THE PERIOD before Christmas is, by tradition, when the Dajama publishing house launches a brace of new books about Slovakia. This year is no exception and, with Dajama focusing on promotion of Slovakia and its regions, it has published six new books in Slovak and – continuing another proud tradition – in English as well. The new titles are Hrady/Castles, World Cultural Heritage UNESCO, Romanesque Churches, Archaeological Monuments, Water and Most Beautiful Valleys. In its latest books Dajama confirms once again that Slovakia is a country rich in natural and cultural heritage.
Hrady/Castles brings readers a non-traditional view of Slovak castles and castle ruins from a bird’s-eye perspective. The author of the images, pilot Peter Chromek, has flown over Slovakia many times and the book enables him to share his excellent and sometime unusual views with the readers. As this is the first book in the Dajama series Flying over Slovakia; readers can look forward to other books looking down on Slovakia from above.
Dajama has also added to its Cultural Heritage of Slovakia series. For the Christmas market it has published World Cultural Heritage UNESCO, presenting those places in Slovakia which have been recorded on the list of world cultural and natural heritage sites by the international cultural organisation UNESCO. The book proves that Slovakia ranks amongst the most interesting countries in terms of the number of sites on the list compared to the size and population of the country. Author Viera Dvořáková has written the book as a kind of guide and record to the most beautiful UNESCO sites in Slovakia, including Banská Štiavnica, Spišský Hrad, Levoča, Vlkolínec and Bardejov.
Also within the Cultural Heritage series is Romanesque Churches, featuring the church in Kostoľany pod Tríbečom on the cover. Inside, Štefan Podolinský introduces churches from as early as the Great Moravian period as well as other pre- and post-Romanesque churches. Apart from well-known churches he also pays attention to some smaller and less well-known ones. According to Podolinský, it was not easy to select the 41 churches given that his ambition was to pick churches which are interesting from the aesthetic and historical side and which represent the contemporaneous architecture of individual regions of Slovakia.
The third new book in this series is entitled Archaeological Monuments, and maps out the localities from where we have the oldest evidence of the life of the ancestors of present-day Slovaks. Vladimír Turčan and his collaborators introduce 20 of the most interesting localities, many of which have been turned into open-air museums. All three books are available in Slovak as well as English.
The fifth new book is Vody (Water), published in the Natural Heritage of Slovakia series, but only in Slovak. This is also the case for Najkrajšie doliny (Most Beautiful Valleys). Earlier this year, as part of the same series, Dajama published National Parks, which is available in English, and covers all of Slovakia’s nine national parks.
