Secrets of Western Slovakia

For a long time, I had heard very little about Dunaszerdahely.
Essentially, I only knew it through its football club — a name from sports news, a place that had no real story in my mind, only a vague atmosphere.

As for the Hungarian mafia of Dunaszerdahely, I knew almost nothing.
It was not part of family stories, it was never taught in school, and it did not appear on the mental map I grew up with. It existed only in half-sentences: in allusions, in averted glances, in names dropped without context — never forming a complete story.

Then, during the summer, podcasts began to appear one after another.
Conversations about Dunaszerdahely, about the 1990s, about a town that was both peripheral and central at the same time. What stayed with me were not the shootings, but a strange duality: how a place continues to live after surviving its own shadow.

That was when the thought first formed that I needed to come here one day.
Not to investigate, not to judge — but simply to see what remains. In streets and squares, in museum display cases, and in the questions a child asks when too many things feel true and incomprehensible at once.

Dunaszerdahely was not a crime scene to me, but a promise:
that in Central Europe there are still towns we think we already know — while in reality, we have not truly arrived yet.