Valentine’s Day and the Eventisation of Slovakia’s Festive Culture

Abstract

e study focuses on Valentine's Day in Slovakia since the turn of the 20 th and 21 st centuries from the perspective of festive culture. It explores public celebrations, as defined by Lars Deile (2014), associated with Valentine's Day, and analyses them on the basis of event characteristics according to Winfried Gebhardt's concept. e study is based on the assumption that the acceleration of eventisation is a new dynamising element of the festive culture transformation at the late modern stage (Gebhardt, 2000). e aim of the study is (1) to find out which of the Valentine's Day public celebrations in Slovakia have the nature of an event; (2) identify the origin of and motivation for the choice of specific forms of events; (3) outline the specifics of Valentine's Day celebrations as events in the framework of Slovakia's festive culture. At the general level, the author is interested in the cultural dimension of the individualisation and pluralisation processes. rough three Valentine's Day events, he traces the transformations of the trends of deinstitutionalisation, deconstruction, profanisation, multiplication, and commercialisation, which characterise the celebrations of modern society according to Gebhardt. Empirically, the study relies on the findings of the analysis of media sources about the forms of the festive practice accompanying Valentine's Day in Slovakia. e sources come from exploratory research conducted in 2011-2021.