Slovak town capitalizes on the Warhol moniker

For a small Slovak town, Andy Warhol may be the key to rolling 15 minutes of fame into years of wealth.

Medzilaborce, the birthplace of the American artist’s emigrant parents in the Carpathian mountains near Ukraine, is investing $1.3 million to create “Warhol City,” replete with Campbell Soup bus stops that complement a museum in his honor, a bronze statue in a square 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. “It’s good not only for the city, but also for Slovakia, which will become more world famous thanks to his name.”

Warhol, known more for his 1960s Pop art in the U.S. than his influence on Slovak culture, is being touted as the town’s favorite son to lure tourists to a region where the 17% jobless rate is among the nation’s highest. 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 of 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 to the U.S., attracted 62,000 last year.