Slovakia: Exploring Čičmany — Slovakia’s Folk Art Village

Čičmany: Slovakia’s Painted Wooden Village in the Rajecká Valley

Čičmany is a small village in the Rajecká Valley, in the north-west of Slovakia, in the hills not far from the town of Žilina. I got there later than planned, with the satnav muttering doubts the whole way. The road climbed and wound about, and I began to think I had gone wrong. I hadn’t. The village is simply a bit out of the way, which is a big part of why it still looks the way it does.

I hadn’t heard of Čičmany until quite recently. That isn’t a boast about how adventurous I am. It just shows how much of the world I still haven’t seen. At my age you start doing the sums on how many more villages you’ll get to, and the answer isn’t encouraging. So you try to make the ones you do see count.

📜 A very old village with a very new look

The first surprise was how old the place is. Čičmany appears in written records as far back as 1272. That was when Henry III was on the English throne, arguing with his barons. So the village has sat in its valley for over seven hundred and fifty years, with sheep wandering about it, and for most of that time nobody outside the district could have cared less.

Then, in 1977, it was given a rather grand title. It became, as far as anyone can establish, the world’s first folk architecture reserve. I like that bit, “as far as anyone can establish”. It sounds like something a committee would write, and I found it oddly comforting. It means nobody is going to jump out of a hedge and tell you Norway did it first. Or if they do, they’ll have to prove it.

In practice, it means the houses are protected. People are asked not to knock them down and put up something beige. In a country that spent much of the twentieth century in love with concrete, I’d call that a small win.

✏️ Houses that look as if somebody went at them with a very large pen

Then there are the houses. As soon as I came round the first bend and saw them, I knew why people make the trip. The houses are made of dark timber, and every one of them is covered, from the ground to the roof edge, in white patterns. There are zigzags, diamonds, stars, crosses and rows of little marks, all painted straight onto the wood.

My first thought was embroidery, the sort you get on a tablecloth at your aunt’s house, blown up to the size of a building. My second thought was of a determined child with a steady hand and endless white paint. I mean that kindly. Whoever did this had a far steadier hand than mine. I can’t paint a skirting board without getting some on the carpet.

What surprised me was that it isn’t fussy. I expected it to look twee, and it doesn’t. The dark wood keeps things serious, and the white patterns sit on top of it quite boldly, like someone who has been told they look good and has decided to believe it.

🎨 How a repair job became an art form

The way it started is quite down-to-earth. About two hundred years ago, people in the village began putting white lime on their timber. It wasn’t for show. Lime protected the wood, which was damaged in places, from the weather. It was maintenance, nothing more.

But at some point it turned into decoration. I imagine somebody thought that if they had to slap lime on the front of the house anyway, they might as well make a nice shape with it. The neighbour saw it and did something a bit better. Over the years the patterns got fancier, and a chore became the thing the village is known for. I find that rather cheering. My own house maintenance usually ends with a man in a van sucking air through his teeth and handing me a big bill, and nothing pretty to show for it.

The patterns aren’t random either. They look a lot like the embroidery on traditional Slovak folk costume. The village was a centre of sheep farming until the middle of the twentieth century, so wool, cloth and needlework were part of daily life. The link between the sewing and the painted walls is too neat to be a coincidence. Designs the women stitched into cloth ended up on the houses. I couldn’t tell you which came first, and I don’t think anyone can, which suits me fine, as I’d rather not be pressed for an opinion.

🔥 The fire, and the rather sensible bargain

Now for the bit I liked best. In 1921 a bad fire went through the village and destroyed much of it. That’s the big risk with wooden houses, as anyone who knows about London in 1666 will tell you, probably at length.

What happened next was the interesting part. The state paid for the rebuilding, but on one condition: the old look had to be kept. So the village was rebuilt in the old style, patterns and all. I thought that was rather wise. In my experience, if the state is given a pot of money and a burnt-out village, you get a car park and a leaflet.

So although the houses look as if they’ve stood there for centuries, most are less than a hundred years old. That threw me a bit at first. You stand in front of a house that looks as if it has been quietly ageing since the Habsburgs, and it’s about the same age as some pensioners I know. Then I decided it didn’t matter. The patterns are old, the skills are old, and the idea is old. The timber is just newer than it looks, which is true of a good many of us.

🚶 What I actually did, which was not much

I spent about half an hour walking round, and I’m not embarrassed about that. It’s a quiet place, and there’s not much to do except look. There are no rides, no gift shop the size of an aircraft hangar and, as far as I noticed, no man in a costume trying to sell me a drink. I walked along the lane, stopped, looked at a house, walked on and looked at another. Somebody’s cat watched me from a windowsill, looking rather tired of people in sensible shoes doing exactly the same thing.

I know some people will feel short-changed. They’ll want an itinerary and a list of ten things to see. But here, looking is the whole point. The village is the exhibit. Nobody needs to tell you what to think. You just stand there and notice that people once decided a wall should look good, and then went to the bother of making it so.

💭 Reflections

I left feeling a bit quieter than when I arrived, which isn’t something I can say about most days out. Slovakia has bigger sights, with castles, mountains and caves. Čičmany is small and modest. It’s just a village that took a plain job and turned it into something people will drive a long way to see.

It also made me think about what we don’t look after at home. We’re good in Britain at keeping the grand, impressive things. We’re not so good at looking after the small everyday things that ordinary people made with care. In Čičmany somebody decided that mattered, and made it part of the deal for rebuilding. I thought that was rather nice, though I’d never say so in front of the cat.

Would I go back? Probably not. Half an hour was about right, and I’d rather leave before I get bored. But I’m glad I went. If you’re in the Rajecká Valley, or anywhere near Žilina, and you’ve got an hour to spare and comfortable shoes, go and have a look. Just don’t expect anything to happen. It doesn’t, and that’s the charm of it.