Czech and Slovak Cultural Center

SLOVCZECH is a group of musicians, who love to share joy of Central and Eastern European folk music. The band started in 2008 here in Minneapolis. It initially focused on dance music, which would serve Czech and Slovak communities in Midwest US.

Gradually, the band profiled into more concert oriented, modern sounding folk rock formation, heavily influenced by central european bands Cechomor, Dikanda and Kroke.

SLOVCZECH currently features:

Aurora Adamson
- fiddle, mandolin and vocal

Petr Bachan
- guitar, keyboards and vocal

Jozef Klobusnik
- accordion and vocal

Lubor Manolov
- guitar and vocal

SLOVCZECH band also regularly features children from Czech and Slovak families, who play and sing during occasions – St. Nicholas, Christmas and Easter.

During last 3 years, SLOVCZECH performed several times at  Festival of Nations, St. Paul, MN; Minnesota Sokol Days; Dozinky Days in New Prague,MN; Cedar Rapid BrewNost and Milwaukee Sokol. SLOVCZECH also  performed solo concerts at Harriet Lake Band Shell as a part of Twin Cities Music in the Park summer series.

SLOVCZECH will be performing in March during new Edina Schmitt music opening and it may be also occasionaly seen playing at some of Twin City venues.

Come and join us to support this great local band!

We think of World War II as a period in world history of enormous loss of human life, indeed the most destructive episode in the last three centuries.  Losses of human life on this scale can only be estimated, and current estimates of the military and civilian dead, whether due to violent attacks, genocide, disease, or starvation caused directly by the war, run to between 62 and 78 million people in all theaters.  Civilian deaths ran to between 40 and 52 million.  Yet the human suffering in Europe did not stop with the formal end of hostilities in 1945.  Deaths continued for several years after the war because of starvation and disease in bombed out cities and above all among the refugees created by massive forced migration after the fighting stopped.  The largest number of those forced migrants, expellees, in fact, were ethnic Germans who were forced out of their home communities in many parts of East-Central as they fled from the advancing Soviet military forces or were deliberately expelled by Soviet authorities and the new post-war governments in East-Central Europe.  That movement of ethnic Germans included between 12 and 14 million people, probably the largest single forced migration in modern history.

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser

That is the question that we do not often ask. Instead we focus on the cost of education that is climbing and affects virtually everybody’s checkbook. Yet ignorance does cost a lot, more than most people recognize, and the Czechs could tell you a gruesome story about it. However, they probably won’t because, according to Martin Jan Stransky, this subject falls into the category of selective attention, convenient lapsed of memory, or conspiracy of silence. Stransky is the publisher of Pritomnost, originally founded by his grandfather in the 1920’s, and now one of the most respected journal.

So how much does ignorance cost? One million crowns? Hundred million? How about ten billion crowns and climbing; three billion is damage for breach of business deal, and seven more for accumulated interest, increasing by one million each day.

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Family Night will take place on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 from 4:30-6:30 pm at C.S.P.S. Hall, 383 Michigan Street, Saint Paul, MN 55102. This is a fun event for the whole family. Come and enjoy Czech and Slovak conversation and fellowship. We all will decorate with our children heart cookies (pernikova srdce), create special cards with fabric, practice our theatre play, start learning a song and definitely learn how to move super fast . Please bring a dish to share for the potluck dinner.