I grew up riding into the forests south of Handlová at night. The dark has come north with me.
The road out of Handlová towards Žiar nad Hronom, Slovakia, 2013
Home
I was born in Handlová, a mining town in the middle of Slovakia, about twelve kilometres from one of the places that claim to be the geographical centre of Europe. (Europe has several. Ours is near Kremnické Bane.) My grandparents taught me things there, and the kitchen smelled of my mother’s baking.
Most people carry a place like that. Mine is Handlová, and the longer I am away, the less of it I can put into words. The details go first. They stop mattering before they are forgotten, and what is left is plainer: the shape of the town, the forest above it, the roads out.
Pond above Handlová at night, Slovakia, 2013
The Rides
I have always liked being alone, mostly outdoors and often on a bicycle. I used to ride south from Handlová through forests and fields that became, over the years, almost mythical to me. Many of those rides were at night. I spent hours alone among the trees in full darkness and was never afraid there. It was the most comfortable place I knew.
This troubled my mother’s calm, as it would. But somehow she understood me. Somehow she recognized the nyctophilia living inside her son, and let it be.
I knew those roads by feel: the gravel under the tyres, the grade of each hill, the smell of pine resin cooling in the air after a hot day. My body had learned what my eyes could not confirm. Without light, the forest showed a version of itself that nobody sees by day, and the fields beyond it opened into a blackness so complete it felt like a country of its own.
Poetic Edda, forest above Handlová, Slovakia, 2015
Smaller
The Handlová I carry is not the Handlová that exists. The forests have grown in some places and been cut in others. The fields have changed shape and use. The kitchen where my mother baked has gone on through years I was not there to see. And the boy on the bicycle is not me. He is someone I remember being, which is a different thing.
When I go back, the streets are familiar but no longer mine. A building I remember as enormous turns out to be ordinary. The distance from the house I grew up in to the edge of the forest, which once felt like a crossing between worlds, is just a walk. Five minutes. Maybe less. Measured as an adult, the old mythology does not hold, and what remains is simple geography.
Northern Dark
Now I live in Norway, on an island where the winter days are themselves a kind of night. The old places cannot be rebuilt, because they no longer exist in the form I knew. What I can do is make new ones: roads my body can learn, places to stand in the dark and feel the old comfort, even though the dark here is different. It is longer and colder, and it carries the salt of another sea.
I am doing that slowly, knowing that whatever I build here will one day be remembered too. The days that are nights and the solitude that is now simply the shape of my life are the material. They are mine in a way Handlová, for all it means to me, can no longer fully be.
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The dark came with me. Of everything I brought from Handlová, it is the one thing that has not changed with distance. I still find comfort in it.
Churchyard at night, Sør-Arnøy, Norway, 2026
