Old City Conquered by Hammer and Sickle

Cassovia. Kassa. Kaschau. Košice. Four names for the same place, yet never quite the same city. Each name carries its own century, its own empire, its own dream of what this corner of Europe should be. Tonight I call it Košice, though in my glass of Pinot Noir the cathedral glimmers like Cassovia again — the wine holding more memory than the streets themselves.

Once, this was no provincial town. A free royal city, proud enough to bear the first coat of arms in Europe, its Gothic cathedral a declaration that even on the edge of kingdoms, grandeur could rise. By the turn of the twentieth century it became something more intimate: a café town with trams rattling past the theatre, bakeries sweetening the air before Shabbat, and waiters slipping between German, Hungarian, Slovak, and Yiddish as though language itself were only another dish on the menu. There were tensions, of course — there always are — but those were mere politics, temporary frictions in a world that felt eternal.

Then came the rupture. The Jews deported, the Germans expelled, the Hungarians punished. A world undone in a few brutal years. Into the silence marched the hammer and sickle. The East Slovak Ironworks rose like a fortress of steel, fed by iron from Ukraine, while sídliská spread across the hills in concrete waves.

A rural city was built around the relic of an urban one. Rome in reverse: not goats among fallen forums, but a swollen metropolis surrounding the hollowed heart of its past. The old Košice became a museum piece, its cosmopolitan soul buried beneath industry and ideology.

And so I sit at dusk, the cathedral lit, Kundera open beside me, and I pretend that Košice is still Cassovia. That I, too, belong to that fragile world of cafés and multilingual evenings. But the dream fades with the last sip of wine. I finish my glass and close the book, and know that tomorrow I’ll return to a world where the hillbillies have inherited the earth — where the same valleys that once sent their sons to build this workers’ paradise now send them to vote for strongmen who promise to make the valleys great again.