Bratislava · SK
True Crime Bratislava
Ram Raids, Wiretaps, and Terror Below the Castle
Di cosa parla la passeggiata?
Welcome to Bratislava, the compact capital on the Danube, where pastel baroque palaces, cobbled lanes and a white castle with four corner towers look almost too pretty for trouble. But behind these facades the city has seen a ram raid at dawn, a secret-service wiretap scandal, a crackdown on candle-lit protesters and a hate-driven attack that Slovakia now remembers as its first act of terror in modern history. On this walk you stand exactly where it happened. Our journey begins at the gates of the Presidential Palace, where one summer night the security failed in the strangest way.
Cosa vedrai
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1
The Barefoot Intruder - Presidential Palace
Palace
On the night of 27 to 28 June 2016, a barefoot stranger climbed the back fence of Slovakia's Presidential Palace, roamed its top floor for 20 minutes while the guards switched off the alarm as false, and walked out unchallenged, a blunder that cost the head of the protection service his post.
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2
The Man Who Stepped In - Obchodná Street
Street
In the early hours of 26 May 2018, Henry Acorda, a 36-year-old Filipino, stepped in to protect two colleagues from a drunk man on Obchodná and was kicked in the head; he died five days later, and his attacker was finally sentenced to nine years for manslaughter.
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3
Bloody Wednesday - Námestie SNP
square
On Wednesday 12 February 1919, Czechoslovak legionnaires fired into a crowd of striking German and Hungarian residents in front of this market hall, leaving eight or nine people dead in a shooting whose cause is still disputed.
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4
The Battering-Ram BMW - Panská Street
street
Before dawn on 8 January 2018, four men in yellow work gloves reversed a stolen BMW fitted with a battering ram into a jeweller's grille on Panská Street, crawled under the jammed mesh and escaped with watches worth about €888,000 in under four minutes; no arrest was ever made public.
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5
Candles Against Water Cannons - Hviezdoslavovo námestie
square
On the rainy evening of Friday, 25 March 1988, about 3,500 believers stood silently on this square with lit candles to demand religious freedom, until the communist regime answered with police cars, water cannons and batons and detained 141 people.
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6
The Vanished Synagogue - Rybné námestie
memorial
Right here stood Bratislava's Moorish Neolog synagogue, closed in 1942 as Jozef Tiso's Slovak State deported almost 58,000 Jews and paid Germany 500 Reichsmarks for each one. Tiso was hanged in 1947, and in 1969 the communists bulldozed the synagogue itself for the SNP bridge road.
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7
The Gorilla Wiretaps - Bratislava Castle
castle
In 2005 and 2006 Slovakia's secret service bugged a Bratislava flat in an operation codenamed Gorilla; when transcripts of alleged kickback talks leaked on 21 December 2011, thousands marched up to the parliament beside this castle on 27 January 2012 and pelted it with bananas and eggs, yet nobody has ever been convicted.
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8
Words Became Weapons - Zámocká Street
street
On the evening of 12 October 2022, a gunman aged just nineteen killed Matúš Horváth and Juraj Vankulič outside the LGBTI+ bar Tepláreň on this quiet lane below the castle, in what Slovakia now remembers as its first terrorist attack in modern history.
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