The story
For decades the Slovak National Gallery was best known for the thing many locals wanted torn down. In 1977 the architect Vladimir Dedecek bridged the gallery's old Baroque Water Barracks, an 18th-century riverside garrison on the Danube, with a raised concrete wing that juts out over the courtyard. People argued about it for a generation.
It survived. When the gallery reopened at the end of 2022 after seven years of rebuilding, that brutalist bridge had been restored as the centrepiece rather than demolished, joined to the neighbouring neo-Renaissance Esterhazy Palace to make one large complex on the embankment in central Bratislava.
Inside is the national collection, founded in 1948, running from Gothic altarpieces and Baroque sculpture through the 19th and 20th centuries. The gallery also holds the estate of Ludovit Fulla, a leading Slovak modernist, whose bright, folk-rooted paintings are among the works visitors come to see.
