Slovakia National Anthem

Key Facts

• 1. The storm is an allegory: in the first stanza the thunder stands for hostile forces that the Slovaks must stop; in the second, the lightning rouses Slovakia from its long sleep.
• 2. Matúška's authorship was long in doubt. The song circulated anonymously, and in 1906 Jozef Škultéty published it as the work of Karol Kuzmány; finds in the 1930s pointed back to Matúška, and the oldest known copy, made by his fellow student Viliam Pauliny in 1843/44 and published by Pavol Vongrej in 1967, confirmed it.
• 3. When Czechoslovakia split in 1993, the Czech Republic kept the first part of the joint anthem and Slovakia the second. The Czechoslovak anthem had used only the song's first stanza; Slovakia's anthem adds the second.
• 4. Slovakia's official text sings “zastavme ich” (“let us stop them”, meaning the thunder), as in the oldest known copy of the poem. The Czechoslovak anthem had sung “zastavme sa” (“let us halt”), a reading that a Slovak Academy of Sciences reference work calls semantically incorrect.