Slovakia Culture & Language

Slovak culture is more rural in its reference points than most of Europe, and the folk layer sits closer to the surface here than almost anywhere west of it.

Music

The fujara is the emblem: a shepherd’s flute up to two metres long, played by overblowing, producing a sound nothing else makes. It is UNESCO-listed, still made by hand, and still played. Alongside it are cimbalom bands, and a strong choral tradition.

The wooden churches

Built in the north and east from the sixteenth century in Roman Catholic, Protestant and Greek Catholic forms, assembled entirely from timber without a single nail, and painted inside with icon screens. Eight are UNESCO-listed and dozens more stand in villages.

Folk dress and craft

Kroj costume, whose embroidery identifies a specific village; the blue-dyed resist-printed modrotlac cloth, also UNESCO-listed; Cicmany, a village painted with white geometric patterns on dark timber.

Letters

The language itself is a cultural monument: Ludovit Stur codified literary Slovak in the 1840s as a deliberate act of nation-building, and the Cyril and Methodius mission of 863, which brought the Slavs their first written script, is the founding story.

The hiking culture

Walking is closer to a civic habit than a hobby here. The trail network runs to tens of thousands of kilometres, marked with a colour-band system invented in this part of Europe in the nineteenth century and maintained by volunteers, and the national anthem opens with a storm over the Tatras. A Slovak weekend in summer is very often a marked trail and a hut at the end of it.

Food

Bryndzove halusky — potato dumplings with sheep’s cheese and bacon — is the national dish and genuinely eaten. Also cabbage soup, zemiakove placky potato pancakes, and borovicka juniper spirit.

Slovak is a West Slavic language, closely related to Czech — the two are mutually intelligible, and Slovaks and Czechs generally converse each in their own. Slovak is often described as the most central of the Slavic languages, understood most easily by speakers of the others.

English is widely spoken by younger people, in Bratislava and in tourism; much less so among older people and in rural areas.

Hungarian is the first language of a substantial minority along the southern border, where signage is often bilingual. German is useful near the Austrian border. Russian is understood by the older generation but is not a good choice.

Useful: dobry den for hello, dakujem for thank you, prosim for please, na zdravie as a toast, and ahoj informally — which is also what walkers say passing on a trail.