The Sakrakopec hike combines the quiet of the forest in the Little Carpathians (Malé Karpaty) with a sad chapter of Slovak history: the plane crash of 1966. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a trip with meaning, just a short way from the centre of Bratislava. On the way, stop at the memorial to the victims.
- Start
- Tram 3 to the Detvianska stop, then on foot up to Horáreň Biely Kríž
- Difficulty
- About 500 m of ascent; the hills properly wore us out
- How long
- Three hours, including a strudel stop
- My tip
- Quark strudel at Občerstvenie u Kocmundu; from there it’s about 20 more minutes to the memorial
- Watch out for
- Weak signal, so download an offline map and take water
- At the crash site
- Wreckage and the victims’ personal belongings are still there; don’t take anything
Contents3 chaptersHideShow
- 01The site of a plane crash in Bratislava
- Why a plane crashed on Sakrakopec on 24 November 1966 and who the pilots were
- Why the Sakrakopec plane crash was kept quiet for so long
- 02How to get to the Sakrakopec memorial and where to stop along the way
- The memorial to the crashed plane on Sakrakopec
- 03Final tips
The hike to Sakrakopec, the site of a plane crash in Bratislava, is a trip I’d wanted to do for a long time. Ever since I watched a YouTube documentary about this 1966 air crash, in fact.
To be honest, until then I’d never heard of it, because it happened long before I was born. I only knew about the crash at Zlaté piesky. I finally made up my mind, planned the route and did the trip to Sakrakopec, the site of an air crash in Bratislava that nobody survived. If you’re looking for tips on where to get out into nature in Bratislava without a car, have a look at my article.
Just a few kilometres from the centre of Bratislava, in the Little Carpathians, there’s a place where the silence of the forest meets a sad chapter of the country’s past. Sakrakopec. Today it’s a popular spot for walks, but on 24 November 1966 a tragedy happened here that cost 82 lives.
Sakrakopec hike: the site of a plane crash in Bratislava
Here’s the documentary I mentioned. If you want the bigger picture of how the whole disaster happened, it’s worth a watch:
Why a plane crashed on Sakrakopec on 24 November 1966 and who the pilots were
On 24 November 1966, an Ilyushin Il-18 of the Bulgarian airline TABSO was flying from Sofia to Berlin via Budapest and Prague. The weather was bad, so it had to land at the airport in Ivanka pri Dunaji and wait for conditions to improve. When it took off at around 4.30pm, fate gave it only a few minutes.
Shortly after take-off, the plane crashed into a hill called Sakrakopec. On board were 74 passengers and eight crew, 82 people in total. Nobody survived. Most of the victims were Bulgarians and Hungarians, but there were also people from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Japan, the UK, Switzerland and Tunisia. They included the Bulgarian opera singer Katya Popova and the Honduran writer Ramón Amaya Amador.
Among the names on the memorial plaque you’ll find the whole crew. The captain was 41-year-old Lyubomir Todorov Antonov, who had almost 12,000 flying hours behind him and had flown into Bratislava 11 times before. The co-pilot was Svetomir Dimitrov Shakadanov, the navigator Slavi Stefanov Tomakov, the radio operator Nikola Aleksandrov Tasev and the flight engineer Stoyan Todorov Rangelov. The passengers were looked after by the flight attendants Maria Ivanova Ivanova, Svetla Marinova Georgieva and Violina Veleva Stoychkova. Their names are engraved in metal in three languages: Slovak, Bulgarian and English. The memorial stands at the crash site as a quiet reminder of everyone who died here.
Why the Sakrakopec plane crash was kept quiet for so long
Some of the names tell you the plane was also carrying families, married couples and parents with children. One of the flight attendants, Svetla Georgieva, had got married less than three weeks before this flight. This personal side gives the place a particular weight: you don’t only feel history here, but also ordinary lives that ended far too soon.
The 1966 disaster was one of the worst air crashes on Czechoslovak soil. Even so, it was kept quiet for a long time. During the Cold War, events like this rarely made it into the media. Documents only surfaced decades later. Here you can see actual scans of newspapers from the time, which reported the crash in quite different ways.
The Ilyushin Il-18 crash in Bratislava
The plane that hit Bratislava’s Sakrakopec on 24 November 1966 was a four-engine turboprop, the Ilyushin Il-18. In the 1950s and 1960s it was one of the most modern civil airliners in the Eastern Bloc. The Soviet design was the pride of airlines such as Aeroflot, Interflug and Bulgaria’s TABSO, because the Il-18 could carry more than 100 passengers over distances of up to 6,000 km.
The aircraft was known for being tough and economical, and it flew reliably in all kinds of climates, from Siberia to the Middle East. At the time of the crash it was almost new, a series-built Il-18V with four Ivchenko AI-20 engines. They gave it a speed of around 650 km/h, which was exceptional for a turboprop of that era.
Although the Il-18 had built a reputation as a safe aircraft, this crash is one of the most tragic in its history. The Czechoslovak investigating commission never named a definite cause. It considered the most likely explanation to be that the crew didn’t properly assess the terrain and the weather around Bratislava airport. Ironically, a machine that stood for the technical progress of the Eastern Bloc ended its flight just a few minutes after take-off, in a dense forest above the city.
How to get to the Sakrakopec memorial and where to stop along the way
Sakrakopec is a fairly hard-to-reach hill, and getting here means about 500 m of ascent. For me, the easiest route was this:
- Take tram 3 and get off at the Detvianska stop
- Walk all the way up to Horáreň Biely Kríž (the Biely Kríž forester’s lodge), where you’ll also find the Klinec mountain hut
- Have a great quark strudel at Občerstvenie u Kocmundu, a snack bar on the way. A Sakrakopec hike isn’t complete without quark strudel.
- From there, carry on to Sakrakopec, about another 20 minutes on foot. You’ll find the exact coordinates here on Google Maps
- Tip from Milan I’d download the Maps.me app, which has hiking paths and trails marked really well. With it, you won’t get lost in the forest.
The memorial to the crashed plane on Sakrakopec
I was surprised myself when, with sweet strudel in my stomach, I finally reached the memorial on Sakrakopec. The forest suddenly changed. Several memorials appeared among the trees, as if time had been adding layers of remembrance here. One new, another older, crosses, a stone plaque, a bench and a list of victims with names nobody says out loud any more. It all feels quiet, but also strangely personal.
What struck me most, though, was something else. When I looked down at my feet, I noticed bits of metal glinting among the leaves: pieces of the plane. And then a glasses case that may have belonged to someone. It wasn’t just a historical artefact, but a reminder that the tragedy you read about on the plaque really happened right here.
It was only when I spotted a shoe belonging to one of the victims that I understood how powerful this place is. For a long time I thought someone had just put it there recently. But then the volunteers who look after the memorial came over to talk to me and confirmed that they themselves had found the shoe while cleaning the memorial. So it’s not a prop, but a real remnant of that night.
The plane crashed here in 1966, more than half a century ago. But the terrain is steep, densely overgrown and hard to reach, so wreckage and the passengers’ personal belongings have stayed here to this day. Like silent witnesses that wind and rain haven’t managed to wipe away completely. Sakrakopec still carries its tragedy, not as a relic of the past but as a living memory that everyone who comes here can feel.
If you’re in the area, do stop by. I know it’s not exactly the most typical weekend walk in Bratislava, but Koliba, in the Bratislava forest park, will be packed anyway. On Sakrakopec, peace and quiet are waiting for you.
Sakrakopec hike: final tips
- Take water with you: the forests here are dense, and apart from Horáreň Biely Kríž there are only trails and lots of cyclists
- It’s a longer hike: with the strudel stop it took us three hours in total, and the hills really wore us out
- Don’t take anything from the crash site. People died here, and I believe that if you had a piece of the wreckage at home, you’d be taking this tragedy home with you
- The signal is weak, so download an offline map: in places we had no signal at all
- These are still city forests, so dogs must be on a lead, as there’s a lot of large game here and plenty of roe deer
On the way back we headed down to Rača, a district of Bratislava, past vineyards that were slowly turning autumn colours. We caught the tram at Detvianska, but before that something happened that rounded off the whole trip in a symbolic way: we rescued a lost dog. It joined us out of nowhere and walked alongside us as if it had always been ours. I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t let me. And it was right not to.
Luckily I noticed a phone number on its collar. I called, and a man answered who’d been desperately looking for it, a local hunter. We agreed to meet at Mahrova búda. When he finally got the dog back, you could feel the huge relief. I just felt a quiet joy that a day that began by remembering a tragedy ended with a small good deed. Because those always count. Whether it’s a Sakrakopec hike or a walk anywhere else.
I’ve also written about why Bratislava is worth a visit.
Happy travels!
Milan
A Slovak travel blogger who has been getting Slovaks out of their office chairs since 2013. Author of the book Influencer and founder of the Bez Mapy blog.
