Cultural tourism has undergone fundamental changes in several countries of post-socialist Europe. In Slovakia, this fact concerns, for example, localities with a strong connection to the church and its cultural heritage. These monuments belong to the foundations of cultural tourism, yet the state intentionally did not prefer them as tourist destinations until 1989. Only after political and social changes were such localities exploited by tourism with a qualitative and quantitative increase in cultural tourism. The aim of this paper is to investigate the recent changes in cultural tourism in urban areas and to address alternative cultural tourism products to diversify the offerings. To do so, Nitra (Slovakia) was used as a case study area. The main used methods were comparative analysis of information sources and questionnaire surveys, aimed at residents, entrepreneurs, and tourists. The main result is that Nitra has the potential to become an important center of cultural tourism/stage destination of various cultural routes. The presented results will increase awareness of the present and future of cultural tourism; they can be beneficial for organizations dealing with tourism management in the city (city office) and its marketing (Nitra Tourism Organization) for the academic and public sphere.
The impacts of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union on Slovak agriculture since the accession of Slovakia to the European Union, are discussed in this paper. Structural changes that were made are reflected in the developmental trends of various agricultural areas. In this paper, the changes in agricultural land use and its categories, in particular landscape types, as well as changes in the numbers and structure of the labour force, changes in the organizational structure of agricultural holdings, the development of cropland areas of the most important crops in crop production, and changes in the number of livestock, are discussed. This analysis also focuses on Slovakia’s position in terms of overall agricultural production within the European Union member states.
The paper points at the origin and development of ecological farming in Slovakia from 1991 to 2015. As the positive aspect of this period can be considered the increasing area of ecologically farmed agricultural land, as well as increasing number of farmers and a slight increase in the number of processors of ecological production. The increased interest of farmers in ecological farming on land occurred mainly after Slovakia's accession to the EU. The next part of the paper is dedicated to the regional disparities in ecological production at NUTS III (Slovak regions). To analyze spatial disparities at the regional level, we used the most widely applied statistical methods - standard deviation and coefficient of variation. The largest localization of ecological production is in northern Slovakia - in Žilina and Prešov region, in central Slovakia in Banská Bystrica region. In these regions, there are higher acreage of ecological farmland. Despite the slight increase of processors of ecological produce, they still lack in Slovakia. Processors of ecological products operate mainly in the regions of western and eastern Slovakia and north of the country. With the lack of ecological production, there is relatively underdeveloped distribution of products of ecological production and its lower consumption in the domestic market. Offers of bio-products is relatively low and weak competitive environment does not create the pressure to still reduce still high prices of ecological production.
Applications of knowledge in the real life and practical use of knowledge from natural sciences are typical for current modernization trends in teaching at Slovak schools. In this paper, we focus on emphasizing the interdisciplinary relationship among physics, mathematics and geography. Considering a specific example of Mercator projection, we present close connections of the given subjects via using modern ICT tools, especially dynamical geometry software GeoGebra. We demonstrate how this problem can be useful in school practice as a motivating factor which yields the development of a pupils’ intellect.
30 June 2023 in Konštantínove listy/Constantine's Letters
Konštantínove listy/Constantine’s Letters is an international scientific journal which has been published in Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra since 2008. The main goal of the journal is to present problems and themes intertwined with the cultural and political history of Great Moravia during the 9th century as well as continuity of Cyrillo-Methodian tradition in later times. Next, there is also space for other adjacent topics connected with Slavonic and Byzantine history, philology, philosophy, literature, cultural relations as well as medieval and early modern age ecclesiastical history and iconography.
This article analyzes the question of how the change of geopolitical position in the rural region of Eastern Moravia, which was shifted from the center of the state on its border, is reflected. The paper shows how the originally marginal region transformed from an area with shepherd agriculture to an industrial area with a skilled workforce during the existence of Czechoslovakia and questions how to cope with the consequences of the reverse change into a marginal geopolitical position on the eastern border of Czechia. The paper considers the balance of migration, supplemented by the construction of new dwellings, to be a relatively complex indicator. It states that the region of Eastern Moravia is problematic in terms of further development, except for the northern part, which is affected by the suburbanization of Ostrava. As a result, it proposes to supplement the current orientation toward the manufacturing industry by creating conditions for the development of cultural tourism.