Wells of Love and Hearts of Stone: Two Centuries of the Trenčín Legend in Slovak Literature

Abstract

The Ottoman invasions are among the most significant historical events in Central European literature as well as popular culture. An important example is the legendary „well of love“ at Trenčín Castle, supposedly dug by the Turkish Omar in order to free his beloved Fatima, held in captivity by Stephen Zápolya. Despite its setting in the 1490s, this story was first published in German in the early nineteenth century by Hungarian nobleman Alois Freiherrn von Mednyánszky, which inspired Slovak poetic adaptations of this tale by Karol Štúr (1844) and Mikuláš Dohnány (1846). The narrative was popularized in several collections of „historical“ tales set in Slovakia’s castles by twentieth-century authors such as Ľudovít Janota, Jozef Branecký, Jozef Horák and Ján Domasta, as well as in Jozef Nižnánsky’s historical novel The Well of Love (1935), which provides a concrete political background for the legend. Although the story’s events and characters (other than Zápolya) are fictional, it remains today one of the most enduring love stories in Slovak culture. This article will analyze the textual development of this legend in relation to evolving definitions of national identity over the last two centuries.

Keywords

• slovak folk literature
• historical fiction
• imagology
• literary romanticism
• turks in literature