Some glass relics that didn’t quite survive whole.
Photos by James Thomson
To the southwest of Považská Bystrica, on the other side of the Váh river, is the small town of Lednické Rovne, location of the Slovak Glass Museum. The museum is situated at the entrance to a stately home, now a private house, whose 20-hectare formal 'English park'-style gardens remain open to the public and are an agreeable place for a stroll down to the banks of the river. The museum, though small, houses a wide-ranging collection of glass pieces worked in Slovakia from as early as the fourteenth century. Among them are seventeenth-century tumblers commissioned by the Pálffy family (they of Bojnice and Červený Kameň fame) and work by important turn-of-the-century Slovak glass artist Štefan Šovánka.