Tomáš Votava

* 1965

  • "To those trains, after you stop being the train dispatcher, whether you have a railway or whether you're still interested about it. Of course. I still have the railway, the original one, which I haven't caught for at least ten years, if not more. Because at first it was stored differently. Now I have it stored so that it could be, I just somehow can't force or something, but as part of the fun that I sometimes try to take pictures of trains here as well. But most of all, I have a friend who found out after many years that he knows a person in me who is also wild about trains, he is, too, so he sometimes takes me on trips that go around the very important, cultural monuments of the state, but no stations and bridges, and these matters. And we have fun by either driving through it or filming, well two idiots, but we really enjoy it this way. I am… And of course, of course I also crawl on some websites and so on. That I would be somehow very well informed not, but… that's the way you have to… if you're born with it and there's a train somewhere, then it doesn't matter that you're somewhere on the highway, and that at the speed of one hundred and forty and you should dedicate to driving. No, there is a train, you have to look at it. Thus, this is a normal software matter. It is… “hard fire” it is called that fire promptly. Yes Yes. It is there, it cannot exist without it. When there's some beer, coffee ... so what, beauty. I am, I was completely shocked when I made such a discovery. I work with sound, with music and so on. For example, I entered some sound recordings, I don't know for what I needed it, but anymore I found out that there is a community that records things like the sounds of trains or something... that in short, every train that passes on a route, in short, there is its sound. And so, some again capture that they stand there at regular intervals, I don't know for three months and take pictures of those trains there, they film. So it's there… Well yes. This is. That's it, it seems to me somehow. Yes, it's really one hundred percent dedicated to entertainment, but sincerely I don't quite understand this. As if you wanted to see very strange manifestations of this, of course in a country where everything is different, in Japan. There is the best, there are these communities incredibly different. Like many other Japanese, they do unreal things. ”

  • "How did you... how did you perceive... I already asked about the division of Czechoslovakia, but we haven't talked about the eighty-nine yet. How did you perceive the revolution? Yeah. That sounds pretty crap to me, but I was not in the square, because I was a very fresh family owner, I was pretty careful, let's say. So I can't say that I pushed someone somewhere, I'd love to, but it didn't happen. So, is this really possible? Well, hey ... I don't have the credit for that, but it's very nice. That's ... I'm a little pessimistic, so I watched it on TV and they had to convince me a few times that it really worked, well. And then when they called Krila to the SNP to play something, then it's clear, that's ... that's it. That probably wouldn't work otherwise. You had ... I'm sorry, you probably had a family against ... an anti-regime regime or an opinion, didn't you? Well, Mom, she would be a very good dissident, but I have a feeling she wasn't because of her family. How come she didn't like something here, and I know she was nervous a lot, but she kept the reins. So my father, he called her very funny, that ... that "mom is an old anti-socialist element" and he, from very old times, had some left-wing roots that he took from my grandfather, so to his father, who I have such I don't know the feeling a little bit, for some reason he was inclined ... he wasn't a working cadre right, so. That was the honest left, the cafe type… Not. Just hard to say. I think it was like that, like that cunning left or I don't know, well. It was no conviction and no struggle for the rights of the working people and similar will. Well, and my father ... he was left with a little bit of it, so sometimes he was interested in bullshit like that, how nicely they build that Baikal highway. Of course, I was also interested in, because of trains. ”

  • "And if you remember, Mr. Mečiar chased ... I don't like him, if it didn't follow. He was chasing problems where he could, and one of the problems was certainly any subversive elements, and that means the topic of nationality. So he pissed me off, I have to say. Then rewrite the expression there, but I never became a fan of him, for example because of these demented ideas. But otherwise, I would have come across something that ... that nationality is supposed to be a problem. All right, just be careful. I'm two meters again, when I wear a normal coat, I don't look malnourished. It's clear to me that up to this height, some people don't add any exceptions even if they think so, so I don't know. From my point of view, I didn't run into a problem, but if I was a small figure, maybe I would. Hard to say. So I don't know. I don't think so. I'll skip now ... I'll skip some decades now. How did you perceive the division of Czechoslovakia? Not positive, because if you remember, it was missing there, the moment of some proving, of some referendum. So it made me a little bit annoyed, but practically, but so nice, nice. Practically speaking, you have other papers, it's called differently, it's the half of what you know, but that could be everything, if no one is involved, it can be. I took it very practically, but I think they should have asked. Even somewhere on a trip, I talked to someone, with some kind of people. There were several nationalities and there was something to drink and I tried to explain them with my then incredibly bad German, that look Czech and Slovakia was created by division and not by referendum. For God, they didn't believe - it was some Swiss, Germans and some others - that they understood how to do it. Well, just like that. They didn't understand. This problem ... Just two people sit down in Brno in the garden of a historic villa, have a raspberry, talk and it's equipped. And the only thing that got on my nerves so little, that's well ... practically nice, but maybe it's really better than I know. I'm not a political scientist so ... I take it they could ask, but I guess they're there somehow, well. So yes, there is a certain nostalgia here, but that I would be a big Czechoslovak and go to wave the original flag... no, no. So… ”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Bratislava, 22.02.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:01:09
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

„I dictate to everyone that I was born with trains, but I have no idea who I got it from ... probably from grandpa, he was some track inspector.“

Tomáš Votava, was born in 1965 to parents from Prague. Blanka and Ferdinand met for the first time in the school canteen of the Prague University, the „Academy of Performing Arts“, where the mother studied graphics and father played the cello. This great love of theirs culminated in a wedding in 1957, as well as the arrival of two boys, Aleš and the younger Tomáš. As shortly after the wedding, Tomáš‘s father received a job offer in the Slovak Philharmonic, it was already more than probable that a move to Bratislava would follow. It was completely natural that their family was spoken in czech, and therefore that he and his brother also learned czech language. He learned slovak only when he was seven years old, but he already had relatively good slovak during his kindergarten attendance. Most of Tomáš‘s childhood was made up of trains. It‘s a matter of the heart, a hobby, but most of all it‘s something that still fascinates him. After primary school, he decided to go to the Secondary Industrial School of Transport in Trnava. He later became a train dispatcher, although he always wanted to be a train driver, which was never allowed due to poor eyesight. He has never had a serious problem with being Czech. He was accepted by slovak society and as a little boy he does not remember any allusions. Perhaps later, at an older age, he occasionally heard ethnographic speeches from supporters of the SNS political party. He also remembers when he had to go to the slovak authorities, for the so-called „Certificate of nationality“. At present, Tomáš has two children and a beautiful, several-month-old granddaughter. He moved away from trains in 1994 and became an expert in retouching and scanning, which he realizes for a certain magazine to this day. He still loves trains, but only in his free time, which he spends on websites about trains or on trips to different countries which are full of railroad machines.