Slavs of New York

The other week, Slavs of New York was lucky enough to join the Municipal Arts Society’s walking tour of Bohemian National and the Sokol Halls, led by Joe Svehlak...

Bedford-Stuyvesant, in north central Brooklyn, is not an obvious neighborhood to get the Slavs of New York walking tour treatment. While the neighborhood may have been home to some Poles long ago, they did not leave much of a trace...

Brighton Beach has a long history, but its status as Little Odessa dates from just the 1970s...

As we're catching up on our blogging, here's a selection of recent news:Stalin on Cooper SquareThe Cooper Union's main building on East Seventh Street is displaying a 1952 Picasso portrait of Stalin, part of an exhibit entitled Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman With Mustache by Lene Berg...

The recent Best of 2008 by the Village Voice included a surprising number of Slavic restaurants! Some are pretty well known, but there’s a surprising number of little-known and out-of-the-way places that are deserving a bit of attention...

Last night was the grand opening of the rededicated Bohemian National Hall at 321-325 East 73rd Street in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, historically a major Czech and Slovak area.The building was built between 1895 and 1897 by architect William C...

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but we’re hard at work preping walking tours of Greenpoint, Brighton Beach and Bed-Stuy (with Astoria in the pipeline). They’ll be up ASAP...

Greenpoint is the preeminent Polish enclave in New York – and one of the largest outside of Poland itself...

Start at Union Square, and walk east along the northern side of 14th Street. You will soon hit a small shop, Russian Souvenirs (227 14th Street), between Second and Third Avenues...

The Summer Olympics have begun in Beijing, and the Empire State Building is getting into the spirit. The building will display the colors of 66 countries - a different one on each face of the building through the end of the Games...

Kurowycky Meat Products used to be at 124 First Avenue between 7th and 8th Street, but it closed after 52 years on 2 June 2007.Today, Jeremiah's Vanishing New York reports on what is happening to the building...

No sooner do we note a resurgence of Slavic life in the East Village in the face of gentrification than we discover a new loss in Greenpoint: the Byzantine (Ruthenian) Catholic Church of Saint Elias (143-149 Kent Street) is to be converted into condos.The church was built in 1870 and bought by the...

BGuide New York 2008, featuring organizations and businesses in the New York area of interest to the local Bulgarian community is out now.Local businesses are featured – not only Bulgarian but also Greek, Bosnian and others...

Sunday’s New York Times noted the parole of Zvone Busic, a Croat involved in a hijacking of a TWA flight in 1976 designed to draw attention to the Croatian independence movement (Croatian Leader of 1976 Hijacking Is Granted Parole, but Faces Deportation).When Croatian hijackers took over TWA...

Who’s captive now? on the website of The Economist today highlights Captive Nations Week in the United States, an annual observance since 1959 born of the Cold War...

At the Crossroads: Slovenian Cinema, the first New York retrospective of film from Slovenia, kicks off at the Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center tomorrow. Thirteen films, spanning over fifty years, are on the schedule...

July is promising to be huge for Balkan music fans – two of the biggest names are in town for multiple shows, rounded out with a film and dance lessons too.First up is Sarajevo-born Goran Bregovic, with shows at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center...

Czechs and Slovaks have a long tradition in New York City - Czech immigrants began arriving to the city after 1848, and Slovaks soon following after 1870...

The recent flooding in the Midwest has sadly affected a major landmark in Slavic America – the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.Set up as a local historical institution to document the area’s Czechoslovak immigration, the museum was recognized in 1992 by...

The small, trendy, Czech town of Zlín is getting the star treatment this summer around town thanks to the Zlín in New York program that kicked off last week.Through 31 July, catch the exhibit “Fresh Design - Zl ín in New York” at the Czech Center, which showcases original works created by...

Going on right now is the Borderlanders: Finding Their Voices festival at various venues in the East Village and Lower East Side, organized by the Polish Cultural Institute and the Borderland Foundation of Sejny, Poland...

The sixth annual New York Bulgarian Film Festival opened tonight at Scandinavia House, and runs through 19 April with a schedule featuring fifteen feature films from Bulgaria and a selection of shorts from around the Balkans.Tomorrow (Saturday), the festival has four screenings, including ...

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, Metropolitan Laurus, was buried yesterday at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, near Cooperstown and Utica in central New York State.The highlight of his career was perhaps his leadership in reunifying the Russian Orthodox Church...