TRAVEL FEATURE - SLOVAKIA ANTONIO FEMIA
IDENTITY IS NOT A LIMIT
I
still haven ’ t realised why , when it comes to wandering aimlessly , east is my favourite cardinal point . It ’ s maybe because of the exciting idea to have much road ahead and a thousand possibilities when there ’ s not much time ; more likely because there ’ s what remains of great empires , fragmented in the 20th century by world wars and new national identities . Besides , these borders are fascinating because often they don ’ t match the languages and cultures of the areas they define .
That ’ s why , as soon as borders reopened after first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic , I decided to point the wheels of the bike towards Slovakia . I had the opportunity to ride a Suzuki V-Strom 1050 XT which I immediately renamed Banana Jane for its yellow livery . After loading it roughly with the essentials for a couple of weeks , I ran away finding myself at the limit of Europe , on the western extension of Carpathian Mountains lying at the intersection of the Slovakian , Polish and Ukrainian borders . These boundaries , established after the Second World War , definitively fragmented a territory called Ruthenia .
Despite the decades under the Warsaw Pact , the people ’ s identity has remained alive thanks to their language , Ruthenian , which is a kind of mixture of the idioms of the three modern countries . It ’ s rather hard for us Westerners to understand the features of this language , but we ’ re able to appreciate the other main feature which kept these people united , although spread in more countries : Ruthenians , as the main part of Slavs , are orthodox Christians but their particularity is to be faithful to the Pope : this feature makes them Roman Catholics celebrating masses and ceremonies with Orthodox liturgy , preserving their Eastern tradition concerning spirituality and
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