1953 – 1968 · the mid-1970s Putting the old Orava behind glassStará Orava za sklom

While the valley industrialised, the Orava that the tourists now come for was rotting. The response was systematic and it took three forms. Orava Castle was restored between 1953 and 1968 and became the seat of the Orava Museum. In the mid-1970s the museum opened an open-air museum at Brestová above Zuberec: log farmsteads dismantled in villages across Orava, carted up and re-erected on a meadow, with a late-Gothic timber church brought from Zábrež standing above them. At Podbiel a different choice was made — the log street of Bobrova raľa was protected where it stood, in private hands, as a lived-in street. And the forest railway that had carried timber since the First World War went out of commercial use at the start of the 1970s and was saved as a monument. The difference between saving a building where it stands and moving it somewhere safer is one of the real arguments in conservation, and Orava contains both answers, twenty kilometres apart.Kým sa dolina industrializovala, tá Orava, pre ktorú sem dnes chodia turisti, hnila. Odpoveď bola systematická a mala tri podoby. Oravský hrad obnovili v rokoch 1953 – 1968 a stal sa sídlom Oravského múzea. V polovici 70. rokov otvorilo múzeum skanzen na Brestovej nad Zubercom: zrubové usadlosti rozobrané v dedinách po celej Orave, prevezené a znovu postavené na lúke, s neskorogotickým dreveným kostolíkom prineseným zo Zábrežia nad nimi. V Podbieli sa rozhodli inak — zrubovú ulicu Bobrova raľa vyhlásili za chránenú tam, kde stojí, v súkromných rukách a obývanú. A lesná železnica, ktorá vozila drevo od prvej svetovej vojny, vypadla začiatkom 70. rokov z prevádzky a zachránili ju ako pamiatku. Rozdiel medzi záchranou stavby na mieste a jej presunom inam je jedným zo skutočných sporov pamiatkovej ochrany — a Orava má obe odpovede, dvadsať kilometrov od seba.