She was from Okružna, where she was born on August 1, 1951. She graduated from the grammar school in Prešov and then studied acting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. For one season she worked at the Theatre for Children and Youth in Trnava. Then she decided to go her own way and devote herself to monodrama. Since 1975 she has been freelancing and writing her own scripts for her travelling one-actor theatre. She has appeared in the monodramas Neveľo nas idze, neveľo nam potrzeb, Sojka, Czas kikiríkania, To len tak naoko, Žniva. She has also shown her considerable acting talent in several television films and productions.

She made her literary debut with the short story collection She Grazed Horses on Concrete. Based on one of them, she also wrote the screenplay for the successful film of the same name, in which she played the main character. She also contributed to the screenplays for the films Horses on Concrete and Easter. When writing short prose, she used her knowledge of the environment of the eastern Slovak countryside, as well as the city, and her experience of travelling by train. 

She has published the books So What?, Without Words, So What!, Intercity and Don't Say That! She was authentic in her work thanks to her use of the Sharis dialect, but also her specific sense of humour, while always remaining human, understanding and personal. She lived in Bratislava and regularly returned to Prešov with her performances. 

She passed away on May 30, 2023 after a long battle with cancer.

Source: Regional Library P. O. Hviezdoslav in Prešov; Micro-project.
Photo source: Autor: AngryBiceps – YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tefuevPk0c&ab_channel=Telev%C3%ADziaJOJ – View/save archived versions on archive.org, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119601251

One of the greatest Czech thinkers, philosophers and writers was born on 28 March 1592 in Moravia. He studied theology and was a priest, later the last bishop of the Unity of Brethren. After the defeat of the Bohemian Estates at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, he became an exile and began his pilgrimage through Europe. 

After a stay in Poland and Sweden, he came to Prešov in 1650 and then to Blatný Potok at the invitation of Prince Rákoci. In 1654 he visited Prešov again and was one of the candidates for the post of rector of the town school, but the town council chose another candidate. Comenius went again to Poland and from there to Holland, where he spent the last years of his life. He died on 15 November 1670 in Amsterdam.

During his lifetime, Komenský gained a reputation as an author of pedagogical writings in the field of educational theory and didactics. His ideal was pansofia, i.e. the universal science of the system of all knowledge. Komenský's works that are still recognized today include The Gate of Languages Opened, The World in Pictures, The Great Didactic, and The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart. Many of his ideas are timeless, and because of them he is considered not only the founder of modern pedagogy, but also, and rightly, a teacher of nations.

During his visit to Prešov, Komenský stayed in the house of Ondrej Klobušický, later converted into a palace, today the seat of the Regional Court. Komenský's stay in Prešov is commemorated by a commemorative plaque on the facade of the Evangelical College in the city centre.

Source: Regional Library P. O. Hviezdoslav in Prešov; Micro-project.
Photo source: By Jürgen Ovens - http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/collectie/SK-A-2161, Free work, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34250301

He was born on 1 August 1905 in Trstena, Orava, where he graduated from the gymnasium. After graduation he became a monk of the Franciscan Order and worked in monasteries in Kremnica, Hlohovec, Malacky and Žilina. He studied Catholic theology and became a priest. Subsequently, he worked as a secondary school teacher of religion in several towns, including an evangelical college in Prešov in the second half of the 1930s. After the outbreak of World War II, he volunteered as a field curator on the Eastern Front. 

Returning from the front in the autumn of 1944, he spent five months in the Franciscan monastery in Nižná Šebastová near Prešov. After the war he emigrated, first to Rome and from there to Argentina, where from 1947 he was a priest of the Slovak emigrants in Buenos Aires and edited the magazine Slovenské zvesti (Slovak Tidings). From 1965 he lived in a monastery in Pittsburgh, USA, where he was the editor of the Letters of St. Francis, but also an official of the World Congress of Slovaks. In 1969 he visited Slovakia with the intention of staying, but eventually returned to the USA. He died in Pittsburgh on April 7, 1986.

Dilong is one of the leading representatives of Slovak Catholic modernism, whose work includes more than one hundred collections of poetry. His life and work were marked by his „forbidden“ love for a woman of Jewish origin, Vali, during the time of anti-Semitism. He entered literature as a co-founder of the magazine Postup. In his first three collections of poetry, Future People, Gloriously on stilts, Breathe lazy! he portrayed the theme of nature and peasant life through a traditional rustic vision. In the collections Helena Wears a Lily and The Young Bridegroom one can identify the influences of Czech poetism. Later, struck by the horrors of war, Dilong resorted in his collections to the themes of childhood and his native Orava, which he saw as a security in times of war. 

His work was of a spiritual meditative character, and his book I, Saint Francis is considered to be its culmination. In exile he published more than 70 collections. A selection of his exiled works was published after 1989 under the title I, Rudolf Dilong, troubadour and bears witness to his bitter plight as an outcast and separated from his homeland. His most recent works include the unfinished prose work Ruža Dagmar. 

There is a street named after him in Prešov.

Source: Regional Library P. O. Hviezdoslav in Prešov; Micro-project.
Photo source: Author Slovak Bookshop, Prague - The Pictures of Slovak Writers Serie, vol. 1 (The Pictures of Slovak Writers Series, Series 1), Free work, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10679310

He came from Vyšný Kubín in Orava, where he was born in a peasant family on 2 February 1849. After studies at the grammar school in Miškovec and Kežmarok, he graduated from the law academy of the Evangelical College in Prešov between 1870 and 1872. Together with Koloman Banšell, they founded the Kolo association and published the literary almanac Forward. He passed the bar exam in 1875 in Budapest. He worked as a lawyer and judge in his native Orava. From 1902 he devoted himself only to literary activity. At the end of his life he welcomed the establishment of Czechoslovakia and became one of the presidents of the reopened Slovak Matrix in 1919. He died on 8 November 1921 in Dolný Kubín.

He published his first poems as a student. Later he decided to use the pseudonym Hviezdoslav. He wrote mostly reflective, nature and social lyrics. He is known for his Sonnets, Psalms and Hymns, three cycles of Letorostov, Walks in Spring, Walks in Summer and Blood Sonnets, which have been translated into both French and English. Of the epic works, the epics Ežo Vlkolinský and Gábor Vlkolinský, Hájnik's Wife and the drama Herodes and Herodias still resonate. He has translated the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, Lermontov, Mickiewicz and Petöfi into Slovak. Hviezdoslav's work is not only varied in genre, but also unusually rich in motifs and ideas, ranging from intimate and family motifs to national and world problems, deepened by social relations and a desire to achieve a high degree of universality. He is rightly regarded as an exceptional personality of Slovak literature.

In Prešov, a street and the regional library are named after him.

Buildings:

Hlavná 16, Prešov - the house where Hviezdoslav lived as a student, today the seat of the children's library Slniečko

Hlavná 137, Prešov - Evangelical College, where Hviezdoslav studied

Slovenská 18, Prešov - Regional library P. O. Hviezdoslav (formerly Levočská 1)

Source: Regional Library P. O. Hviezdoslav in Prešov; Micro-project.
Photo source: Free work, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=741471

He was born on 18 October 1874 in Tajov, after which he chose his pseudonym. He graduated from the teachers' institute in Kláštor pod Znievom (1889 - 1893) and worked as a teacher in Banská Bystrica and in villages in the Horehronie and Považie regions. Later he graduated from the Commercial Academy in Prague (1898 - 1900) and worked as a bank clerk in Trnava, Martin, Nadlak. From 1910 to 1912 he was the head of the Tatra Bank branch in Prešov. From 1912 he was the secretary of the Slovak National Party in Martin, where he became the editor of the National Herald after its activities were discontinued. In 1915 he enlisted on the Eastern Front, joined the foreign resistance and joined the Czechoslovak legions. After the war he settled in Martin, but from 1920 he was the head of the legionary office in Bratislava. In 1925 he retired and devoted himself only to literary activities. He died on 20 May 1940 in Bratislava.

Tajovský is one of the top representatives of Slovak literary realism and the founder of realistic drama. His works are connected with current political and social issues, and in addition to criticism, he often used humorous tuning of stories set in a village or small-town environment. He published prose collections Besednice, Smutné nôty, Rozprávky pro folk, Volebné rozprávky, Spod kosy, Tŕpky, Slovenské obrázky, Na fronty a iné rozprávky, Rozprávky o československé leggiách v Rusku, but his best known stories are Maco Mlieč, Mamka Pôstková, Na chlieb, Horký chlieb and Mišo. During his stay in Prešov, he wrote the one-act play Sin, the prose poems Gypsies, Twelve Souls and Heavy Struggle, as well as the autobiographical features When I Was in Prešov, From Prešov to Ujheľ and Behind Záborský's Manuscripts. Tajovský's plays Promises, The Women's Law, Mother, New Life, Sin, In the Service, The Confused Farm, The Death of Ďurka Langsfeld, The Blúznivci and The Hero are still part of the repertoire of Slovak theatres today. In Prešov, a street is named after him.

Source: Regional Library P. O. Hviezdoslav in Prešov; Micro-project.
Photo source: Author: photo from archive from 100 years ago - own, Free work, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8959440

He was born on 30 December 1874 in Martin. After graduating from high school in Kežmarok, he graduated from the law academy at the Evangelical College in Prešov (1893 - 1896). He received his doctorate in law in Cluj, Romania, and passed the bar exam in 1905 in Budapest. He worked as a lawyer in Bánovce nad Bebravou. 

After the outbreak of World War I he was on the Russian front, where he joined the Czechoslovak legions. In 1922 he was a mayor in Rimavská Sobota and then a grand-mayor in Nitra. From 1929 he was a government councillor in Bratislava and later vice-president of the Regional Office. From 1930 to 1939 he was vice-president of the Slovak Writers' Association and from 1933 editor-in-chief of the journal Slovenské smery umelecké a kritické (Slovak Directions of Art and Criticism). In November 1945, he was the first Slovak to receive the title of national artist. He died on 27 December 1945 in Bratislava.

He began to devote himself to literary work during his studies in Kežmarok. He was both a poet and a prose writer. During his stay in Prešov he wrote 60 poems, among others Na shohu Torysy, Na rumoch Šariša, Na Kapušianskom hrade, and two hilarious plays, Kisses of Struggle and Medicine Works. Later he also wrote a novella Karol Ketzer. In poetry he came up with themes of personally experienced love emotion and published several collections of Verses. 

As an intellectual type of poet, he also responded to social issues in the collections Our Hero, Black Days, and On the Wickedness of the Day. In his prose work, he began with satirical and humorous anecdotal stories from the small-town environment, which he published under the title Small-Town Tales. The culmination of Jesenský's prose work is the extensive novel The Democrats, in which he put his lifelong experience of public engagement in the political-administrative sphere. His works have been published in several languages and some have been the subject of film and television adaptations. He has also translated Russian poetry by Pushkin, Yesenin and Blok, and written literary and cultural journalism. His work made him an important representative of modern Slovak literature.

Jesensky's stay in Prešov is commemorated by a commemorative plaque on the Evangelical College and one of the streets.

Source: Regional Library P. O. Hviezdoslav in Prešov; Micro-project.
Photo source: Author Slovak Bookshop, Prague - The Pictures of Slovak Writers Serie, vol. 1 (The Pictures of Slovak Writers Series, Series 1), Free Works, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10680412

Alexander Duchnovich was a Ruthenian national revivalist, writer, educator and Greek Catholic priest, who was born in the family of a Greek Catholic priest on 24 April 1803. He graduated from the gymnasium in Uzhhorod. He studied philosophy in Košice and theology in Uzhhorod. In 1830-1834 he was a teacher in Uzhhorod, a parish priest in the villages of Komlóš (today Chmeľová), Chmeľov, Beloveža. He lived in Belovezha for four years and was sent there by Bishop Gregor Tarkovič. It was during this period that Duchnovich decided to become more involved in the dignified life of the Ruthenians. He began to write in his native language (until then he had used Hungarian and Russian). In Belovezh he wrote or compiled his manuscript collection „Privitatae cogitationes“, which contains works of the 1920s and 1930s and gives an overall picture of his artistic output in this period. In Belovezh he performed mainly church duties (parish priest - svyashchenik). In addition, he taught children and adults. He taught children in their native language and also at school he paid attention to learning the basics of agricultural work, especially gardening and fruit growing.

From 1838 to 1844 he was a bishop's notary in Uzhhorod. From 1844 he was a canon in Prešov; he was also a school inspector. He taught Russian and Latin at the Greek-Catholic gymnasium in Presov. In 1847 he was a representative of the Prešov bishopric at the last Hungarian Estates Council. In the same year he published a syllabary entitled Knyzycja chytaľnaja dla načynajuščych. In it, he also published a short story Obraz zhizni (in Slovak, Obraz zhizni zhizni), written by a mere 12-year-old Anatoly Kralitsky. In 1854 he published Liturgicheskii Katechizis, ili objasenie sv. Liturgii i nekotorych cerkovnych obrjadov.

In 1862 he founded (together with other representatives of the Ruthenian national movement) the Obshchestvo svjatoho Ioanna Krestitelja i Predteči (Society of St. John the Baptist, 1862-1874). The Society was active in 1862-1874; it was renewed in 2003. The Society originally supported poor Ruthenian students in their studies. The program of the restored society is the religious, national and cultural development of Rusyns. 

Since 1990, the Alexander Duchnovič Rusyn Theatre in Prešov has been named after him.

Source: https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Duchnovič
Photo source: Author: originally uploaded by DDima in Wikipedia project (English) - http://www.ukrstor.com/ukrstor/dukhn.jpg, Free work, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9460987

He came from the family of a blacksmith and a richtár from Bardejov. He studied in Košice, Bratislava and from 1530 at the University of Wittenberg under the guidance of representatives of the German Reformation Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. Especially under their influence, his faith and his cultural and educational level were shaped. 

After years as rector of the school in Eisleben (1534 - 1539), he returned to his hometown where he took over the management of the Latin town school (except for a year's stay in Kežmarok in 1555 - 1556, he was at its head until his death), which under his leadership reached an excellent level. Its excellent reputation is evidenced by the fact that sons of prominent noble families also studied there.

Leonard Stöckel is the author of several textbooks (including the Leges scholae Bartfensis from 1540, the oldest pedagogical written monument in Slovakia, which contained methodological instructions for the organisation of pupils' extra-curricular work, instructions for the acquisition of the curriculum, but also regulations concerning pupils' duties and disciplinary guidelines) and also a school drama written in German The history of von Susanna (The Story of Susan), published in Wittenberg in 1559. In the field of theology, L. Stöckel was one of the main disseminators of the Reformation doctrine in the northern regions of Upper Hungary, and wrote several important works in defence of Protestantism. Of particular importance are his Notes on the General Principles of the Christian Doctrine of Philip Melanchthon (published in Basel in 1560) and the Confessio Pentapolitana, the confession of faith by which the Pentapolitana, an association of five Upper Highland towns, subscribed to Protestantism in 1549.

Leonard Stöckel has a great merit for the elevation of cultural, spiritual and artistic life in Bardejov in the first half of the 16th century.

Source: showbiz.sk
Photo source: By Anatol Svahilec - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=120616683

Jonáš Záborský was a Slovak novelist, playwright, poet, historian, journalist and priest. He was born in 1812 in a peasant family in the village of Záborie (now Martin district). He studied at grammar schools in Kežmarok and Levoča, graduated in theology at the Evangelical Academy in Prešov and later studied at the University of Halle in Germany. From 1834 to 1839 he was a chaplain in Pozdišovce, in 1840 he became a parish priest in Rankovce. After the fire of his rectory in 1842, he converted to the Catholic Church and worked at the German rectory in Košice.

He disagreed with Ľudovít Štúr and his codification of the written Slovak language and considered his national programme unrealistic. In 1848 he was imprisoned for possession of the Requests of the Slovak Nation, and in 1850 he was appointed professor of Greek at the law faculty in Košice. From 1850 to 1853, he also worked as editor of the government-run Slovak Newspaper in Vienna, from where he had to leave due to conflicts with the censorship. In 1853 he became a parish priest in the eastern Slovak village of Župčany, where he worked until his death, adopted a new form of Slovak and devoted himself mainly to literary activities.

Jonáš Záborský's oeuvre is extensive. It includes classicist poetic compositions (Zehry, The Entry of Christ into Paradise), satirical prose (Faustiáda, The Shofranks, On the Seven Dukes of Hungary, Chruňo and Mandragora, Frndolína), didactic humoresques (Two Days in Chujava, Kulifaj), and autobiographical prose (The Panslavist Parson), historical short stories (Buld, Svätopluk's Betrayal, Mazep's Love), a syllabotonic poetic composition (The Death of Janosik), and many dramas (The Last Days of Great Moravia, The Arpáds, The Resistance of the Danube Slavs, Pansláv, Holub, Batory, Striga, the so-called "The Resistance of the Danube Slavs", the "The Last Days of Great Moravia", the "The Last Days of Great Moravia", the "The Last Days of Great Moravia", the "The Last Days of Great Moravia", the "The Last Days of Great Moravia", the "The Last Days of Great Moravia". Lžedimitrijád, etc.). He wrote an extensive historical work History of the Kingdom of Hungary from the beginning to the times of Sigismund. The main themes of his work are historical facts and autobiographical elements.

Source: csfd.sk
Photo source: By Jonáš Záborský - Jonáš Záborský, Free Work, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19141314