Slovakia Today, English Language Current Affairs Programme from Slovak Radio

News and Topical Issue. Former PM Robert Fico once infamously said that there is nothing in the Eastern Slovakia. Igor Kupec with his project Local Nomad is trying to prove quite the opposite. Listen to the interview to find out more about the region with a big potential that is slowly being discovered. We will stay in the Eastern Slovakia even with the second story of today. In order to improve the quality of life in the second biggest Slovak town and its surrounding, Košice municipality together with Creative Industry Košice decided to include local people in the process of shaping the future of the town. How is Script for Košice being written? You will find out in the interview with Deputy Mayor Marcel Giboda and Project Manager Zuzana Reveszova.

Bloody Sonnets by Hviezdoslav. Competition - round 10.

Declamation competitions were organized by the national cultural institution Matica slovenska as early as 1928-1929 in Slovakia. All about reading poems and shortened fiction by heart in front of an expert jury and lay audience, the national contest, Hviezdoslavov Kubin, has been running since 1954.

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the death of P. O. Hviezdoslav, the eminent Slovak poet. To mark the occasion, we will visit the village of Hviezdoslavov, near Bratislava, whose name is also about 100 years old. Since the Veterans' Day and, in fact, the anniversary of the end of the First World War is approaching, we will speak to the authors of a new war memorial - Monument, which was recently opened on the site of the former military cemetery (and infirmary) in Banská Bystrica. The modern memorial was awarded several architectural prizes. How does modern architecture preserve memory?

As we continue this week to celebrate the centenary of the death of Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav, one of Slovakia’s greatest literary figures, today we focus on his so-called ‘Bloody Sonnets’ – a series of short but passionate anti-war poems written in 1914 during the early months of the First World War, but which were impossible to publish as long as the war lasted. Jonathan speaks with John Minahane, whose English translation of the Bloody Sonnets was published in 2018, about this remarkable work by one of Slovakia’s most renowned figures.

News and Topical Issue. On 8 November 1921, exactly 100 years ago today, one of the greatest figures in Slovak history, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav, passed away. In today’s first story we are going to visit two important places in Bratislava named after this famous Slovak writer. What places are they? Listen to the first story to find out. The Danube is the second longest river in Europe and passes through 10 countries. However, did you know that there are more than 900 islands on the Danube? In today’s second feature we are going to discuss them with Andrea Froncová from the Regional Association for Nature Conservation, who will tell us why it is important to restore natural water dynamics.

The worsening pandemic situation will likely get more people to start jogging. What do new runners need to pay attention to? The town Revúca in the picturesque Gemer region hopes to benefit from becoming the 2022 Slovak town of culture.

In this part of our series dedicated to 95 years of radio and 65 years of TV broadcasting in Slovakia, we present to you the era of repressions against any forms of liberalisation tendencies common to 1968 Czechoslovakia. In radio, new genre of a "feature" and a commie audio soap opera appear while TV series delve into history.

On the Wednesday edition of Slovakia today we discuss the 10th anniversary of the Danube Strategy. Recently, the European Commission representatives visited "Korzo Zálesie", a unique Slovak example of good practice - revitalisation of the embankment of the Little Danube for leisure activities, implemented thanks to the INTERREG cross-border cooperation programme. Thanks to the involvement of Slovak partners from the Faculty of Architecture of Slovak Technical University in the follow-up international project DANUrB+, similar architectural realizations should be added in the next 2 years in the vicinity of the Danube River in other locations in the six countries involved in the project.

With the post-pandemic economic recovery starting sooner than expected, and worldwide energy prices spiking in recent weeks, some EU countries have especially felt the pinch – in particular those that have preferred to buy gas at current market prices rather than to sign long-term contracts, mainly with Russia, for their gas supply. But is this really a ‘supply problem’ like we saw in the 1970s oil crisis, or only a temporary price problem due to unusual conditions and fluctuations in the market? According to Alexander Duleba of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association, an expert on EU energy policy and on relations with Russia, supply is not the issue: and it’s very much in the interests of everyone involved – both suppliers and consumers of gas – that prices return to normal levels as quickly as possible.