Communism changed both urban and rural landscapes in Slovakia as no other period of the history. Massive industrial projects were built hand in hand with construction of concrete housing estates for workers in growing towns. Modernity became the new ideal, traditions were forgotten. Bratislava became a showcase of the central socialist planning in Czechoslovakia. Let's check it out!

Did you know?

• Boys in Czechoslovakia played with a technical eastern version of Lego, called Merkur, to bring up skilful engineers.
• Strahov in Prague, the largest stadium in the world, is as big as 9 football fields. It held mass sport events called "Spartakiada" every 5 years. In 1960, 2 million spectators and 750,000 performers participated.
• In the 1950's, due to lack of flats, working-class village people were moved to bigger bourgeois flats to live together with intellectuals. Double-family arrangements caused conflicts, as equality exists only in theory.
• The prefabricated housing estate became the symbol of communist housing. Everybody was living in the same kind of flat as a symbol of equality.
• Villages were modernized during communism as well. Traditional folk architecture was forgotten, private ownership minimized and the land collectivized.