Wolves and bears still prowl the wooded foothills of the Carpathian Mountains along the border between Poland and Slovakia, and the local populace — a motley blend of Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, gypsies and Ruthenians — still clings to ancient rural ways.

It’s a corner of the world where nothing would seem more out of place than a museum dedicated to Andy Warhol.

“I come from nowhere,” the artist once famously quipped. Yet sub-Carpathian Ruthenia — a region that was once part of the former Czechoslovakia and is now divided among Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and Romania — is where Warhol’s parents came from. Warhol himself never visited the area, but in 1991, his brother John made the trip to this remote corner of what is now Slovakia to found the Andy Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art in the town of Medzilaborce.

People in the nearby village of Mikova, where Warhol’s parents were born, had always known that Warhol was a painter. But it wasn’t until he died in 1987 and Polish newspapers first wrote about Warhol’s Slovak connection that they learned that he was world-famous. Soon the Slovak papers were writing about his roots, too. Everyone wanted to claim him as a native son.

Yet when it opened, the museum stirred suspicions in this deeply religious, conservative part of rural Slovakia, where decades of communism had left their stamp. There were campaigns to close it down. It didn’t surprise me to learn that the director, a high school art teacher by the name of Michal Bycko, had been accused of being a CIA agent, or that the museum was seen as a cover for U.S. intelligence operations in part of a dark plot to spread Western decadence to Slovakia.

This at any rate was the story as related in the Czech media. Looking to find out more, I headed to Medzilaborce to get the scoop for myself.

The train from Prague left at midnight. Surprisingly, it was full, but I managed to find a seat in a compartment occupied by a babushka wearing a floral headscarf, her son, and three Ukrainians in ski hats.

Five minutes into the journey, the Ukrainians uncorked a bottle of vodka and began a boisterous game of cards, playing for pistachio nuts. I dozed off, and as the train hurtled through the dark eastern night, I glided in and out of sleep, half-aware of the din around me.