Lodge of the Lodge of Silence (Csemadok Headquarters)

The meeting places of the Freemasons were initially noble residences, bourgeois houses or rented apartments. This was the case for a long time in Bratislava. ; From 1879, the Bratislava Lodge For Silence (Zur Verschwiegenheit) rented eleven rooms on the third floor of a hotel on Híd Street (now the Carlton) for more than thirty years - it had everything a lodge needed, a sanctuary, a hall of lost steps (entrance hall), a darkroom, a dressing room, a dining room, etc. The interior design was sumptuous, with Egyptian-style decorations, e.g. colorful carved scarabs. The Grand Master's chair was an exact copy of the throne of Ramses III. It is characteristic that they donated two sphinxes from their furnishings to the Grand Lodge in Budapest. ; When the hotel got a new owner, the Freemasons stopped renting and rebuilt a house they had bought on Széna Square (later 1st May Square) into their own lodge, and moved here in 1912. The classicist house, decorated with a tympanum, had a statue of Prometheus on the roof. ; In addition to the Zur Verschwiegenheit and the Brotherhood lodges, eleven other Viennese and one Prague lodge held meetings here. However, they also often held meetings in taverns. A Masonic museum was also set up in the lodge shortly after its completion. ; Freemasonry continued to exist in the first Czechoslovak Republic. Until 1938, when the Slovak parliament dissolved the Masonic organizations and confiscated their property. Freemasonry slowly revived after the war, but it was "voluntarily" dissolved after the communist takeover. The lodge served various offices, including the Bratislava headquarters of the Csemads. ; In the 1990s, the Csemads purchased the building from the city of Bratislava and operate it here as the headquarters of the national council. ; ; Written by László Vári.