and adding their own voice to the traditional art forms.
Our next stop of the day was at the Slovak Museum of History, where we saw a remarkable display of Holíč ceramics, presented using a similar display strategy we witnessed at the Black Depo in the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic. Hundreds of objects are collectively shown in a large glass case that spans an entire gallery floor, situated in a darkened room painted black.
The Slovak Museum of History is one of eighteen specialized museums that make up the Slovak National Museums cohort. “The SNM – Museum of History is a significant part of the complex of specialized SNM museums. Its fundamental mission is to acquire, conserve, process collection items scientifically and in a specialized way, and to use them, make them accessible and through them document the development of society in Slovakia from the Middle Ages up to the present times. The museum administers approximately 250,000 collection items, including the numismatic collection from ancient times up to the present and collections documenting the history and ethno-cultural development of Slovaks abroad. The Museum is located at Bratislava Castle.”
