Bratislava

This was the alleyway leading out of the hostel where I was staying in Bratislava. I loved the decayed brickwork and so on, so even though this is by no means a tourist attraction, I wanted to try a photo.

Dating, as far as I can tell, to the 13th Century, the Starej Radnice, or Old Town Hall, has undergone many, many renovations, the most recent being in 1964. As such it has picked up elements of almost every European style.

Bratislava, in spite of having a narrow-gauge tram system, nevertheless has a Tatra T3 fleet, same as Prague, but these are the special narrow-gauge version, the T3SUCS.

Built in 1717-1727, the Trinitarian Church of Bratislava was built mainly to defy the Ottoman Turkish armies that were threatening Bratislava (then Pressburg) at that time.

I shot this to get a combination of old and new, with Cafe Moda in the foreground and Michelska Brana in the background.

It was snowing quite heavily when I took this, as it was December, but the primary subject here is the Slovenske Narodne Divadlo, or Slovak National Theatre, which is that big building to the left of the tram. There are actually two National Theatres, however. This is the older one, dating to 1920 (although it looks older, and it is, as you'll read below), and then there's the modern Slovenske Narodne Divadlo, completed in 2007, which had yet to open when I took this. In actuality, this building predates 1920 as a building, having originally been built in 1886 as the City Theatre.

This is Beblaveho Ulice, a street in the old Jewish ghetto of Bratislava, which was almost destroyed during the Holocaust, but has just barely managed to hang on to become a tourist attraction.

Technically on Zidovske ulica, very close to Beblaveho ulica (the previous photo showed the corner of Zidovske and Beblaveho Streets), this building was not always a clock museum, being built in 1760-1765 as the "House of the Good Shepherd" in Rococo style.

Although the site dates to Roman times, and was in fact the site of a Roman Church, the current St. Martin's Concathedral (formerly St. Martin's Cathedral) dates to 1221, although it was renovated in the 14th, 15th, 18th, and 19th Centuries. Originally, it was incorporated into the city walls, of which you can see the remains on the left. In the days when Bratislava (then Pressburg) was the capital of Hungary(1563-1830), it served as the coronation chapel. Maria Theresa was one of the better known monarchs crowned here.