Nad Tatrou sa blýska
| English: Lightning over the Tatras | |
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The first printed version of Nad Tatrou sa blýska
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National anthem of  Slovakia
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| Lyrics | Janko Matúška, 1844 |
| Music | folk tune |
| Adopted | 13 December 1918  Czechoslovakia1 January 1993 Slovakia
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Nad Tatrou sa blýska (Slovak pronunciation: [ˈnat tatrow sa ˈbliːska]; English: Lightning over the Tatras) is the national anthem of Slovakia. The origins of the anthem are in the Central European activism of the 19th century. Its main themes are a storm over the Tatra mountains that symbolized danger to the Slovaks, and a desire for a resolution of the threat. It used to be particularly popular during the 1848–1849 insurgencies.
During the days of Czechoslovakia, the anthem was played in many Slovak towns at noon. This tradition ceased to exist after the two nations split. Nad Tatrou sa blýska is now performed mainly at special events, including sporting events.
23-year-old Janko Matúška wrote the lyrics of this anthem in January - February 1844. The tune came from the folk song Kopala studienku (She was digging a well) suggested to him by his fellow student Jozef Podhradský (1823 – 1915), a future religious and Pan-Slavic activist and gymnasial teacher. Shortly afterwards, Matúška and about two dozen other students left their prestigious Lutheran lyceum of Pressburg (preparatory high school and college) in protest over the removal of Ľudovít Štúr from his teaching position by the Lutheran Church under pressure from the authorities. The territory of present-day Slovakia was part of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austrian Empire then, and the officials objected to his Slovak nationalism.
Lightning over the Tatras was written during the weeks when the students were agitated about the repeated denials of their and others' appeals to the school board to reverse Štúr's dismissal. About a dozen of the defecting students transferred to the Lutheran gymnasium of Levoča. When one of the students, the 18-year-old budding journalist and writer Viliam Pauliny-Tóth (1826 – 1877), wrote down the oldest known record of the poem in his school notebook in 1844, he gave it the title of Prešporskí Slováci, budúci Levočania (Pressburg Slovaks, Future Levočians), which reflected the motivation of its origin.
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