The Slovak Institute is a library, archive and museum of Slovak books, newspapers, journals, photographs, paintings and other Slovak cultural items at St. Andrew Svorad Abbey located at 10510 Buckeye Road, on the southeast side of Cleveland. Founded in 1952, the major part of the Institute's library had its genesis in an extraordinary trip that four Slovak intellectuals from Matica Slovenska (pronounced "Mah-teet'-sa Slow-ven'-ska")--the Slovak Institute of Arts and Sciences, made to Cleveland in 1936.
Arriving in Cleveland on April 16, 1936, the four intellectuals (an historian, a writer, an artist, and a film director) brought with them almost 3,000 books which had been published in Slovakia since 1918--the year in which the first Czechoslovak Republic had been created. Jozef Ciger Hronsky, the writer and president of the delegation, later wrote about the purpose of the group's trip that year to Cleveland, as well as to other American cities which had large Slovak populations. Bringing these books, he wrote, was in part to thank Slovak-Americans for their support of the Slovak independence cause in World War I which had led to the creation of the first Czechoslovak Republic. However, he added, there was a second purpose to the trip. Matica Slovenska, which is Slovakia's national cultural organization, was concerned that, by 1936, many Slovak-Americans were losing their cultural ties to their ancestral homeland. It was hoped that this gift of books would help to re-establish those cultural ties between Slovak-Americans and Slovakia.
The four delegates from Matica Slovenska spent almost a month in Cleveland, attending banquets in their honor, enjoying the Great Lakes Exposition and capping off their visit by participating in a May 10, 1936 ceremony at the site of the Milan Stefanik statue at Wade Park, commemorating the seventeenth anniversary of the death of this World War I national hero of Slovakia. After the delegates departed from Cleveland, most of the 3,000 books that had formed the centerpiece of their visit to Cleveland eventually ended up in the library at St. Andrew Svorad Abbey. This was a logical place for them. Not only had the Abbey been founded by a Benedictine Order of Slovak priests in 1922, but the Abbey's grounds had also been home since 1927 to Benedictine High School, the first Catholic Slovak boy's high school established in the United States.
Not without a small amount of irony, at the end of World War II and following the takeover of the Czechoslovak government by the Communist party, the 3,000 books at the Abbey became the centerpiece of a new mission. In 1943, during the War, the Slovak League of America had donated funds to St. Andrew Svorad Abbey for the purpose of creating a Slovak museum in Cleveland. Once the war ended, the museum became a gathering place for Slovak refugees fleeing from communism and communist control of Czechoslovakia. In 1952, Abbot Theodore Kojis converted the museum at the abbey into the Slovak Institute, citing the importance of having a Slovak cultural organization in the United States to serve in the stead of Matica Slovenska, which by 1952 was under the control of the communist party in Slovakia.
For the next nearly four decade period-- from 1952 to 1989, the Slovak Institute in Cleveland fulfilled the mission of serving as a Matica Slovenska abroad, conducting various Slovak cultural activities here in Cleveland that had international impact, including publishing and surreptitiously shipping back to Slovakia books authored by post-World War II Slovak refugees living in exile in the United States.
With the end of communist party control in Czechoslovakia in 1989 and following the creation of an independent democratic Slovak state in 1993, the main purpose of the Slovak Institute--to serve as a Matica Slovenska abroad, ceased to exist. Accordingly, since 1993, and especially during the tenure of the Institute's current director-- from 2002 to the present, the Institute has instead focused on achieving other cultural goals, including strengthening the cultural ties between Slovakia and Slovak-Americans--a goal that had sparked Matica Slovenska's trip to the United States, and to Cleveland, in 1936. In addition to pursuing this goal, the Slovak Institute also continues to this day to preserve and maintain its extensive library of Slovak books, journals and archival materials for the benefit of the Slovak-American community, scholars, and the interested general pubic.
]]>St. Elizabeth of Hungary Roman Catholic Church sits on the corner of Buckeye Road and East 90th Street in Cleveland's Lower Buckeye neighborhood. In the late nineteenth century, the neighborhood became home to thousands of Hungarian immigrants who were drawn to the area by nearby factories and mills, especially the Cleveland Malleable Iron Company and the Eberhard Manufacturing Company, which were known to these immigrants as, respectively, the "old" factory and the "new" factory.
Hungarian immigrants initially worshiped alongside Slovak immigrants at St. Ladislas Church, located on the corner of Holton Avenue and East 92nd Street. However, when a dispute broke out between Hungarian and Slovak parishioners as to which mass should be said in which ethnic group's native language, the Hungarians were induced to leave St. Ladislas and form a parish of their own. That new parish became St. Elizabeth of Hungary parish, the first Roman Catholic Hungarian parish in the United States.
The first parish church was built in large part as a result of the efforts of Father Karolyn Boehm. Arriving in America in 1892, Fr. Boehm temporarily held masses for the parish in a nearby hall and led the efforts of the parish in constructing a small wood-framed church on the corner of Buckeye Road (then called South Woodland Avenue) and East 90th Street (then called Bismark Street).
On June 4, 1893, the cornerstone of the first St. Elizabeth's Roman Catholic Church was laid. This first church provided seating for up to 800 Hungarian immigrants at a single mass. Within a decade, however, it was too small to accommodate the thousands of Roman Catholic Hungarian immigrants arriving in Lower Buckeye. As early as 1907, Father Szepessy, the second pastor of St. Elizabeth began to petition the Bishop of Cleveland for permission to raise money to build a new church that would hold up to 1300 parishioners. Permission was finally granted by the bishop and, in 1918, construction of the new church was begun.
The new church, designed by French-born architect Emile Uhlrich, was completed in 1922. The church is a large rectangular building with a gable roof and exterior masonry walls composed of large smooth grey blocks of stone. A prominent feature of the Church are its twin bell towers which flank the front of the building, each topped with a brass dome and an internally illuminated cross. The two exterior side walls of the Church are each graced with six large stained glass windows with semicircular arches. The Church has a front entrance way consisting of ten wide and deep stone steps that lead up to three large metal front double doors with semicircular arches above them. Each doorway is flanked by stone columns, and above the doors, arches and columns is a decorative triangular pediment. The facade of the building also features a large ornate circular window with carved stone decoration directly above the front doors.
De-industrialization and suburbanization induced the Hungarian population to begin leaving the Buckeye neighborhood in the 1960s. Today, few Hungarian-Americans live in the Buckeye neighborhood. A small group of Hungarian-Americans--most of whom live in Cleveland's suburbs, however, continue to worship at St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The church now serves as a symbol and reminder of the once thriving and bustling Hungarian-American population that resided in Cleveland's Buckeye neighborhood for nearly 100 years.
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]]>The plot of land that makes up the Rusin Cultural Garden is located along East Boulevard. It was dedicated in June, 1939.
Most Rusyns (also commonly spelled Rusins) immigrated to Cleveland in the period from 1880 to World War I. The Rusyns are an Eastern Slavic ethnic group who speak a dialect known as Rusyn or Lemko. Rusyns descend from Ruthenians but, unlike some of the groups related to them, did not adopt the term Ukrainian in the early twentieth century to describe their ethnicity. Cleveland's Rusyns trace their heritage to the Carpathian Mountains, which is the second longest (932 mi) mountain range in Europe. This chain of mountains stretches in an arc from the Czech Republic (3%) in the northwest across Slovakia (17%), through Hungary (4%) and Poland (10%) to the Ukraine (11%). It then runs south to Romania (53%) before arcing back east to the Iron Gates (gorge) on the Danube River between Romania and Serbia (2%).
One of the earliest (1890) Rusyn settlements in Cleveland was located within a Hungarian community along Orange and Woodland Avenues. As these groups grew they both moved eastward along the Union and Buckeye Avenues. A second Rusyn settlement also developed in Tremont and by 1906 Rusyns were settling as far west as Lakewood. By the 1930s, more than 30,000 Rusyns lived in the city. After World War II, however, Rusyns, like many others, moved to the suburbs in large numbers. In 1983, approximately 25,000 Rusyns still lived in the Greater Cleveland area, but most of the original Rusyn neighborhoods had long been abandoned. In 2009, the Carpatho-Rusyn Heritage Museum opened at the St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Parma to educate the public about the history and culture of Rusyns.
Pastor of Holy Ghost Greek Catholic Church, Reverent Jseph Hanulya, was also the head of the Rusin Cultural Garden Association. In May, 1952, Hanulya unveiled a bust of Alexander Duchnovich. A Greek Catholic priest, Alexander Duchnovich (1803-1865) wrote prose and poetry in the Rusyn language, and also wrote the Rusyn National Anthem. The bust has since been stolen and no longer stands in the garden.
The Cultural Gardens have often incorporated symbolism or design elements that subverted the message of unity and reflected ethnic tensions in Europe and Cleveland. Clever choices of sculptures and honorees by ethnic communities also brought the conflicts so evident in Europe and its history to the chain of gardens. An example of this sort of conflict can be found in the Rusin Garden's choice to honor Alexander Duchnovich; a champion of Rusyn language and identity who defended the Rusyn language from Hungarian rule in the nineteenth century. Both the Slovak and Czech gardens celebrated similar themes. It was no mistake that the Czech, Slovak, and Rusin gardens arrayed themselves across a boundary street from the contiguous German and Hungarian gardens. Location can sometimes suggest just how powerfully old cultural conflicts were felt.
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