Viktor Cintula

Víťazoslav Cintula (; 4 March 1848 – 22 March 1911) was a Slovak cartographer and encyclopedist.

Biography Early life and education Víťazoslav Cintula was born on 4 March 1848 in the village of Borský Mikuláš into a gentry family. Like many members of the Hungarian low nobility, his father Ján Cintula worked in local administration. His mother Anna was a daughter of a wealthy landowner from a nearby village of Radošovce. While Viťazoslav was still a child, his father died, leaving his mother to take care of him and his four siblings alone.

Cintula's early education took place in the local school. Between 1860 and 1866, he studied at the gymnasium in Trnava before eventually graduating from a gymnasium in Esztergom in 1868. Originally, he intended to study theology but due to persecution he suffered due to his Slovak nationality from Hungarian professors at Esztergom, he opted to instead study geography at the Charles University in Prague. There are differing accounts of his living standard at the time. On one hand, Cintula send a letter to the writer Viliam Pauliny-Tóth in December 1968, pleading for financial support due to being raised by his mother alone. After completing his military service, he also studied at the University of Vienna, where he obtained a doctorate in 1974, which entitled him to teach geography and history at a gymnasium in the German language. Later, he extended his qualifications in Prague to be also able to teach in Czech. Cintula also maintained regular correspondence with Slovaks intellectuals of the Matica slovenská and his brother Gustav, who was a parish priest at the village of Špačince. A small alley at the border of Nové Mesto and Rača boroughs of Bratislava is named after Cintula. In 2024, after a poet named Juraj Cintula, unrelated to Víťazoslav Cintula, was identified as a culprit behind the attempted assassination of the prime minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, there was a brief push to rename the street. Nonetheless, it failed to gain any traction.