Medzilaborce, Slovakia ? Two waist-high Campbell Soup cans greet visitors to the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in the town near where his parents were born.

For the locals, who make their soup from scratch, the canned kind is an alien concept. So is Warhol and so are his works, which just don’t compute in a corner of Slovakia frozen in its bleak communist past.

Fifteen years after his death on Feb. 22, 1987, Warhol still has Slovaks wondering. He’s always had that effect on millions of people worldwide, but in Medzilaborce, there is genuine bemusement.

“I think he was not normal, because if he had been, he would have never colored his hair white and then green,” said Michal Pavlovic, a resident.

For years, Warhol and his works were ignored in state propaganda that sang the praises of artists from Russia or elsewhere in the communist East.

It wasn’t until shortly before the 1989 downfall of communist rule in this country that people even learned of the Warhol connection that his parents came from the hamlet of Mikova, outside Medzilaborce in this poor and remote corner of northeastern Slovakia.

Not that knowing has made much of a difference.

Although 14,000 people visited the museum last year, 70 percent were foreigners mostly from neighboring countries plus a few Westerners. Medzilaborce isn’t easy to get to from Bratislava, the capital, it takes nearly nine hours on three different trains.

Among the 140 items are several original screen prints: “Red Lenin,” “Electric Chairs,” “Ingrid Bergman” and “Ladies and Gentlemen.” Also on display are Warhol’s jacket and sunglasses, some photographs, his mother’s handwritten diary and the baby outfit in which Warhol was christened.

Relatives in Mikova contributed a shoe box of snapshots and letters from Warhol’s mother, Julia.

Also on show are works by one of his brothers, Paul Warhola. The family’s name originally was Varchola, which eventually was changed to Warhola, from which came Warhol. Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, or possibly a couple of years earlier he never made that clear.

The museum, in a leaky, drab concrete building that once served as a communist-run culture center, “is in a bad place and in a bad time,” said curator Michal Bycko.

Few locals can afford the $2 admission fee, and with unemployment at 27 percent, art takes second place to struggling to make a living.

Jozef Regrut, a retired teacher, seemed happy enough, though.

“The museum is just unique,” he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “There’s a lot to be seen there, a lot to appreciate and to marvel at.”

But Warhol’s pop art doesn’t quite seem to work on many Slovaks, particularly the older generation, who remain suspicious of foreigners and yearn for the old communist system, which at least gave them secure jobs.

“We knew he was a painter, but we didn’t know what kind of a painter he was,” said Jan Zavacky, Warhol’s 56-year-old cousin. “Here, that could mean he painted walls or something. It wasn’t until the 1980s that we found out what a famous artist he’s been.”

Zavacky still lives in Mikova, where Warhol’s parents were born, grew up and married before emigrating to the United States.

There are no traces left of the Warhols in Mikova, no commemorative plaque, not even the old family home.

But Zavacky can point out where it stood. A pear tree marks the spot.