Darina Laščiaková

Darina Laščiaková ( Gažová; 23 November 1931 – 12 August 2026) was a Slovak folk singer, ethnographer and radio editor. Over a career of more than four decades at Czechoslovak Radio and its Slovak successor, she combined field collection of traditional song with her own performance of it, and became one of the best-known voices of Slovak folk music.

A native of the Orava region, Laščiaková joined the radio's folk music desk in 1961 and remained there for some thirty-three years, travelling across Slovakia with a tape recorder to record singers and instrumentalists in their own villages. The recordings she brought back form a substantial part of the Slovak Radio archive of authentic musical folklore.She was also a prolific broadcaster, best known for the cycle Hory, ľudia a pieseň ("Mountains, People and Song"), and recorded extensively as a singer, particularly of lyrical and wedding songs from Orava.

Early life and education Laščiaková was born in Tvrdošín in northern Orava on 23 November 1931.