Central Europe Activ

The most famous Slovaks

Posted by Dániel Antal on 23/10/08
Tags: Czech Republic, migration, Slovakia

The Foreigner’s Guide to Living in Slovakia blog tries to enumerate the most famous Slovaks around the world. Most of them are emigrants from the former Czechoslovakia and earned their world fame abroad. According to the subjective and interesting blog post, the most famous Slovaks today who were born and raised in Slovakia are Peter Dvorský, the world famous tenor opera singer, and Peter Š?astný, legendary National Hockey League (NHL) hockey player and today a Member of European Parliament (MEP) for Slovakia.

Would you think that Paul Newman, Andy Warhol or the founder of the Herz car rental chain were also born in this current Slovakia? The list was inspired by another blog post, where Captain Oddsock quoted the old bon mot that all the famous Czech were Germans, like Sigmund Freud, Oskar Schindler, Gustav Mahler or Franz Kafka. A similar regional version of these kind of root-searching is connected to historical Olympics medal counts: some gold medals are counted in the hall of fame in Austria, Hungary and Slovakia, too.

Czech Republic, English, Slovakia
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4 Responses to The most famous Slovaks »»

Bryan

Comment by Bryan | 2009/08/29 at 20:15:49

The Foreigner’s Guide to living in Slovakia mentions Robert Maxwell as a famous Slovak.

Surely he can’t be - accordsing to his biographers Peter Thompson and Anthony Delo “Maxwell - a Portrait of Power” Corgi Books 1988

he was a Ruthenian born in Slatina-Selo in Pod-Karpatske Rus in 1923. This was never part of Slovakia but ruled from Prague during the First Republic.

After WWII this was removed from Czecholoslovakia and added to the Ukraine to the chagrin of the Communist Klement Gottwald who had asked that Stalin take all of Slovakia and incorporate it into the USSR as a new Soviet Republic. Stalin refused Gottwald’s generous offer since he believed that the Czechoslovaks would vote in a Communist Goverment - the Czechs very nearly did - but the Slovaks were wary of voting Communist and the Catholic Church strongly opposed the Communists.

So in 1948 the Communists simply gave up on democracy and created the Socialist Republic!

[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘1055386704 which is not a hashcash value.
Ken MacLean

Comment by Ken MacLean | 2009/12/13 at 17:16:13

Nice to hear the name Peter Štastný again. I was a big fan of the Quebec Nordiques and Štastný was close to being the best player in the league for a time. He and his two brothers did a lot for players in Europe, proving they could play with the owrld’s best.