POLITICKÝ KULT JOZEFA TISA V POVOJNOVEJ SLOVENSKEJ POÉZII

During the Second World War, Jozef Tiso (1887 – 1947), a Catholic priest, leader of the governing Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, and President of the Slovak State (1939 – 1945), a client state of Nazi Germany, had become an object of political cult that persisted after 1945. After being sentenced to death by the National Court in Bratislava and executed by hanging on 18 April 1947, Tiso was ultimately turned into a martyr in the eyes of the Hlinka’s Party wartime regime’s supporters. His image as a “martyr of the nation, state, Christian faith and the Church” has been formed mainly by those who fled the communist regime and remained in exile from the late 1940s until 1990s. Tiso’s “sacrifice” was massively reflected in exile poetry. The poetry of the Catholic modernist group as well as poems written by occasional poets of nationalistic orientation strongly contributed to the creation of the persona of Jozef Tiso as a martyr – a myth which did not disappear from Slovak politics and culture even after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Against the background of Tiso’s cult genesis and formation, the article analyses the semiotic dimension of politically engaged poetry, which has shaped his sacralised image in recent decades and led part of Slovak nationalistic organisations in the post-communist milieu to efforts for judicial and moral rehabilitation of Jozef Tiso, as well as his ecclesiastical beatification.