“Our little Sándor, welcome back to a hopefully more European-style capital city,” said Slovak Deputy Prime Minister Pál Csáky, at the unveiling of the statue of Hungarian national poet Sándor Petőfi in the Bratislava/Pozsony inner-city park, the Medicus Gardens. The statue had to be restored following a serious attack on it in March 2001 at its previous location [see reports of July 11, 2002 and March 20, 2001] The restoration was made possible by the Hungarian-Slovak Cultural Agreement, both governments allocating funds for the work. The statue was originally commissioned by the Toldi civic organization from sculptor János Radnai and erected in Bratislava in 1911. Eight years later, the statue was disassembled by Czech legionaries and kept in a warehouse for almost four decades. Re-erected in Petrzalka in 1955, Sándor Petőfi’ statue has been vandalized many times throughout the years. [Új Szó (Bratislava/Pozsony) March 17, 2003]

The Slovak government issued a resolution establishing the state-funded Hungarian-language János Selye University, scheduled to open in Komárno/Komárom in 2004 with three departments: theology, pedagogy and economics. The long-awaited establishment of the Hungarian-language university was one the conditions of the Hungarian Coalition Party to join the current government coalition. Creation of the university must also be approved by the university accreditation committee and Parliament. This move comes after more than two years of dawdling by the Nitra/Nyitra-based Konstantín University’s senate which ultimately rejected the Slovak government recommendation to establish an independent Hungarian-language department. The pledge had been a condition of the Hungarian Coalition Party’s participation in the prior coalition government and a key Hungarian community aspiration [see reports of January 28, 2003, July 2, 2002 and January 24, 2001]. The Komárom-raised János Selye was one of the greatest medical scientists of the 20^th century. His name is inseparable from the theory of stress, and he also studied the illness of our age: coronary disease. [Magyar Hírlap (Budapest) March 12, 2003]