elites

The present study deals with how the bodies of deceased medieval kings and other significant persons were treated after death. The body of a monarch still represented royal majesty, which, according to the beliefs of the time, had been entrusted to him by God himself. Because royal majesty was seen as immortal, complex rites of passage were necessary for the burial of kings.

After the battle of Mohács, political elite of the Hungarian kingdom was apart from the prelates formed predominantly by aristocracy. They were represented by about fifty families who in the middle of the century owned 45-50 % of the country's land. Their members would hold the highest administrative and military offices, occupy prominent positions at the Diet, become leaders of the Estates Confederated against the Habsburgs, controll majority of the comes posts in the counties and with the help of their familiares practically govern the whole regions.

This study is the first attempt to outline the specific characteristics of the Hungarian national minority´s political elite, the congressmen and senators of the National Assembly, in the first Czechoslovak Republic. The first part of the article focuses on the basic features of the contemporary Hungarian political elite in Slovakia; the place of origin, profession, place of residence, age, political affinities etc. of the Hungarian MPs.

The study details the life and work of a nearly forgotten personality in the Hungarian minority history of Slovakia, Ödön Tarján. His contemporaries considered him not only an opposition politician who criticized the government minority and economic policies in the Czechoslovak republic (1918 – 1938), but also an agent of the Hungarian government. He was an outstanding economic expert and an éminence grise of the Hungarian parties who had substantial influence on the administration in Budapest. Despite his Jewish descent, he claimed to belong to the Hungarian national minority.

The article analyses the careers of a particular group of participants of the Declaration assembly that took place on 30th October, 1918, in Turčiansky Sv. Martin/Turócszentmárton (present day Martin in Slovakia). At the assembly, the Declaration of the Slovak Nation was proclaimed, by which the participants declared the "will of the Slovak nation" to become a part of the newly established Czechoslovak Republic. The author focuses particularly on 33 male participants who hailed from Turčiansky Sv. Martin, the very town where the declaration assembly took place.

The study, The Strategy of Forming a Nationalist Elite in the Best-Known Slovak Association, discusses the issue of establishing a new Slovak nationalist elite in the so called "matica" years. In the first chapter, a theoretical background is provided which seeks to define the term "elite" for the needs of this study on the basis of contemporary literature and especially sociology. The second part is analytical and can be divided into two subparts.

The paper focuses on the war career of the Nová žena journal, more precisely, on war-time strategies applied by a journal exhibiting specific features. The first one is that the Nová žena was not only for women, but entirely women´s – written and run by women only. The next typical feature was the lasting political and ideological orientation towards neutral Vatican, which was a source of permanent contradictions with the official propaganda contents preferred by the war-time Slovak state.