The History of the Gymnastics Association in Pozsony: 1880–1945

The period of dualism is considered the heyday of embourgeoisement in Hungary. Through their lively community life, the citizens of Pozsony (Slovak: Bratislava) founded a number of associations in the last third of the 19th century, including several organizations that played a decisive role in the city´s life for many decades. One of these was the Gymnastics Association in Pozsony (PTE), founded in 1880, about which, despite its importance, a Hungarian-language historical elaboration has not yet been made. In this work, I endeavour to fill this gap, presenting the history of the club’s development and the difficulties associated with the changes of sovereignty that the club members were able to successfully overcome by 1945. To prepare the study, I used the 18 PTE yearbooks found in the Kerezsi legacy of the Hungarian Olympic and Sports Museum, dating from the period before the First World War, the source material of the Bratislava City Archives, which contains fragments of documents of the association preserved from the Czechoslovak era, supplemented with information already known from the period press and academic literature.