"The far end of Slovakia" a Kosice Travel Page by kit_mc

Kosice was the last town in Slovakia that we stayed in. It was also the base from which we visited Bardejov, the UNESCO World Heritage site near the northern Slovakian border with Poland.

I have to say that I was really, really impressed with Kosice. As we'd gone further east from Bratislava I'd expected, perhaps in a rather prejudiced Western European way, to expect everything to become somehow rougher. While you can tell that this area is perhaps poorer and more isolated from the rest of the EU, this city really deserves a visit.

We arrived in Kosice after spending a night en-route in Levoca. After Levoca this place really seemed like a metropolis.

It's just a short walk from the train station to the main town centre which looks to have been completely restored. This area has really had some cash spent on it and you can tell from the new restaurants that they're getting ready for the visitors in the enlarged EU.

The main thing I'd learned from visiting Kosice was to always make the effort to travel the extra mile. It might have been a long train journey into the unexpected, but it was well worth it.

One of the problems during the trip to Slovakia was that so many cultural sights were closed. This was kind of the case in Kosice where the archaeological museum was closed.

On the other hand, it was interesting to wander around the streets and see the lovely architecture, the monuments and sights from the communist days and to just soak up a place that's only a couple of hours from home by plane, but different in so many ways.

We stayed two nights in Kosice and found such a great new restaurant that we ended up eating there both nights. The tips we'd read about were either closed or were really just not as nice as we fancied.

Most of our time actually in Kosice was spent in the evenings only, in either a bar or a restaurant. We did manage to get inside the Cathedral of St Elizabeth which is a beautiful sight, inside and out. It's Europe's eastern most Gothic cathedral and as such it was kind of odd to find it sitting there this far east.

Kosice is a good base to visit the eastern parts of Slovakia, you can get to some of the more remote attractions such as the famous wooden churches, in a day.