A family of poppy farmers in Slovakia has been having trouble getting rid of hundreds of swans that have become addicted to poppy seeds and sometimes even overdose on them.

Poppy farmers near the Slovakian town of Komarno first reported the presence of swans in their fields back in February. It is believed that they were originally attracted by the large puddles of water that formed in the area, but after pecking at the flowers all day, many of them became addicted to the opium-containing seeds and refused to leave. Back in May, Slovakian media reported that around 200 swans had made a poppy field near Komarno their home, causing around €10,000 in damages to the flowers and getting so high on the natural narcotic that many of them couldn’t even fly anymore.

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Slovakian amateur football club TJ Tatran Cierny Balog prides itself on having one of the most unique stadiums in the world, complete with a railway track and a steam engine running straight through it.

Cierny Balog, a small Slovakian town of about 5,100 people, has become somewhat of a tourist spot in the last seven years or so, and it was all thanks to its football stadium. In 2015, a video of a steam engine passing through the stadium, on tracks positioned right between the field and the only existing grandstand went viral online, leaving a lot of people scratching their heads. Was it CGI, was it just part of a one-time event, or was there actually a train regularly passing right through the stadium? Well, as weird as it sounds, that last one was actually correct. The Čiernohronska Railway goes right through Cierny Balog stadium, and a steam-powered tourist train passes through it all summer long.

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Eva N., from the Slovakian town of Štúrovo, was recently arrested after defying the Supreme Court’s decision to stop playing a four-minute aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ on loop every day from early in the morning until late at night.

It’s safe to say that Eva N.’s neighbors on Kossuth Street, in Štúrovo, know Verid’s La Traviata by heart. After all they’ve been forced to listen to it for 16 years, ever since the woman started playing it from loudspeakers on her balconies almost non-stop during the day. They’ve been trying to get her to stop for years, appealing to both local police and the justice system, but Eva just defied everyone and kept turning on Placido Domingo’s interpretation of La Traviata every morning at around 6 am, and only turned it off at around 10 at night. Luckily, after over a decade and a half of audio torture, Slovakia’s Supreme Court recently upheld the decision of a lower court that required Eva N. to stop playing her music at loud volume. She ignored the ruling as she did the previous ones, only this time, she got arrested.

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Many people have one or two really old mobile phones from before the smartphone revolution happened, but 26-year old Stefan Polgari has a collection of over 3,500 of them, made up of 1,231 different models.

Polgari, from the small Slovakian town of Dobsina, has always been kind of a tech-head, and at 15-years-old, he started doing online reviews of new mobile phones. Before long, he had already amassed a small collection of Nokia, Alcatel, Sagem, Ericsson and other brands that were available in Slovakia at the time. But it was 2 years ago that Stefan’s collection really took off, after he bought someone’s collection of 1,000 old phones for a few thousands of euros. He has been hunting for missing models to add to his already impressive collection ever since, and today he is the proud owner of 3,500 “ancient” mobile phones, about half of which still work.

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Batman is in the news again, this time from Slovakia. Unlike his Brazilian counterpart, the Slovak Batman hasn’t been hired by the police, he’s self-appointed. 26-year-old Zoltan Kohari, from the southern Slovak town of Dunajska Streda, has donned a leather Batman suit that he’s stitched together himself, in an attempt to help the people of the town. He goes around cleaning the streets, helping the old, and calling the police when he spots something suspicious.

Incidentally, Kohari was a petty criminal prior to his superhero-avatar; he had spent eight months in jail last year and also attempted suicide just after his release. This was before he realized that he had a larger mission – to make life in his community better. “I have decided to do good for the people. I take care of order and help clean up the environment so we can keep living on this planet,” he says. Since Kohari doesn’t really have a full time job, he’s moved into an abandoned apartment in a dilapidated building on the edge of town. He has no electricity or water supply, but the place serves the purpose of a Batcave perfectly, to conduct his town patrols from.

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