Embeddedness of chateaux and castles into the Slovak cultural landscape

Castles, chateaux and their late owners are not an immanent part of the official grand narrative about a “plebeian” Slovak nation. Meanwhile, the Slovak rural countryside is littered with such heritage sites, dominating the local cultural landscape: altogether 434 chateaux (i.e. bigger, more representative mansions within a settlement, not erected for a significant military-defense reason) are under heritage protection, third of which are depopulated, fifth of them are owned by private owners, others are used for social or community purpose. The primary aim of the three-year research which is presented here has been to tackle this contradiction between the plebeian national historical narrative and the landscape of chateaux.

During the research, local utilization initiatives and storytelling practices about chateaux have been mapped and scrutinized, with the methodology of critical discourse analysis. As a result, some general patterns were revealed, how stories about good-hearted, cosmopolitan, industrialist-landowners are remained, reconstructed or constructed. This de-ethnicized cultural bridge-making between local Slovakness and bygone (typical non-Slovak) chateau-dwellers seems to be triggered by the pure aesthetics of ruins, by general reflex of nostalgy to find some morally ‘noble’ in the past, by channelling grand European cultural epochs (renaissance, baroque, industrial revolutions) into the local identity, by the struggle of finding some ‘unique’ story of the settlement, and by mental (re-)appropriation of the heritage object by local community. All these motivations, the utilization initiatives and storytelling patterns can be regarded as a special embodiment of genius loci, which is not without global parallels, as it can be drawn an analogy with non-European examples of decolonization of heritage through its conversation and utilization.

Image credit: István Kollai