Online daily Index writes that a woman from Štúrovo, Slovakia was arrested on the grounds of making life-endangering threats. Her crime? Disturbing her neighbours by blasting Plácido Domingo arias for 16 years.
The house of Éva N. is known worldwide as the ‘music house’, as the woman has been blasting Plácido Domingo arias on full volume, so that the music can be heard loudly on the street too, for sixteen years now.
As parameter.sk writes, Éva moved to Štúrovo for business reasons in 1998 and bought a suspiciously cheap house. The seller told Éva that they needed the money fast as they were moving abroad, but as Éva recalled the story, she found out later that the reason why the house was so low-priced was that it is located in a bad neighbourhood.
Not much later, the war with the neighbours broke out: according to Éva, a man jealous of her flourishing business kept breaking in her windows, but the police did nothing, as the neighbours took the man’s side. Later, she started to get annoyed by her closest neighbour’s dog, which, as she recalled, would not stop barking: if there was nothing to bark at, it barked only to keep itself entertained. She asked her neighbour to quiet the dog so that she would be able to get some sleep, but the neighbour only laughed.
The authorities advised Éva to listen to music to dull the sound of barking. This is where things started to really get out of hand and the music became louder and louder.
The woman claims that, when the dog died, the music stopped, but her neighbours bought other dogs just to spite her, so in turn, she turned the volume up. Éva, to annoy her neighbours, put her house on sale a couple of years ago, but she would only sell it to Roma families, who could build small cabins in the 1100 square metres large backyard.
Her neighbours claim that ‘they are going crazy’ from the noise and that they are growing sick of the opera numbers. They have asked her to change the channel or to put on something else, like an operetta, to no prevail. The neighbours turned to the authorities on many occasions, but there is nothing to be done, as the music does not surpass the legal decibel limit.
Even the Slovakian Supreme Court ordered the woman to stop the noise pollution, though it was effortless.
After continuous quarrels with the neighbours, the law, and even a Slovakian newspaper Parameter. When they tried to cover the strange case between Éva and the neighbours, they presented Éva in a negative light which broke her business. Thus she sued them. Éva was eventually asked in for questioning by the local police, and on the grounds of making dangerous threats, she was even arrested.
featured image: WikiCommons – ProtoplasmaKid