Symbiosis in Diversity: The Specific Character of Slovakia’s Religious Landscape

Abstract

The culturally rich diverse space of Central Europe is reflected in its landscapes. The religious landscape especially portrays the long lasting and sometimes surprisingly still strong feelings of belonging to a certain religious group. The religious landscape of Slovakia is a good textbook example how various Christian and historically Jewish identities inhabit small pieces of the world. These communities have to find ways of precisely defining facets of mutual respect, discovering a certain level of freedom for public expression of own identity and maintain channels for social interaction. The relationships in individual communities always reflected interdenominational relationships and the politics of higher levels. Most relationships in communities of Slovakia and Central Europe reflect the historical experiences of the Counter-Reformation, ReCatholization, relationships between Christians and Jews and most recently secularization. Sometimes there were limited possibilities for identity expression, such as the architecture of non-Catholic denominations. These peculiarities had different spatial imprints at the micro-level of individual villages or towns and also at regional and national levels. I outline the major ways of identity expression with special focus on Slovakia’s main denominations within the framework of symbiosis as a way of living together under shared temporal and spatial, or political, social, and cultural circumstances. Important is the religious diversity of the population, historically and today. The main denominational differences are explained in symbols, the architectural of church buildings, cemeteries and tombstone forms. Many symbolical expressions have global meanings and distribution (the cross), while others have roots peculiar to Central Europe.