For five hundred years Nižná was a village of the Orava Castle estate, doing what its neighbours did: grazing, flax, timber. Then in the 1950s the state built an electronics works here, and for four decades this village made the television sets that Czechoslovakia watched. Almost everything about the place today — the blocks of flats, the industrial estate, the skills — follows from that one decision.Päťsto rokov bola Nižná dedinou oravského hradného panstva a robila to, čo jej susedia: pásla, siala ľan, ťažila drevo. Potom tu v päťdesiatych rokoch 20. storočia štát postavil závod na elektroniku a štyri desaťročia sa v tejto dedine vyrábali televízory, na ktoré sa pozeralo celé Československo. Takmer všetko, čím je Nižná dnes — paneláky, priemyselný areál aj remeselné zručnosti — vyplýva z toho jedného rozhodnutia.
Drag the bar, or pick a year, to see what was happening here then.Potiahnite lištu alebo vyberte rok a uvidíte, čo sa tu vtedy dialo.
Castles and lordsHrady a páni
A charter of 1380 mentions an Upper Tvrdošín, which means there must already have been a lower one. The settlement itself appears directly in 1395, still written as a form of the name Tvrdošín, and by 1420 it has a name of its own — Nissne Wes, the lower village. The name is the whole early history in two words: this was the downstream half of a bigger neighbour, on the same river and the same estate. Like every village here it belonged to Orava Castle, and its people were the castle's subjects.Listina z roku 1380 spomína Vyšný Tvrdošín, čo znamená, že musel existovať aj nižný. Samotná osada sa priamo objavuje v roku 1395, ešte stále pod tvarom mena Tvrdošín, a od roku 1420 má vlastné pomenovanie — Nissne Wes, teda Nižná Ves. To meno je celými ranými dejinami v dvoch slovách: bola dolnou polovicou väčšieho suseda, na tej istej rieke a na tom istom panstve. Ako každá dedina tu patrila Oravskému hradu a jej ľudia boli poddanými hradu.
The parish church was finished during the fifteenth century, and that is a bigger fact than it sounds. A village with its own church had a priest, a graveyard, and written records of who was born, married and buried — and it gave the neighbouring hamlets a reason to walk here on Sundays. Orava was thinly settled and poor, and most places had to use somebody else's church. Nižná did not.Farský kostol dostavali v priebehu 15. storočia a je to väčší údaj, než sa zdá. Dedina s vlastným kostolom mala kňaza, cintorín a písané zápisy o tom, kto sa narodil, kto sa sobášil a koho pochovali — a okolitým osadám dávala dôvod prísť sem v nedeľu. Orava bola riedko osídlená a chudobná a väčšina obcí musela chodiť do kostola inam. Nižná nie.
Two disasters twenty years apart nearly ended the village. In 1666 a flood tore through it — the Orava is a fast mountain river and its floods arrive in hours, not days. Then in 1686 the army of the Polish king Jan III Sobieski marched through Orava on campaign, Nižná was burned, and the villagers ran into the forests and waited it out. By 1695 there were 107 farmsteads and about five hundred people again. That is how these villages always recovered: slowly, and by having children.Dve pohromy s odstupom dvadsiatich rokov dedinu takmer zmazali. V roku 1666 sa cez ňu prehnala povodeň — Orava je prudká horská rieka a jej veľká voda prichádza v hodinách, nie v dňoch. V roku 1686 potom cez Oravu tiahlo na výpravu vojsko poľského kráľa Jána III. Sobieskeho, Nižná vyhorela a ľudia ušli do lesov a prečkali to tam. V roku 1695 tu bolo znova 107 usadlostí a asi päťsto obyvateľov. Presne takto sa tieto dediny vždy spamätali: pomaly a tým, že mali deti.
By the early 1600s Nižná already had two mills and a sawmill and about four hundred people; by the census of 1785 there were 1,031. The village lived on what the valley allowed: flax spun and woven at home, cattle and sheep on the slopes, and timber. Logs cut in the Orava forests were lashed into rafts and floated downriver to the Váh, and the raftsmen of these villages were skilled enough that the trade fed families for generations. Nothing about the place suggested it would ever make anything more complicated than a plank.Už začiatkom 17. storočia mala Nižná dva mlyny a pílu a asi štyristo obyvateľov; pri sčítaní v roku 1785 ich bolo 1 031. Dedina žila z toho, čo dolina dovolila: z ľanu, ktorý sa doma priadol a tkal, z dobytka a oviec na stráňach a z dreva. Klady vyrúbané v oravských lesoch viazali do pltí a splavovali po rieke do Váhu a pltníci z týchto dedín boli takí zruční, že to remeslo živilo rodiny celé generácie. Nič na tom mieste nenasvedčovalo, že tu raz budú vyrábať niečo zložitejšie než dosku.
In 1899 the branch line from Kraľovany, on the main Košice–Bohumín railway, was built up the valley towards Suchá Hora on the Polish border, and Nižná got a station. It did not save the village. Rafting died because timber could now go by rail, and household weaving died because factory cotton was cheaper. The census counted 1,217 people here in 1890 and only 933 in 1940 — a quarter of the village gone, most of it to the United States or to work elsewhere. That is what a poor mountain valley looked like before industry arrived.V roku 1899 postavili z Kraľovian, ktoré ležia na hlavnej košicko-bohumínskej trati, odbočku dolinou smerom na Suchú Horu pri poľskej hranici a Nižná dostala stanicu. Dedinu to nezachránilo. Pltníctvo zaniklo, lebo drevo mohlo ísť po koľajniciach, a domáce tkáčstvo zaniklo, lebo fabrická bavlna bola lacnejšia. Sčítanie tu v roku 1890 napočítalo 1 217 ľudí, v roku 1940 už len 933 — štvrtina dediny bola preč, prevažne v Spojených štátoch alebo za prácou inde. Takto vyzerala chudobná horská dolina predtým, než prišiel priemysel.
Nižná spent the war inside the Slovak State, the German-allied republic. The Slovak National Uprising began in August 1944 and was pushed into the mountains, where partisan groups wintered in the ranges on both sides of this valley, and villages suspected of feeding them were punished for it. The front came through at the very end of March and the first days of April 1945, German units burning as they withdrew: Trstená lost seventy-five houses, and sixty-four people were killed at Námestovo on 2 April. No separate record of what those days did to Nižná itself could be verified for this page.Nižná prežila vojnu v Slovenskom štáte, v republike spojenej s Nemeckom. Slovenské národné povstanie sa začalo v auguste 1944 a zatlačili ho do hôr; partizánske skupiny prezimovali v pohoriach po oboch stranách tejto doliny a dediny podozrivé z toho, že ich živia, za to platili. Front prešiel celkom na konci marca a v prvých aprílových dňoch 1945 a nemecké jednotky pri ústupe pálili: Trstená prišla o sedemdesiatpäť domov a v Námestove zahynulo 2. apríla šesťdesiatštyri ľudí. Samostatný doklad o tom, čo tieto dni urobili priamo v Nižnej, sa pre túto stránku overiť nepodarilo.
In the 1950s the state built an electronics works at Nižná as part of the Tesla group, and in 1958 the first black-and-white television set came off the line — the model was called Mánes. Colour production followed in 1975. The sets were sold across Czechoslovakia and beyond it under the brand name Orava, and picture tubes were made here as well. The plant hired from every village in the upper valley, and with it came blocks of flats, schools and shops that a village of nine hundred people would never have built for itself. This is what planned industrialisation actually looked like: a factory decided on in an office, and a whole community rearranged around it.V päťdesiatych rokoch postavil štát v Nižnej závod na elektroniku ako súčasť koncernu Tesla a v roku 1958 zišiel z linky prvý čiernobiely televízor — model sa volal Mánes. Farebná výroba nasledovala v roku 1975. Prijímače sa predávali po celom Československu aj za jeho hranicami pod značkou Orava a vyrábali sa tu aj obrazovky. Závod naberal ľudí z každej dediny hornej doliny a s ním prišli paneláky, školy a obchody, aké by si deväťstočlenná dedina sama nikdy nepostavila. Takto vyzerala plánovaná industrializácia v praxi: fabrika sa rozhodla v kancelárii a celá obec sa preskupila okolo nej.
A factory built to supply one planned economy is in trouble when that economy stops existing. After 1989 Czechoslovak television sets had to compete with Japanese and Korean ones on price and on quality, and they lost. The works was reorganised into a successor company, OTF, and that company has been in bankruptcy since 2000. In a village of a few thousand people the collapse of the plant was not something that could be absorbed quietly. What survived was the ground, the buildings, and — the part that mattered most — a workforce that knew how to do precise assembly work.Fabrika postavená pre jedno plánované hospodárstvo má problém, keď toto hospodárstvo prestane existovať. Po roku 1989 museli československé televízory súťažiť s japonskými a kórejskými cenou aj kvalitou a neuspeli. Závod sa pretransformoval na nástupnícku spoločnosť OTF a tá je od roku 2000 v konkurze. V obci s niekoľkými tisíckami obyvateľov sa pád takého závodu nedá prejsť ticho. Zostala pôda, zostali budovy a — čo bolo najdôležitejšie — zostali ľudia, ktorí vedeli robiť presnú montážnu prácu.
The old works site is now an industrial estate, occupied by electronics, plastics and engineering firms that took over its buildings and much of its skilled labour, and it is one of the larger concentrations of manufacturing jobs in Orava. Nižná itself is officially still an obec, a village, of around 3,900 people, with an industrial park, blocks of flats and a grid of streets set among timber houses and pasture. Downstream at Podbiel stands the protected reserve of Orava log cottages called Bobrova raľa; upstream at Tvrdošín stands a wooden church on the UNESCO list. Nižná is the modern chapter of the same valley, and it does not pretend to be a sight: it is a place where people work.Z areálu bývalého závodu je dnes priemyselný park, v ktorom sídlia elektrotechnické, plastikárske a strojárske firmy; prevzali jeho budovy aj veľkú časť vyučených ľudí a patrí k väčším sústredeniam výrobných pracovných miest na Orave. Samotná Nižná je úradne stále obec, dedina s približne 3 900 obyvateľmi, s priemyselným parkom, panelákmi a sieťou ulíc medzi drevenicami a pasienkami. Nižšie po prúde stojí v Podbieli chránená rezervácia oravských zrubov Bobrova raľa, vyššie v Tvrdošíne drevený kostol zapísaný v UNESCO. Nižná je modernou kapitolou tej istej doliny a nepredstiera, že je pamiatkou: je to miesto, kde sa pracuje.
Sources consulted while researching this page. Follow them to read further — and to check us.Zdroje, z ktorých sme pri príprave tejto stránky vychádzali. Kliknite a čítajte ďalej — aj si nás overte.
Sixteen videos for this chapter.Šestnásť videí k tejto kapitole.