SR, Poprad: Tatranian Crossroad – VIDEO

Poprad lays on an important railroad Prague – Košice. To foothills of the highest Slovakian mountains you can get from Prague by a night train. Despite you can’t enjoy view over Tatras in night, you will wake up fresh. A drive from Prague will take you 7 hours, at least. Poprad is an important point if you want to get to High Tatras, but the city is also a center of culture and sport.

Město Poprad consists of several parts   - Spišská Sobota, Veľká, Stráže pod Tatrami, Matejovce, Kvetnica and the Old Town of Poprad. The city is obviously large and its 54 thousand inhabitants prove that. We visited the center of events – in the Old Town, not long before Advent. However, there were not many people on streets in Poprad. Streets were deserted, only few Popradians walked on the streets. The omnipresent peace calmed one of them so much he fell asleep on a bench in front of a church. This kind of image belongs to large cities.

A calm before the storm

During weekends only few restaurants and bars were left open, attracting with loud music people passing by to enter. Despite the fact these restaurants feel alive when you are on the street, when you enter there are as much as deserted as the streets. Considering the prices Slovaks require for their services and a condition of local economy, it is no wonder people are not attracted to go out. They rather try to spare every Euro before the Christmas. The real tumult indisputably belongs to the Chirtmas. There will be, as always, a shopping spree.

A calm city on weekends

Despite the impression of a lazy city, Poprad belongs to a dynamically developing areas, where is a great variety of social, cultural and sport possibilities, and it has many things to attract tourists. In 2006 Poprad even tried to hold the Olympic Games, however, in the end they were held in Torino in Italy. If representatives of the International Olympic Committee approved the Olympic Games, our neighbors would be most certainly very busy.

Not many can imagine Poprad as a place where would the Olympic Games happen. However, the city itself is clean and modern. It is evident that Slovaks take care about this city, and despite our maybe fallacious impression of a lazy weekend city, it lives to the fullest and it act in the opposite to the trend of tourism. Renewed sight, houses or square, new bicycle tracks, aquapark or a winter stadium attract visitors. Moreover, you can find here many cultural of social events.

On the square in Poprad are two churches- the evangelical Church of Holy Trinity and the roman catholic Church St Egi . The latter with a beautiful belltower and high tower hidden behind the trees, was built in the second half of the 13th century. The evangelical church is much newer. It was built in 1834. However, you will notice the evangelical church faster, because it stands on a tidy ground in the center of the square. There are many more sacral building in Poprad and they are worth visiting.

Text/photo/video: Klára Svobodová