Artur Nandrazi from Slovakia

I am a staunch opponent of smoking and drinking alcohol, because I value life. One of my greatest shortcomings is that I am often even more withdrawn than an ordinary introvert. Unfortunately, I began to become this way at the age of fifteen, when fate took away the person dearest to me. This is also one of the reasons why I do not go to church, and for that I would like to apologise to Christians of all denominations, not only Lutherans.

About two years before this website was created, an idea suddenly came to me: I would learn the Lord's Prayer in at least thirty languages of the world. It was an unusual but very appealing thought. I told myself: “You have an excellent visual memory, so perhaps you could manage fifty languages without too much difficulty.” My son Oto first downloaded versions of the Lord's Prayer in about twenty languages for me. For some languages he also had to find recordings of the correct pronunciation.

Believe it or not, learning the prayer in languages I had studied before was easy for me, and so was learning it in some languages I had never studied, such as Basque, Albanian and Vietnamese. Nahuatl, Navajo and Inupiat required more effort. Among European languages, Welsh was the most difficult for me. During those two years there were also many objective and personal circumstances that repeatedly made studying impossible for long periods.

One of the main reasons I created this website was that I could officially recite the Lord's Prayer in 88 languages, while unofficially the number had already exceeded one hundred. Since 3 December 2013 I have been the holder of an inaugural Slovak record for this achievement and I have a certificate documenting it. I wanted to present this widely known prayer, one of the basic texts of the Christian tradition, in at least fifty languages. Have you ever heard languages such as Bemba, Nahuatl or Zulu? Or Kapampangan?

I would also like to present verses by poets such as Andrej Sládkovič, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Shakespeare and others. Another reason for creating this website was my wish to leave something behind in people's memory after I am gone. I hope Slovak visitors will forgive me for also including verses by the well-known Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi; I have a personal reason for doing so. If I were to write about my life in detail, even a hundred pages would not be enough. It would almost become a work of fiction. I am grateful to my son Oto, without whom I would never have been able to put all this online.