I was born in the city of Ružomberok in 1864. I was a gifted boy, so I started studying at the gymnasium in Ružomberok, then at the four-year gymnasium in Levoča, and after graduation I decided to become a priest. My first places of work after becoming a priest include Zákamenné-Klin, Tvrdošín, Svätá Alžbeta, Tri Sliače. It was here that I started my social and political activities. I founded a sobriety society, brought peasants together, broadened their horizons with lectures and reading. I founded farmers' associations, food cooperatives, reading clubs. During my time at Tri Sliače, I began to actively participate in the activities of the Slovak National Party. In the elections of 1906, I supported V. Šrobár's candidacy, for which the Hungarian court sentenced me to two years in prison and a heavy fine. At the end of World War 1, I clearly supported the Czech-Slovak orientation. From 1918 to 1938 I was a member of the Czech-Slovak Parliament. When I learned about the Pittsburgh Agreement in 1919, which was concluded by American Slovaks and American Czechs and which was designed by T. G. Masaryk, I went with the Slovak delegation to Paris, where I demanded that Slovakia's position in Czechoslovakia be secured in a peace treaty. After returning to my homeland, I was imprisoned for this in Moravia and the Czech Republic In Czechoslovakia, I was at the head of the People's Party all the time and led the Slovak autonomist movement. I became a symbol of Slovak unity. I entered the nation's memory as a great symbolic personality of the new Slovak history.