“Я… я… я… я… я выиграл…, я очень много выиграл.”
(“I… I… I… I… I won, I won a very great deal.”)
Alexei (The Gambler) – Sergey Prokofiev based on Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Last year when I asked my son which opera he would like to see he suggested The Gambler by Sergey Prokofiev. Unfortunately, this is rarely performed and the only stagings that we could find were in Russia, which, for obvious reasons, we were not going to go to. As an alternative, he suggested Dvořák’s Rusalka and consequently we arranged our visit to Ostrava at the end of November to see it. Between booking to see Rusalka and going to Ostrava, the opera company there announced its programme for 2026 and it was, for the very first time, going to perform The Gambler. As tickets would not go on sale until after we had seen Rusalka, we decided that we would see if we enjoyed our first trip there and, if so, book The Gambler as soon as tickets went on sale.
Last time we went to Ostrava, we spent a day in Katowice en route. This time, my son suggested going via Bratislava, as he had never been to Slovakia before, but it would be my fourth visit to the city.
Day 1 – Wednesday 20th May 2026 – London to Bratislava
As there had been a tube strike announced for the day that we were going to depart and engineering work on the railway line on the day we returned, I decided to drive to Stansted and leave my car in the mid-stay car park. The cost of parking is normally much more than the train fare, but for a short trip with two people travelling the difference was not so great. We arrived at the airport in plenty of time and headed for the quiet area that I normally use to wait for our gate to be announced, only to discover that it was closed for building work.
We got on the plane promptly, but by the time everyone was on board, and it waited for its slot on the runway for take-off, it was a few minutes late. Initially, the views were obscured by cloud, but this started to clear as we neared our destination. There were good views of the Czech city of Brno not long before we made our final approach to land in Bratislava just before 3pm.
There was no queue at the e-gates for EU passport holders and we were soon outside and quickly found the bus stop for a bus to take us to the city centre. Although not full on leaving the airport, the bus filled up with passengers at the intermediate stops along its journey. We did not go all the way to its final destination of Bratislava Railway Station, but transferred to a tram which took us to the edge of Bratislava Old Town, near to our hotel.
By the time we had checked into our hotel and dropped our bags, there was not really time to justify the entrance fee of visiting any of the major attractions, so instead we decided to go on a walk to see some of the main sights of Bratislava. After going past the Čumil statue of a man emerging emerging from a manhole, we came to Hlavné námestie, the main square where Bratislava’s Old Town Hall is located. We noticed a lot of police around and in a side street a line of black limousines, some of which carried a Chinese flag.
Within the old town there are a number of baroque palaces, which these days are used for a variety of purposes – some are embassies, some host cultural events. After taking a circuitous route via St Michael’s Gate, we came to St Martin’s Cathedral. This church was the place that Hungarian monarchs were crowned between 1563 and 1830. The top of the spire is topped with a gold replica of the Hungarian crown.
We then walked via the city walls up to the front of Bratislava Castle with views across the Danube and the so-called UFO bridge which spans the river just below.
We returned via Hviezdoslavovo námestie, where nearby is the Soviet ‘Victory’ monument and the impressive looking Old Slovak National Theatre. Further on, we passed the Art Nouveau St Elizabeth’s church, which is striking due to being blue inside and out.
For dinner that evening, we ate in the restaurant that I had been to on my previous visit to Bratislava. There I had grilled cheese with cranberry to start, followed by mutton with gnocchi. Unfortunately, I thought that the quality of the cooking had deteriorated since my previous visit.
After dinner, we went for a walk in the dark along both banks of the Danube, crossing it initially on the walkway under the UFO bridge and returning on the Starý Most (Old Bridge), which is now only used by pedestrians, bicycles and trams.
Day 2 – Thursday 21st May 2026 – Bratislava
As we thought it would take the longest to visit, our plan was to visit Bratislava Castle in the morning and then see how much time we had to go to other attractions. We walked up the hill to the castle, this time approaching from the side not facing the Danube, so that we could visit the castle gardens before the main building of the castle opened at 10am. When we had finished wandering around the castle gardens we made our way around to the front entrance of the castle. There were a lot of armed police around the castle that morning and eventually one of them stopped us from making any further progress. Apparently, the castle was being used for a state function that morning – we were told by the policeman that it should reopen to visitors ‘after lunchtime’. Ironically, I had checked the castle’s website that morning, which gave its normal opening times, but also said that any additional closures would be reported on the website!
Instead, we returned to the Old Town and went to the Old Town Hall in Hlavné námestie. The Old Town Hall dates from the 14th century, but it has been remodelled on many occasions. It now houses the city’s history museum. We first climbed the tower in one corner of the town hall, which gave good views across the city. In the upper floors of the town hall, you pass through to the adjoining Apponyi Palace. At the time of our visit, the Apponyi Palace was housing a special exhibition describing the lives of a number of Bratislava families from the 19th century through to the mid 20th century. Immediately prior to World War I, the composition of the population of Bratislava (as defined by first language) was approximately 40% German, 40% Hungarian and 10% Slovak. The exhibition gave a fascinating portrayal of how the families from the different ethnicities coped with the changing geopolitical situation when, after World War I, Bratislava moved from being part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to being in the newly independent Czechoslovakia. The main part of the Town Hall building had exhibitions describing the history of Bratislava from earliest times through to the present day. There was also information about how the Town Hall itself had changed over time. It was originally created by amalgamating three adjacent town houses, but over the years the front and the tower have been redesigned a number of times. Finally, we left the Old Town Hall after a couple of hours and went to the ground floor of the next door Apponyi Palace, which had an exhibition on Slovakian wine and viticulture.
After visiting a supermarket to buy some lunch we returned to the castle at at about 2pm. Thankfully, all the armed police had disappeared and we were able to enter the main building. We turned down the option of paying extra to view a special exhibition on Marie Antoinette, but just bought tickets to access the main exhibitions of the Slovak National Museum of History within the castle. In the basement of the castle, there was a special exhibition on the Celts in Slovakia. Until I visited a special exhibition about the Celts in the Czech National Museum in 2017, I had not realised that the Celts had settled in this area. The castle houses a collection of religious art and a main exhibition of Slovak history. However, compared to when I last visited the castle in 2017, the exhibition of Slovak history stopped in the 17th century rather than continuing through to modern times. There were also special exhibitions on the Slovak Diplomatic Service and on Josip Plečnik, a Slovenian architect who was prolific throughout central Europe in the early part of the 20th century. Before we left the castle we climbed to the top of one of its four corner towers for views across the Danube.
After the castle we just had time to return to the Old Town and climb the tower of St Michael’s Gate and visit the Red Crayfish Pharmacy. I had not been in these two places since my visit to Bratislava in 1985, when the Red Crayfish Pharmacy was known as the Apothecary’s Museum. St Michael’s Gate is the only surviving gate of the original city wall and was first constructed in about 1300. As you climb to the top of the tower there is information about the construction of the tower and the various renovations that it has had. The front room of the Red Crayfish Pharmacy is fitted out as a former apothecary’s premises, but the remainder of the building is used as an information centre for the city. There is a model of the city as it was a few hundred years ago and there is an animation superimposed on it, describing the building of the city fortifications, the attempts to capture the city and other developments in Bratislava’s history.
On our way back we treated ourselves to ice creams, as it was a warm day. Before dinner we resumed the walk that we had started the previous day, now going outside of the old town. We first went past the Grassalkovich Palace, an enormous Rococo mansion, which now serves as the official residence of the President of Slovakia. One account I have read suggests that the Grassalkovich Palace was the place where Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria first met his future wife Sophie Chotek – their assassination in Sarajevo became the direct cause of World War I.
Near the Grassalkovich Palace is the former Archbishop’s Summer Palace, home of the Archbishop of Esztergom (the highest ranking archbishop in Hungary) during the Ottoman occupation of Esztergom. It is now used as government offices. Nearby is the communist era Freedom Square, previously known as Gottwaldovo named after the communist Czechoslovak President Klement Gottwald. The water feature in the centre of the square has recently been restored after having been defunct since 2007.
Our final stop before dinner was at the Slovak Radio building, which is in the form of an inverted pyramid. This architecturally modernist building was completed in 1983.
For dinner, we went to a slightly old-fashioned establishment outside the Old Town. My son and I shared an enormous cheese plate for a starter, while I had pork with smoked sausage and melted cheese to follow. Inside the pub there was a large grainy black and white photograph from the past of the outside of the building. The people in the street were all wearing very drab looking clothes. By examining the photograph very carefully and noting some posters in the window at the time, we concluded that the photo dated from 1985 – the year of my first visit to Bratislava!
There was one final stop on the walk that we had been following, which was some distance from all the others. After dinner, we climbed to the top of Slavin Hill, where there is a 40 metres tall Soviet war memorial that can be seen from all over Bratislava. Surrounding the memorial is the Soviet war cemetery containing nearly 7,000 graves of soldiers who died in the battle to drive the Nazis out of Bratislava. When we visited, the memorial had fresh flowers laid in front of it.
Day 3 – Friday 22nd May 2026 – Bratislava to Ostrava
After an initial visit to a supermarket for supplies and to Bratislava’s main post office to post a postcard home, we caught a tram to Bratislava hlavná stanice (the main railway station) to catch a train to Ostrava. The train was due to depart at 10:46, but when we arrived at the station the departure board told us that it was running ten minutes late. After we went to the platform, the delay estimate increased to 15 minutes. The train was the EuroCity Bathory train, comprised of Hungarian rolling stock and travelling from Budapest to Warsaw.
We left Bratislava 15 minutes late as predicted. My son and I had a compartment to ourselves throughout our entire journey to Ostrava, despite the rest of the train appearing to be quite busy. We travelled quite slowly along the line out of Bratislava, which seemed to have major engineering work going on. We eventually crossed the Morava river and entered Czechia, where the train sped up. The first stop in Czechia was at Břeclav, from where we departed on time. We kept to time throughout the Czech Republic until we got to Ostrava Svinov station, the one before where we wished to get off. We sat around there for a while and left five minutes late, before arriving at Ostrava hl. n. a short time after.
From Ostrava’s main station we caught a tram to our hotel, where we left our bags, before immediately heading out to explore. We went first to Ostrava’s main square (named after Thomas Masaryk) before going to Ostrava’s main art gallery, which had been temporarily closed at the time of our previous visit. Visiting on a Friday had the added benefit that entrance was free. Much of the space of the gallery was given over to a special exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the gallery’s opening, displaying one work from each year since 1926.It was noticeable how the styles changed in 1948 from more modern art to Soviet Realism, only to become more liberal again in the run up to the 1968 invasion of the country by Soviet forces, but then again adopting a more conservative style.
We decided to go up the tower of the ‘new’ Town Hall again, as during the time of our previous visit the weather was murky with freezing fog for most of the time. The views this time were much better, we could see the hills of Poland in the distance, and also across the Ostravice river into Sliesian Ostrava, and clear views of the Dolni Vitkovice blast furnaces, all of which had been invisible six months before.
We decided to have dinner in the same restaurant that we had used on our first night in Ostrava previously, as it had been very good. To get there we went on a bit of a circuitous walk. First we went through the city centre to the opera house and then along the bank of the Ostravice river. This brought us to a park which we strolled through on the way to the restaurant. By chance, we found, within the park, the Soviet war memorial containing the urns of the ashes 668 Soviet troops who had died in the battle for Ostrava.
For dinner, I had pickled Hermilin cheese to start, followed by the same main course as I had had on my previous visit, pork served on a bed of puréed cauliflower flavoured with saffron. The restaurant has an interesting changing selection of beers, although I was slightly disappointed that the delicious smoky porter that I had last time was no longer on offer.
On our previous visit to Ostrava, we had found on a side street an establishment called Hobit (sic) Tolkien’s Pub. My son was keen to visit, but as it was only open on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, this was not possible last time. So we called in on our way back after dinner. It was a fairly basic Czech pub, with wooden furniture and payment by cash only. However, it did have some interesting beers at reasonable prices. We never did find out why it is called The Hobbit, as apart from the sign outside there was no other reference to Tolkien to be found.
Day 4 – Saturday 23rd May 2026 – Ostrava
Last time we were in Ostrava we booked a tour of the Bolt Tower and blast furnaces of the Dolni Vitkovice iron and steel works to the south of the city. This time, I had pre-booked a guided tour of the former coal mine located in Landek Park to the north of the city. We got there by catching a bus, which crossed over the Oder river (Odra in Czech), which was once the border between Moravia and Silesia.
The Landek Park mine is in what was once a rich coal area, with some coal seams breaking the surface. The park has now been developed for a variety of recreational activities, including a number of tennis courts, and it was not obvious from our on-line ticket where we should go to pick up our tour. The information point marked on the map on the ticket was my first guess, but that was not it, and in fact the tours started from the place marked as the mining museum on the map. We knew that, as last time, our tour would only be in Czech, but we were able to download an app which gave us a commentary in English against marked points as we moved around. The tour was in two separate parts with different guides. The first part of the tour covered mine rescue. We visited a miners’ memorial and then saw the different equipment that was used for mine rescue. Next we went to a lower level which was once the mine rescue training area. Here our guide related stories about mine rescues that he had been involved in, which was far more detailed than the information on the app, so we used Google to provide a real time translation of his stories. We were then transferred to a different guide and were lowered by a cage down a mineshaft to a former coal seam. Here we walked around underground and were shown examples of the different methods of mining that had been used over the ages. I found the time down the pit more interesting than the first part of the tour. As the map showed a mining museum marked on the map, I had assumed that we could spend some time looking round a museum when we had finished our tours. However there is no museum that you can look round by yourself, everything is covered by the tours that you take.
We then returned to the city centre by bus and tram and walked through a park to reach the area of the Dolni Vitkovice iron works. When we had been there previously, the main science museum on the site had been shut, as it is was a Monday, so we decided to visit it this time. It occupies a large modern building near the complex of now defunct blast furnaces. It has lots of hands-on exhibits, and I think it would have appealed to my son a lot more had he been about 15 years younger. Nonetheless, we enjoyed trying out various games and activities. We particularly enjoyed a quiz which involved matching models of animals’ penises to the correct animal. My son also played a computer simulation of the steel making process from raw materials to the finished product and was rewarded with real stainless steel spoon for his efforts.
On the walk back towards the city centre we stopped off at Ostrava Střed station, where within the station building is the Moravian-Silesian Railway Museum. This is a small museum, staffed by a group of enthusiastic elderly women who speak no English. Between them they were very keen to show us everything in the museum and encouraged my son to try his hand at operating signals and other equipment. There are no actual trains on display at the museum, but there are a couple of model railways, posters about the history of the lines in the area, departure boards, signals, and a mock-up of a driving cab.
On our return to the city centre we decided to have a late lunch/early dinner at about 4pm. We returned to the very good pizzeria we had eaten in last time we visited Ostrava, and my son and I both ordered the same pizzas as we had had before.
We then returned to our hotel to get changed before going to the opera house. As the performance we were attending was the slightly oxymoronic second première of The Gambler in Ostrava, we thought that we should dress up for the occasion. The Moravian-Silesian Opera cast two singers for each of the major parts in any run in their repertoire and the cast for the second première was nearly completely different to that of the first première a couple of days earlier. My son decided to wear a dinner jacket and black bow tie, whereas I wore a suit and tie.
We got to the Opera House a few minutes before the performance started and took our seats in the balcony straight away. The Opera House looked just as lovely as we remembered it from our previous visit. This was the very first time that Ostrava had put on The Gambler (Hráč in Czech, Игрок in Russian) and while the main auditorium and balcony were full, surprisingly the upper gallery was not sold out. I suspect this may be due to the fact that The Gambler is not such a well known opera and it deviates from the traditional format of opera by having no major arias or choruses. It was sung in its original Russian, with Czech and English surtitles. The production was exceedingly lavish – for example the scene set in a hotel foyer had characters going up and down in three different lifts on stage, while the main protagonists sang. My son and I thoroughly enjoyed the production, although my son, who had read the original Dostoevsky short story on which it is based, was puzzled why Prokofiev had chosen not to include the final retrospective section of the book which wraps up what became of the major characters.
Day 5 – Sunday 24th May 2026 – Ostrava to London
We made an early morning visit to a supermarket to get supplies, encountering a statue of the composer Janáček which I had not noticed before. He had on his lap either a dog or a fox – I assume the latter, as Janáček was the composer of the opera The Cunning Little Vixen.
My original intention for our final morning had been to visit the firefighters’ museum, but when I tried to check out the details the previous day, its website was not working. When I did manage to connect, I discovered that visits were by pre-booked guided tour only and the timings did not fit in with our plans. So instead we went for a walk across the Ostravice river into what had once been Silesian Ostrava. Until the mid-twentieth century, the city of Ostrava was administratively split between Moravian and Silesian parts and Silesian Ostrava had its own Town Hall. The impressive building of former Silesian Ostrava Town Hall is just across the Ostravice river from Moravian Ostrava. Near to it is another Soviet war memorial, this one topped by a tank. Google had suggested that there may be a museum near the Silesian Ostrava Town Hall, but as I could find no up to date details about it, I assumed that it was no longer open. This proved to be the case. So instead we caught a bus to go to Ostrava Zoo.
Visiting the Zoo seemed to be a popular activity for the inhabitants of Ostrava on a sunny Sunday morning. By the time we arrived officials were already directing traffic to an overflow car park and there was a queue to get in to the zoo. The zoo covers a large area and we initially chose the less popular paths to take us into a wooded area away from the main animal enclosures. The rhododendrons were in full bloom and seemed to be thriving much better than those in my local woods back home. We eventually came round to some of the more popular areas, where we saw elephants, zebras, giraffes and camels, among other animals. We did not have a great deal of time to spend in the zoo and a little before noon we had to leave, without having seen everything, to catch a bus back to our hotel to collect our bags.
From the hotel, we caught a tram to a shopping centre near Ostrava bus station, where in the top floor food court we had some lunch. From there it was just a short walk to the bus station. When we arrived, there was already a bus waiting, but this was going to Poltava in eastern Ukraine. We did not have long for our bus to arrive. It was the same Vienna to Warsaw bus , running in the opposite direction to that which we caught last time to come to Ostrava. I recognised the driver as the same person who had driven the bus six months previously. We soon joined the motorway to leave Ostrava and a short time later passed seamlessly over the border into Poland. The bus then left the motorway to call at a couple of small Polish towns en route. After a couple of hours the bus arrived at Katowice bus station, where we had caught it last time. We did not get off there this time, but stayed on the bus to go to Katowice airport another 30 minutes away.
The timing of the bus meant that we got to the airport in plenty of time and we soon got bored of exploring the area before security. Katowice airport has separate security checkpoints for those travelling to Schengen and non-Schengen destinations, and the non-Schengen one we needed to use opened a couple of hours before our flight was due to depart. The plane was on time and departed at 1820. We arrived at Stansted Airport at 1930. There was hardly any queue to get through passport control, but there was a massive queue for the bus to take us to the car park where we had left our car, so that we had to let one bus go without being able to board. We could have been half way home on the train in the time it took us to get to the car park, were it not for the fact that engineering work was diverting trains that weekend.
Conclusion
This was a very enjoyable short trip. The Moravian-Silesian Opera did not let us down and served up another first rate production. It was interesting to contrast Ostrava in warm sunshine compared with the freezing conditions of six months earlier. My son also enjoyed visiting Bratislava for the first time.