Visiting the Andy Warhol museum — in Slovakia

Editor’s Note: This article in the April 17 Travel section included material that was taken without attribution from a documentary film. The article explored the Warhol museum in Medzilaborce and the reaction of Warhol’s relatives in nearby Mikova to the late artist’s notoriety. The writer, a freelance contributor to The Post, described a scene of men in rabbit-fur caps fixing a car exhaust and giving directions to the relatives’ home and mentioned passing a Soviet tank. Those scenes appeared in “Absolut Warhola,” a 2001 film by Stanislaw Mucha. The writer also used without attribution quotes from the documentary of conversations with Warhol’s cousin Michal Warhola and Warhol’s elderly aunt. In addition, while the article appeared to be based on a single trip, in fact it was based on several journeys, including one 10 years ago. The Post apologizes to filmmaker Stanislaw Mucha and to its readers for these lapses.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

Medzilaborce is about 174 miles or a five-hour drive southeast of Krakow.

More on this Story

• Visiting the Andy Warhol museum — in Slovakia
• Details: Medzilaborce, Slovakia

Wolves and bears still prowl the wooded foothills of the Carpathian Mountains along the border between Poland and Slovakia, and the local populace — a motley blend of Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, gypsies and Ruthenians — still clings to ancient rural ways.

It’s a corner of the world where nothing would seem more out of place than a museum dedicated to Andy Warhol.

“I come from nowhere,” the artist once famously quipped. Yet sub-Carpathian Ruthenia — a region that was once part of the former Czechoslovakia and is now divided among Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and Romania — is where Warhol’s parents came from. Warhol himself never visited the area, but in 1991, his brother John made the trip to this remote corner of what is now Slovakia to found the Andy Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art in the town of Medzilaborce.

People in the nearby village of Mikova, where Warhol’s parents were born, had always known that Warhol was a painter. But it wasn’t until he died in 1987 and Polish newspapers first wrote about Warhol’s Slovak connection that they learned that he was world-famous. Soon the Slovak papers were writing about his roots, too. Everyone wanted to claim him as a native son.

Yet when it opened, the museum stirred suspicions in this deeply religious, conservative part of rural Slovakia, where decades of communism had left their stamp. There were campaigns to close it down. It didn’t surprise me to learn that the director, a high school art teacher by the name of Michal Bycko, had been accused of being a CIA agent, or that the museum was seen as a cover for U.S. intelligence operations in part of a dark plot to spread Western decadence to Slovakia.

This at any rate was the story as related in the Czech media. Looking to find out more, I headed to Medzilaborce to get the scoop for myself.

The train from Prague left at midnight. Surprisingly, it was full, but I managed to find a seat in a compartment occupied by a babushka wearing a floral headscarf, her son, and three Ukrainians in ski hats.

Five minutes into the journey, the Ukrainians uncorked a bottle of vodka and began a boisterous game of cards, playing for pistachio nuts. I dozed off, and as the train hurtled through the dark eastern night, I glided in and out of sleep, half-aware of the din around me.