Karol Kočík
For almost fifty years of my life, I have been walking alongside a beautiful folk music instrument – the fujara shepherd’s pipe. The important music composer Svetozár Stračina called it “the chapel of our shepherd’s huts”. This deeply intimate instrument was in decline from the mid-1950s. This was beautifully reflected by one of the doyens of the fujara tradition – the shepherd Ondrej Madoš from Poniky (Banská Bystrica district) – when the composer Tibor Andrašovan asked him in around 1950 what attracted him to the fujara in particular when he could also play the pipes and flute. He replied, “Because the fujara is so forgotten that it is now precious.”