Kníhkupectvo Christiania, Poprad — 1996 to 2026
There are places that do more than exist. They shape you. They hand you, quietly and without ceremony, the version of yourself you were always supposed to become. For me, that place was a bookshop in Poprad, Slovakia. It was called Christiania.
I walked through its door for the first time almost thirty years ago. I don’t remember exactly what I was looking for that day — probably nothing in particular. But I remember what I found.
More Than Books
Kníhkupectvo Christiania was, on the surface, an independent bookshop on Námestie sv. Egídia, the beautiful main square in the centre of Poprad. But to call it simply a bookshop would be like calling a campfire simply a source of light.
It was a living room. A meeting place. A stage.
Much of that was down to one person: Pato Stražay. He ran the shop with a kind of restless, generous energy that turned it into something far bigger than its four walls. Under his watch, Christiania hosted live concerts, film screenings, poetry readings, book launches, and late evenings where ideas moved around the room faster than the wine. He understood something that most people in retail never grasp — that a space becomes meaningful only when people feel free to inhabit it fully.
And people did. They came for the books, stayed for the conversation, and left with something harder to define.
What I Found There
I was a teenager when I first walked in. Young enough to still be figuring out what kind of person I wanted to be, old enough to sense that the answer mattered.
My first proper memory of Christiania as a place that could change you was a film screening. Pato was showing Hair — the 1979 musical, all Vietnam-era protest and flower crowns and the radical, joyful insistence that love matters more than war. I sat in that room with strangers and watched it, and something shifted. Not dramatically, not all at once — but permanently. The way I looked at the world, at authority, at what was worth fighting for and what was worth letting go. That film cracked something open in me that has never quite closed again.
I have worn my hair long ever since. I am not even sure I made a conscious decision about it. It just seemed obvious after that evening.
Christiania gave me friends — real ones, the kind forged over shared enthusiasms and long discussions rather than proximity or convenience. It gave me ideas I hadn’t encountered before, books I wouldn’t have found on my own, and people who taught me — not through lectures but simply by example — that love and peace could accomplish more than wars and hatred ever could.
It also gave me my first love.
I don’t say that to be sentimental. I say it because it is true, and because it matters. The places where we first love, where we first feel seen, where we first sense what life could be — those places become part of us. They don’t leave even when we do. Every time I look in the mirror, I am reminded of an evening in a bookshop in Poprad, thirty years ago, when a film about longhaired dreamers told me something true about who I was.
The End of an Era
I learned this week that Christiania will close its doors on 31 May 2026.
The reasons are painfully familiar: a worsening economic climate, consolidation measures rippling through the economy, and — the final blow — a planned reconstruction of Námestie sv. Egídia that will restrict footfall to the town centre for around nine months, eliminating the crucial pre-Christmas trading period. For a small independent bookshop, that is simply unsurvivable.
Števo, Ivka and Juraj — who have carried the shop in its later years — wrote their farewell with real dignity and warmth. “Christiania tu bola vďaka vám,” they said. Christiania existed because of you. It is a generous thing to say, and it is true. But the reverse is equally true: many of us exist, in some meaningful way, because of Christiania.
Why This Matters Beyond Poprad
Independent bookshops are not just retail outlets that happen to sell books. They are, at their best, civic infrastructure — places where a community thinks out loud, where strangers become neighbours, where culture is not consumed but lived.
When they close, something goes with them that cannot be replicated online. An algorithm cannot host a concert. A delivery warehouse cannot spark a friendship. A recommendation engine has never, to my knowledge, introduced anyone to their first love.
The Christiania team themselves put it well in their farewell: support your independent bookshops, theatres, galleries, cafés. Go there. Buy things. Have conversations. Because once they are gone, they are gone.
Goodbye
I won’t be able to get back to Poprad before the 31st. But I’ve been thinking about that first visit for days now — the smell of the place, the feeling of stepping into somewhere that somehow already felt like mine.
Thirty years is a long time. Long enough to build something that genuinely changes lives. Christiania did that, and it did it because of the people who poured themselves into it — Pato in those early years, and Števo, Ivka and Juraj in the years since.
Thank you. For every book, every evening, every conversation. For being the kind of place that makes a teenager feel that the world is larger and kinder than it might otherwise seem.
You will be missed. By me, and by many.
Christiania končí svoju prevádzku 31. 05. 2026. Ďakujeme, že ste boli s nami.