Hey, Slavs

"Hey, Slavs" is a patriotic song dedicated to the Slavs and widely considered to be the Pan-Slavic anthem. It was adapted and adopted as the national anthem of various Slavic-speaking nations, movements and organizations during the late 19th and 20th century.

Its lyrics were first written in 1834 under the title "Hey, Slovaks" ("Hej, Slováci") by Samo Tomášik in Prague and it has since served as the anthem of the Pan-Slavic movement, the organizational anthem of the Sokol movement, and the national anthems of the First Slovak Republic, SFR Yugoslavia, and Serbia and Montenegro. It was composed to the slowed down tune of "Mazurek Dąbrowskiego" from 1797, which was adopted as the national anthem of Poland through a process spanning from 1926 to 1927, but the Yugoslav variation has a slower tempo, changed a few notes, is more accentuated, and does not repeat the last four lines as it repeats the last two lines. The composer is unknown, although modern renditions of the song often used a World War II-era arrangement by Oskar Danon.

Etymology

In Serbo-Croatian, which uses both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets, the song had been titled as (in Croatian and in Serbian standard, respectively):

Hej, Slaveni or Hej, Sloveni (in Latin)

Хеј, Славени or Хеј, Словени (in Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic)

In Macedonian the song's title is "Ej, Sloveni" (Cyrillic: Еј, Словени), and in Slovene, it is "Hej, Slovani". The original title in Slovak was "Hej, Slováci".

Slovakia

The song was written initially in Czech by the Slovak Lutheran minister Samuel Tomášik while he was visiting Prague in 1834. He was appalled that German was more commonly heard in the streets of Prague than Czech. He wrote in his diary:

"If mother Prague, the pearl of the Western Slavic world, is to be lost in a German sea, what awaits my dear homeland, Slovakia, which looks to Prague for spiritual nourishment?