donderdag 15 maart 2012

Slovakia 16/03/2012

Hello everybody.

Here we are again with a new blog post. It’s a bit earlier than expected but at this moment I have some spear time to explain where we are.
We travelled from Bratislava to Košice, one of the biggest cities of Slovakia. For the people who don’t know where Košice is located, I will give you a short description. So Košice is a city in eastern Slovakia. It is located on the river Hornàd at the eastern reaches of the Slovak ore Mountains, near the border with Hungary.  

We rented a car to go to our new hostel. We took a longer, but easier and more comfortable route through Hungary. The journey took about 5 hours and 400 km. We heard wonderful things about this city and we really wanted to see it. We are truly overwhelmed. It’s such a beautiful city!
We certainly couldn’t visit everything on the same day. So I’m just going to talk about the most beautiful sites we have seen.

The city has a well preserved historical centre. There are many heritage buildings in Renaissances, Art Nouveau, Baroque and Gothic styles. Slovakia’s largest church, the St. Elisabeth Cathedral is located in this city. It’s an amazing church with such a beautiful completion. The guide told us that the construction of the biggest cathedral in the Kingdom of Hungary was supported by the Emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg and by the apostolic see itself. We have visited the church yesterday for about 3 hours. We didn’t miss a single detail and it was amazing.
The city is well known as the first settlement in Europe to be granted its own coat-of-arms. That made us very curious. The coat of arms used today features symbols of historical countries. Košice is unique in that it was the first city in Europe to gain a royal warrant for a coat of arms.

The most historical monuments are located in or around the Main Street. The town has the largest number of protected historical monuments in Slovakia. In addition to St. Elisabeth, there is the St. Michael Chapel, the St. Urban Tower, and the Neo-baroque State Theatre in the centre of town. Several other monuments and buildings of cultural and historical interest are as well as a number of galleries, museums and parks.
We have visited a few of them. Such as Municipal Park, that is located between the historical city centre and the main railway station. It’s a beautiful park in the city to offer recreation and green space. We didn’t know that nature could be so impressive. It was wonderful!

We ate something after we visited all those wonderful sites and then we went to our hostel to pack our suitcases. We still have a few hours before our plane leaves. This was the end of our trip in Slovakia. I’ll be back soon with a new blog about our trip around the world.

Regards

Jolien Masscheleyn

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Ko%C5%A1ice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_park

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