Moravany nad Váhom are interesting tourist villages that benefit from the vicinity of Piešťany. There is a manor house with a nice garden, its surroundings are led by hiking trails. At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, farmer Štefan Hulman-Petrech dug a magnificent statue, not even eight centimeters high, in a field near the village.

“He thought that it was a lost children’s toy and during the war he exchanged it for a few memorial photographs with the factory owner Bernhardt Germann, a Sudeten businessman from the Czech Republic. But in 1945 he committed suicide. The earth also lay down behind Venus from Moravia, “ says Jaroslava Ruttkayová, an archaeologist at the Ponitrian Museum in Nitra.

They found her in Paris

Finally, she was tracked down by the German archaeologist LF Zotz, who went to Piešťany before the war as a spa guest and heard the whole legend about the statue. He brought it to Paris, where in the early 1960s they exhibited a copy of the Venus of Moravia at the Musée de L´Homme.

“She was noticed there by the Czech anthropologist Emanuel Vlček, who immediately arrives at an important Slovak researcher, Juraj Bárta. With the help of foreign colleagues, he tracked down how Venus got to Paris and proved her connection with Zotz, “ Jaroslava Ruttkayová continues in an almost detective plot. In 1968, however, the Moravian Venus returned to Slovakia and since then it has represented us at the most prestigious domestic and foreign exhibitions.