The former Hotel Kyjev is one of the most striking buildings in Bratislava. The circular design is actually new, originally the façade was horizontal brown and white stripes, and the circle was added in 2018 as part of a street art festival. People liked it, so it stayed.
Before it was a Tesco, it was a hotel and department store complex. In the 60s it was incredibly fancy, designed by famous architect Ivan Matušík, who would later be persecuted in the post-Prague Spring for being too decadent and westernised. It apparently had the first escalators in Slovakia. The store sold a full range of electrical goods that could be difficult to find elsewhere, and even had imported items from the West, the ultimate luxury. Czechoslovakia was one of the the richer Iron Curtain countries, and more people had cars due to Škoda, but there were still queues and waiting lists and under the counter deals needed to get hold of many items.
The hotel was also luxurious. It had a Clockwork Orange styled interior also designed by Matušík, with modular lounge chairs that have become a design classic. Visiting dignitaries, and the few international tourists allowed were also hosted there. Of course all the rooms were bugged by the security services, like the infamous Jalta Hotel in Prague. I also saw a funny anecdote when researching the building, of someone whose mum left them in the car outside while popping into the shops, and they saw an ŠtB agent making notes of all the number plates of the hotel guests, and getting increasingly frustrated at trying to copy some Arabic ones from a Middle Eastern delegation.
The Slovak ŠtB or Štátna bezpečnosť were not as infamous or quite as ridiculously diligent as East Germany’s Stasi, but they still had a high level of control over the population. As Slovakia had been an Axis power in WWII, there was an existing fascist secret police, the ÚŠB, so the ŠtB were free to take over their infrastructure and hit the ground running. Like their counterparts in other Eastern Bloc countries, they tapped phone lines, steamed open letters, cultivated a network of informers, tracked down samizdat distributors, tortured prisoners and generally tried to crush any level of dissent.
The rooms at the Hotel Kyjev are no longer bugged, but you also can’t stay in them. It’s been closed since 2016, and been in redevelopment limbo ever since, being a prime location with fantastic views from the rooms, and a beautiful mid-century lobby, but also in need of a lot of work.
The shopping centre is still operational however. The basement is occupied by Tesco, and there’s a few other shops there like Drogerie Market (where I once bought some caffeinated vitamin tablets by mistake, which they definitely don’t sell in their German or Austrian branches).
Slovak Tesco feels like a parallel universe where everything is slightly different. The packaging and store design is the same, the Clubcard looks identical (but UK ones don’t work on the tills), and most of the products are the same, but then you get stuff like this- microwave goulash instead of curries. They also play 80s soft rock in store.
They love different fruit Jaffa Cakes in this part of the world. When I was living in Hungary I caught pneumonia. The doctor sent me home on bedrest, and en route I stopped at a supermarket and blearily stocked up on a load of Jaffa Cakes that were on special offer, not really looking at them properly because I just wanted to go home to bed. When I opened them, they turned out to be peach flavoured and not nice at all.
Slovaks eat bread rolls with cheese and ham for breakfast like the Germans. Cereal comes in bags for some reason, is really expensive, and usually full of chocolate.
This brand of Slovak chocolate is really good (and cheap). I’m not such a fan of this rum-flavoured one in the blue wrapper, but their orange Jaffa Cake bar is really good.
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