This at any rate was the story as related in the Czech media. intelligence operations in part of a dark plot to spread Western decadence to Slovakia. It didn’t surprise me to learn that the director, a high school art teacher by the name of Michal Bycko, had been accused of being a CIA agent, or that the museum was seen as a cover for U.S. Yet when it opened, the museum stirred suspicions in this deeply religious, conservative part of rural Slovakia, where decades of communism had left their stamp.
Everyone wanted to claim him as a native son. Soon the Slovak papers were writing about his roots, too. But it wasn’t until he died in 1987 and Polish newspapers first wrote about Warhol’s Slovak connection that they learned that he was world-famous. People in the nearby village of Mikova, where Warhol’s parents were born, had always known that Warhol was a painter. Warhol himself never visited the area, but in 1991, his brother John made the trip to this remote corner of what is now Slovakia to found the Andy Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art in the town of Medzilaborce. Yet sub-Carpathian Ruthenia - a region that was once part of the former Czechoslovakia and is now divided among Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and Romania - is where Warhol’s parents came from. “I come from nowhere,” the artist once famously quipped. Medzilaborce is about 174 miles or a five-hour drive southeast of Krakow. It’s a corner of the world where nothing would seem more out of place than a museum dedicated to Andy Warhol. Wolves and bears still prowl the wooded foothills of the Carpathian Mountains along the border between Poland and Slovakia, and the local populace - a motley blend of Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, gypsies and Ruthenians - still clings to ancient rural ways. The Post apologizes to filmmaker Stanislaw Mucha and to its readers for these lapses. In addition, while the article appeared to be based on a single trip, in fact it was based on several journeys, including one 10 years ago. The writer also used without attribution quotes from the documentary of conversations with Warhol’s cousin Michal Warhola and Warhol’s elderly aunt.
Those scenes appeared in “Absolut Warhola,” a 2001 film by Stanislaw Mucha. The writer, a freelance contributor to The Post, described a scene of men in rabbit-fur caps fixing a car exhaust and giving directions to the relatives’ home and mentioned passing a Soviet tank. The article explored the Warhol museum in Medzilaborce and the reaction of Warhol’s relatives in nearby Mikova to the late artist’s notoriety. Editor’s Note: This article in the April 17 Travel section included material that was taken without attribution from a documentary film.
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