The Litmanová Apparitions: the Lady of Mount Zvir, Slovakia (1990 to 1995)

Litmanová is a Rusyn village in Stará Ľubovňa District, northern Slovakia, near the Polish border. Communism had fallen nine months before. Above the village rises Mount Zvir. On it stood a wooden hay hut that locals call a majdan.

Sunday, 5 August 1990. Afternoon. Three Greek Catholic children were playing on the mountain. Ivetka Korčáková was 11. Katka Češelková was 12. Her brother Mitko was 9. They heard "something walking back and forth" among the trees and hid in the hut. Then "steps started to walk around the majdan." Ivetka prayed three times: "Mary, our Mother, hide us under your [protective] mantle."

"Just then, a glare shined in the room. We thought it had been the sun. After some time the same glare shined again and then, we could see a beautiful young Lady in the center of the room." She sat on the bench at the door. As dusk fell, Ivetka asked her to come down with them. Katka remembered: "She went approximately two steps behind us. I felt peace." At the cross below, the official account says, she knelt and made the sign of the cross. Mitko, by the shrine's own history, "saw nothing."

She returned. She blessed a spring near the hut. On 2 December 1990 she named herself "Immaculate Purity." She usually wore a white tunic and a blue mantle, and looked about 19 or 20. "We do not use any language when we talk," Ivetka said. From March 1991 she came on the Sunday after each first Friday.

The crowds swelled to over 100,000. Pilgrims described a sun that "rotated, emitted concentric circles in rainbow colours, darkened and brightened again, and trembled." A teacher saw a green sphere approach as if falling, then retreat. On 6 August 1995 came the last apparition. Katka: "Mary was dressed entirely in white. She had no rosary, no crown. She was barefoot. She was very serious."

Bishop Ján Hirka of the Prešov Greek Catholic Eparchy formed an eight-member commission of priests and physicians. During trances of about 8 minutes, the girls' eyes stayed fixed on one point. Their pulses rose to 130 and 123 bpm. They showed no reaction to painful stimuli. Child psychiatrist Ladislav Kvasnička concluded: "Both Iveta and Katarina are mentally lucid and their intellectual level is good."

Sceptics reportedly blamed the glare on sunlight reflecting off light decorations. The dancing sun recalls Fátima, where such reports are usually explained as after-images from staring at the sun. No source accuses the seers of fabrication.

On 4 July 2025 Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith granted a nihil obstat. Public devotion was approved. Supernatural intervention was not recognised.

The hay hut is now the Chapel of the Apparition. Pilgrims have come from almost 30 countries. In 1991 a message asked for a church at Turzovka, and the pattern of young seers and regular dates recalls Medjugorje.