Here is something few people expect from the communist years. Slovak dioceses were still formally attached to Esztergom in Hungary — a leftover of the old kingdom that had survived the end of Austria-Hungary by nearly sixty years. In 1977 Pope Paul VI cut that link and created a Slovak church province with its metropolitan seat at Trnava, the town where the archbishops of Esztergom had lived in exile from 1543 to 1820. So Trnava got its archbishop back, 157 years after losing him, and it happened under a government that was officially atheist and had spent the 1950s imprisoning priests and dissolving religious orders. The seat of the metropolitan moved on to Bratislava in 2008, but Trnava remains an archdiocese.Toto by od komunistických čias málokto čakal. Slovenské diecézy stále formálne patrili pod Ostrihom v Maďarsku — pozostatok starého kráľovstva, ktorý prežil zánik Rakúsko-Uhorska o takmer šesťdesiat rokov. V roku 1977 pápež Pavol VI. túto väzbu prerušil a zriadil slovenskú cirkevnú provinciu s metropolitným sídlom v Trnave — v meste, kde ostrihomskí arcibiskupi v exile žili od roku 1543 do roku 1820. Trnava tak dostala arcibiskupa späť 157 rokov po tom, čo oň prišla, a stalo sa to za vlády, ktorá bola oficiálne ateistická a v 50. rokoch väznila kňazov a rušila rehole. Sídlo metropolitu sa v roku 2008 presunulo do Bratislavy, Trnava však zostáva arcibiskupstvom.
