When I leave my front door and start uphill, the city falls away surprisingly fast. After fifteen minutes the concrete and parked cars are behind me and I’m already on the edge of real Little Carpathian woodland, a tangle of oaks, beeches, hornbeam and maples that feels different in every season – bright in spring, deep green in summer, copper and gold in autumn, bare and echoing in winter.

Somewhere in that mosaic of trunks and undergrowth live fallow deer, roe deer, wild boar and foxes; I only seldom see them, but I know they are here. What I enjoy is this strange overlap: the path is clearly made for people, you are still in the capital, yet the forest follows its own rules, continuing day and night whether anyone is watching or not. A simple any time walk becomes a quiet crossing between two worlds – the familiar one of stairwells, tram lines and streetlights, and the older one of hoofprints, feathers and leaves, only a few minutes apart on foot.