Slovak culture: a folk tradition that was never allowed to become quaint

Why folk tradition carried more weight here than elsewhere

Every European country has a folk tradition. Slovakia's is unusual in what it had to do. From the collapse of Great Moravia in the tenth century to 1918 there was no Slovak state, no Slovak court, no Slovak university and, for long stretches, no Slovak-language schooling. What existed was villages, and the culture that survived was the culture villages could carry: song, dress, wooden building, story.

Folk material became the foundation the nineteenth century assembled a national culture from. The clearest case is the anthem. "Nad Tatrou sa blýska" is built on the melody of the folk song "Kopala studienku", so the country's most formal piece of music is a peasant tune with new words.

The institution that keeps this going is the Východná Folklore Festival, the oldest and largest in the country, held annually in the village it is named after and drawing international participation. The state ensemble SĽUK, the Slovak folk art collective, is the largest professional group working the same material.

The best known figure in Slovak folk mythology is Juraj Jánošík, who lived from 1688 to 1713 and functions as the Slovak Robin Hood: an outlaw who robbed the rich for the poor. He was a real person, and the legend has been retold in literature and on film throughout the twentieth century, most famously in Martin Frič's Jánošík of 1935. That a highwayman occupies the position other countries give a king is itself a statement about how the culture assembled itself.

What the language went through to exist

Slovak was codified twice, along confessional lines, and the second attempt won.

Anton Bernolák produced the first literary standard in 1787, based on the western dialect and taken up mainly by Catholic intellectuals. Lutheran writers continued with a Slovakised Czech, and the pan-Slavists among them, Ján Kollár and Pavel Jozef Šafárik, held that Czechs and Slovaks were one nation whose languages should converge.

Ľudovít Štúr settled it in 1843 by building a standard on the central dialect and arguing the opposite case: a separate language for a separate nation. Both confessions accepted it in 1847. Modern Slovak is Štúr's, after reforms.

The literary record before that is not Slovak in any simple sense. Medieval writing from the eleventh to the fifteenth century was in Latin, Czech and Slovakised Czech. The oldest layer is older still and belongs to Great Moravia: Proglas, a verse foreword to the four Gospels, and partial translations of the Bible into Old Church Slavonic, all products of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission.

Slovakia also produced an unusual number of polymaths for a stateless nation, among them Matej Bel, Pavol Jozef Šafárik and Ján Kollár, and its two internationally known modern figures, Milan Rastislav Štefánik and Alexander Dubček, were both political.

What Slovak buildings are made of

Slovak vernacular architecture follows the material available, which follows the terrain. In the mountains it is wood: shingled roofs and ornate gables. In the southern lowlands, Záhorie and Považie, it is rammed earth, clay compressed between board formwork to build both outer and cross walls.

Ten conservation reserves protect whole settlements rather than single buildings, at Veľké Leváre, Brhlovce, Sebechleby, Čičmany, Špania Dolina, Vlkolínec, Podbiel and Ždiar among others. Vlkolínec has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993, a complete wooden village still standing where it was built. Ten open-air museums hold the buildings that could not be saved in place, from Martin in Turiec to Svidník in Šariš.

The wooden churches of the Prešov Region are the most distinctive built form in the country, built since the second half of the fifteenth century, with about forty surviving. Four are on the UNESCO list: Bodružal, Hervartov, Ladomirová and Ruská Bystrá. They stand along the Carpathian ridge where Latin and Byzantine Christianity met, and their plans read as the meeting point they are.

Slovakia is also often described as having the highest concentration of castles per head of population of any country. Most are ruins. The intact ones include Bojnice, used constantly as a film location, Spiš Castle, the largest fortified castle complex in Europe and a UNESCO site, Orava, Bratislava, and the ruins at Devín, which sit at the confluence of the Danube and the Morava and were a Great Moravian stronghold.

What Slovaks actually eat

The base is pork, poultry, flour, potatoes, cabbage and dairy, close to Hungarian, Czech and Austrian cooking, with Ukrainian influence in the east. Game is more available here than in most of Europe, because the forests are extensive and hunting is common: boar, rabbit and venison are on menus year-round. Lamb and goat are eaten and are not popular.

The national dish is bryndzové halušky: small potato dumplings with bryndza, a salty, strongly flavoured sheep's milk cheese, usually finished with fried bacon. It appears on the menu of every traditional restaurant in the country. Bryndzové pirohy work the same combination into filled dumplings. The typical soup is kapustnica, made from sauerkraut, and krvavnica is a blood sausage that uses every part of a butchered pig.

The geography decides the drinking. Wine comes from the south, along the Danube and its tributaries, because the northern half of the country is too cold and too high for vines. White has traditionally outsold red, and sweet outsold dry, though that has been shifting. Beer, mostly pilsner with some dark lager, is drunk everywhere.

The pattern is a mountain cuisine at the top of the country and a Pannonian one at the bottom, which is the same north-south split that governs the terrain, the farming and the dialects.

What people wear when it matters

Slovak folk dress survives as ceremonial clothing rather than as costume, and it varies by valley rather than by region. A trained eye can place a kroj to a specific cluster of villages from the embroidery, the cut of the sleeve and the colour of the ribbon, because each community developed its own within a shared grammar. Čičmany, in the north-west, is the extreme case: the village painted white geometric patterns on the dark timber of its houses, and the same motifs run through its embroidery, so the buildings and the clothing carry one design language.

That pattern was adopted as a national visual signature in the twentieth century and now appears on sports kit, packaging and passports. It is one of the few instances where a single village's ornament became a country's shorthand for itself.

Where the art and the galleries are

The Slovak National Gallery, founded in 1948, runs the largest network of galleries in the country, with its Bratislava displays in the adjoining Esterházy Palace and Water Barracks on the Danube riverfront. The Bratislava City Gallery, founded 1961, holds about 35,000 works across the Pálffy and Mirbach palaces.

The Danubiana sits on a peninsula in the Danube near the Čunovo waterworks, one of the youngest art museums in Europe and the one with the most striking setting. In the far east, the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art exists for a specific reason: Warhol's parents emigrated from Miková, a village in the Prešov Region, which makes the most famous American artist of the twentieth century a product of Slovak Rusyn emigration.

What the music sounds like

The instrument that defines Slovak folk music is the fujara, a shepherd's overtone flute up to two metres long, played vertically and inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. It produces a soft, breathy sound with a limited fundamental range and a wide overtone series, and it exists because a shepherd in central Slovakia needed something to play while watching a flock and had a long piece of elder wood.

The vocal tradition it accompanies is largely unaccompanied and often in seconds rather than thirds, which gives Slovak folk singing the astringent quality that surprises listeners expecting Central European harmony. Composers drew on it heavily: Eugen Suchoň built the twentieth-century Slovak operatic repertoire out of the same modal material, and his Krútňava of 1949 remains the country's central national opera.

What the country plays and watches

Two sports carry Slovak public attention, and they carry it differently.

Ice hockey is where the country expects to compete internationally. Slovakia joined the International Ice Hockey Federation on 2 February 1993 and has taken four World Championship medals: one gold, two silver and one bronze, most recently silver at Helsinki in 2012. The national team has appeared at five Winter Olympics, finishing fourth at Vancouver in 2010. The country has 8,280 registered players and hosted the World Championship in Bratislava and Košice in both 2011 and 2019.

Football has more participants and less success. Over 400,000 players are registered, which dwarfs hockey, and the national team has reached one World Cup, in 2010, where it beat Italy 3-2 and went out in the last sixteen to the Netherlands. It qualified for the European Championship in 2016 and reached a best ranking of fourteenth. Three clubs have made the Champions League group stage: Košice in 1997-98, Artmedia Bratislava in 2005-06 and Žilina in 2010-11.

Beyond those two, whitewater slalom is the discipline in which Slovakia performs far above its size, which follows directly from having mountain rivers with reliable spring melt and a canoeing tradition built around them.

Where the calendar still shows

The ritual year survives most visibly at Easter. In much of the country the Monday custom is oblievačka, in which men douse women with water and, in some regions, switch them lightly with braided willow, in exchange for painted eggs. It is a fertility rite older than the Christian calendar it now sits inside, it is genuinely practised rather than performed for visitors, and it divides opinion inside Slovakia along generational lines.

Christmas keeps a fixed shape: the meal falls on 24 December, opens with a wafer and honey, and centres on cabbage soup and carp. The carp is bought live days ahead, which is why Slovak bathtubs in late December are a recurring domestic joke. Around it sit Lucia on 13 December and the fašiangy season between Epiphany and Lent, when village masking processions still run in parts of the centre and east.

What holds it together

Catholicism is the largest single influence and the one most visible in the calendar and the buildings, though the Lutheran minority carried a disproportionate share of the national revival, which is why the language argument of the 1840s ran along confessional lines.

The pattern that repeats across every part of Slovak culture is the same: a small population, no state of its own for most of a millennium, and a set of neighbours large enough to absorb it. What survived did so because it was portable and local. The songs, the dumplings, the wooden churches and the dialects were not preserved by an institution. They were what a village could keep, and they became national culture when somebody in the nineteenth century went looking for one.