These articles were published in the Spectacular Slovakia travel guide, published annually by The Slovak Spectator since 1996. The latest editions can be obtained from our online shop.

Searching for traces of Andy Warhol

By Matthew J. Reynolds

	photo: Couresy The Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art

Andy Warhol's cousin, Helena Bošnovičová, greets me in front of her one-story home in the small north-eastern Slovak village of Miková (population 300), where the artist's mother Julia was born and raised. I have come to ask questions about her famous cousin, to see the land where his ancestors lived for hundreds of years, to find traces of Andy Warhol on modern Slovak soil.

Warhol's mother and father were Rusyn (Ruthenian), a minority group which numbers between 60,000 and 100,000 people interspersed among the small villages of north-eastern Slovakia. Since the discovery of Warhol's roots in the late 1980's, the American-born artist, who never visited his mother's country, has become an important figure for Slovak Rusyns. The Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art (pictured above) in Medzilaborce - 15 minutes east of Miková - opened in 1991 with 17 Warhol originals.

	Helena Bošnovičová
	photo: Matthew J. Reynolds

"Andy Warhol is the Rusyn God," says Jozef Keselica, a Rusyn schoolteacher who is almost a professional fan. In the early 1990s he turned a collection of Warhol photographs and newspaper clippings into an audio-visual show, then shot a documentary on Warhol's roots that won third prize at an Argentine film festival.

But for Bošnovičová, the famous Warhol was just "cousin Andy", the youngest son of a faraway aunt. Bošnovičová's mother, Eva, was the youngest of 12 siblings, 10 of whom emigrated to the US in the lean years following World War I, as did Julia. Eva and Julia stayed close through mail (Eva even visited New York in 1965). Bošnovičová remembers her family receiving packages of coffee, clothes, and shoes from America. They also received drawings - Julia's on the front and Andy's on the back - although none survive today.

I ask her if she is an artist. No, although she drew as a child. Her and Warhol's ancestors were simple farmers, she says, but an artistic streak has always run through the family. Eva sewed beautifully, and Andy's early sketches resemble his mother's. Bošnovičová's own child is a talented amateur artist, as is Warhol's brother Paul, who in recent years has painted abstract art by using chicken feet. Bošnovičová produces a T-shirt with Paul's chicken-feet imprints.

	photo: Couresy The Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art

Apologising, Bošnovičová says she must cut short our chat to bring lunch to an elderly neighbour. Somewhere I have read that Andy Warhol was also famously concerned for the well-being of others. I walk her through the small village, where every third house is abandoned, and nearly every citizen is retired or living on unemployment.

I strain for more connections between the artist Warhol and the town of Miková, which is really nothing more than a kilometre stretch of hilly country road lined with ageing houses and two grocery stores, one of them run by Bošnovičová. The store is open daily 7:00 till 12:00, but the hours are flexible when locals are thirsty. With a sober Bošnovičová giving the orders, I can't help thinking of Warhol in his New York City 'Factory', where he stayed clean while partygoers indulged in drugs and alcohol. The Factory also had loose hours and was the centre of village (Manhattan) life until Warhol was shot in the late 1960s. But I know this is a stretch.

Warhol was fond of saying, "I am from nowhere." Bošnovičová says I'm not the first to come looking for traces of her famous cousin, who surely would have found such quests ridiculous. Bošnovičová says she is proud of Andy - "The whole village is proud of him" - in the same way an aunt might say she is proud of a graduating nephew. What else is there to say?

	photo: Couresy The Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art

I leave the village having established few connections between Warhol and his ancestral land, but I do not go empty handed. Rather, I leave with a renewed sense of wonder at the remarkable immigrant story of Júlia Warholová, who left a one-church village in the poorest corner of Czechoslovakia and gave birth to a son who conquered the art scene in the world's greatest metropolis and forever changed it's understanding of the relationship between art and culture.

See also:

• Medzilaborce (Spectacular Slovakia 2002)
• Medzilaborce travel tips (Spectacular Slovakia 2002)

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