ROB CAMERON

“Could you,” I once asked a train-mad friend “travel right across the Czech Republic using only the slow, stopping trains?” The answer was yes, as I and another friend proved in 2007. We spent 19 days covering 2,000 kilometres, setting foot in over 80 towns and villages, and crossing the border into Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Austria. This is an audio diary of that journey.

When the EU’s Schengen zone expanded in 2007 to include much of Central and Eastern Europe, one of the least enthusiastic countries was Austria, where fear of foreigners has long dominated the national debate. But in the far east of Austria, along the River Danube that forms the border with Slovakia, the reality of Schengen has changed both attitudes and lives.

“Populism is not the only way to resolve frustrations,” said Zuzana Caputova. Rays of spring sunshine poured through the windows of a Bratislava café for her first TV interview with the international media since she was elected Slovakia’s first female president. She’s a liberal, pro-EU figure using words like “truth”, “tolerance” and “compassion” – a rarity these days in Central Europe.

It’s long been the stuff of science fiction, but could the flying car ever become a viable means of transport? Professor Štefan Klein of Nitra, Slovakia passionately believes it could. His AirCar can transform from sports car to aircraft in just over two minutes. Running on regular petrol and able to carry two people, it has a range of some 1,000km in the air.

Police in Slovakia have fined a car owner whose dog was caught on a speed camera sitting behind the wheel. The owner of the Skoda car insisted that his pet – a brown hunting dog – had suddenly leapt into his lap. It’s not clear if the fine – issued to the owner, rather than the dog – was for speeding, or for failing to secure the pet in a moving vehicle.

A brown bear that injured five people during a rampage in a Slovak town has been shot dead, Environment Minister Tomas Taraba says. However, opposition politicians believe hunters may have shot a different bear, and are calling for answers. Controlling Slovakia’s bear population has become a highly politicised issue under the new populist-nationalist government.

A Czech travel agency is offering package holidays for people nostalgic for the trade union perks of Communist Czechoslovakia, when factory workers were bussed off to recuperate from the daily grind. For a modest sum, guests can stay at a grim-looking hotel in Slovakia’s Tatra Mountains, to relive the sights, sounds, and smells of pre-1989 holidays.

The grandson of British wartime leader Winston Churchill has unveiled a statue in the Czech capital Prague dedicated to the 2,500 Czech and Slovak airmen who fought in Britain’s Royal Air Force. The monument, called the Winged Lion, is a gift from Prague’s British expatriate community in gratitude for the airmen’s contribution during World War Two.

Scotland went to the polls on September 18th, 2014 to decide whether to leave the United Kingdom and begin a new chapter as an independent state. The only country in Europe that has peacefully divided in recent decades is Czechoslovakia, which split into two on January 1st, 1993, without a drop of blood being spilt. So what advice would Czechs and Slovaks give the Scots?

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico is defying EU officials in the migrant crisis – and may win re-election on Saturday. Slovak voters will decide whether to give his Smer party another four years in office. Fico told a crowd of supporters in a packed sports hall in Bratislava he would not “bring one single Muslim to Slovakia’ as part of an EU quota system.

The murder of reporter Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová convulsed Slovak society. The wave of public anger and disgust led to the fall of Prime Minister Robert Fico and ultimately the election of liberal Zuzana Čaputová as president. There was also hope (short-lived) that Slovakia could untie the Gordian knot between high-level politics and endemic corruption.

Thousands have attended protest rallies across Slovakia in memory of murdered journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, shot in a targeted killing a year ago. Kuciak had been investigating alleged corruption linked to Italian organised crime – a story which would, after his death, bring down the government. It remains unclear who ordered the killings.

Slovakia votes on Saturday in its first general election since an investigative journalist and his fiancée were murdered in 2018. The shooting of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová shocked the nation and toppled PM Robert Fico, but his Smer-SD party remains in office. Polls are tight, and support has swelled for an ultra-nationalist party.

Visits from British partygoers and other tourists were an early casualty of the coronavirus pandemic for the Slovak capital Bratislava – and now it is struggling to claw back its depleted industry. Slovakia was praised for its swift and decisive response to the virus – which included shutting its borders to tourists – but it has come at a price.

Slovakia was the second country in the EU to order Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine – but the decision caused political turmoil as the mercurial prime minister Igor Matovič flew to Moscow to make the purchase without informing anyone. Slovakia’s medicines regulator refused to certify the vaccine – which was not approved in the EU – so supplies of Sputnik sat unused on the shelves.

Pope Francis has begun a four-day visit to Slovakia, the first papal visit to the country in 18 years. Typically, he’s going out of his way to embrace the most excluded members of society. He’s spending 70 hours in Slovakia, after just seven in Hungary, and commentators believe Francis was sending a very subtle message to Viktor Orban in Budapest.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent millions fleeing across the country’s western borders – including to Slovakia. Some were passing through, on their way to stay with friends and family further west, but many had nowhere to go – and no idea when they would be able to go home. And among the great tide of exhausted and disoriented people were thousands of foreign students.

Councillors in the Slovak village of Varin have rejected a request from state prosecutors to rename the country’s sole street sign honouring Slovakia’s wartime fascist leader, Monsignor Jozef Tiso. The village – in the Zilina region – bears a street named “Dr Jozef Tiso Street”. Earlier this year, activists tore down the street sign in the latest instalment in a long-running saga.

January 1st, 2023 marked the 30th anniversary of the break-up of Czechoslovakia; one of the few cases in history when a state has been divided up without a single life being lost. Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia enjoy a harmonious, friction-free friendship – tinged with a touch of regret perhaps for what was once a happy marriage.

Slovaks are voting in early elections following the collapse of the former centre-right government. Leading most polls is the populist SMER party of Robert Fico, who has pledged an immediate end to Slovak military support for Ukraine. But Fico’s former party colleague turned rival, Peter Pellegrini, is also likely to play a decisive role in forming the new government.

Peter Pellegrini has been elected president of Slovakia. A former prime minister, Mr Pellegrini is an ally of Prime Minister Robert Fico, and shares the PM’s opposition to arming Ukraine. Mr Pellegrini’s campaign echoed some of Fico’s Moscow-friendly rhetoric, vowing after his victory “to ensure that Slovakia remains on the side of peace and not on the side of war”.

Robert Fico might have promised to send “not one more round of ammunition” to Ukraine, but he wasn’t speaking for all Slovaks. When the government cut off state-supplied military aid, citizens banded together, raising €1m for artillery shells within 48 hours. They included Otto Simko, a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor and veteran of the Slovak National Uprising.

Slovakia’s populist government has caused alarm with plans to abolish the country’s public broadcaster, prompting renewed fears for the independence of the Slovak media. The move is being spearheaded by Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová, who previously co-hosted an online TV channel promoting pro-Russian narratives and disinformation about Covid.

Robert Fico describes himself as a leftist and a social democrat. But his Smer party is in government with the far-right, and his language is increasingly vitriolic and nationalist. He’s blamed the assassination attempt of May 2024 on the liberal opposition as well as his pro-peace stance, and says Vladimir Putin has been ‘wrongly demonised’ by the west.

Slovakia’s populist prime minister, Robert Fico, has claimed the opposition is planning a “Maidan”-style coup, referring to the popular uprising that toppled Ukraine‘s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Fico, who survived an assassination attempt last May, quoted from what he said was a classified report ahead of a motion of no-confidence.

The Slovak government has approved a plan to shoot around a quarter of the country’s brown bears, after a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest. A total of 350 out of an estimated 1,300 animals will be culled under the plan. “We can’t live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods,” Prime Minister Robert Fico told reporters after a cabinet meeting.