A Sister City for Pittsburgh

Chris sends along news of "Warhol City" in Slovakia:

Medzilaborce, the birthplace of the American artist's emigrant parents in the Carpathian mountains near Ukraine, is investing $1.5-million to create “Warhol City,” replete with Campbell Soup bus stops that complement a museum in his honour, a bronze statue of Warhol and a hotel called Pension Andy.

“We want to bring a little bit of pop art into the town's soul,” Medzilaborce mayor Mirko Kalinak said in an interview.

. . .

The catch is that Medzilaborce lies seven hours from the capital, Bratislava, down some of the nation's most treacherous two-lane country roads, making it popular with only the most ardent Warhol fans.

About 17,000 visitors made it to the museum last year.

While that's almost three times the size of the city's population, the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where the artist was born after his parents moved the U.S., attracted 62,000 visitors last year.

“I call it the K2 of museums,” Tomas Pospiszyl, a Warhol expert and Prague film teacher, said in reference to the Himalayan peak of K2, the second highest in the world.

“You have to really be sure you want to go there.”