Slovakia's history: a thousand years inside somebody else's state

Who lived here before the Slavs arrived

The territory has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic. Stone tools worked by the Clactonian technique have been found near Nové Mesto nad Váhom, a Neanderthal site was excavated at Gánovce, and the Gravettian culture left the Venus of Moravany, a small carved figure from Moravany nad Váhom that remains the best known prehistoric object found in the country.

The first population identifiable from written sources were the Celts, who arrived from the west around 400 BC and settled the lowlands along the Danube. Their hill forts became working economic centres rather than refuges: Zemplín was a centre of iron-working, glass was made at Liptovská Mara, and coins were struck at Bratislava bearing the inscriptions Biatec and Nonnos.

Rome never held the territory, but it pressed against it for four centuries. The Danube was the frontier, and the Romans built small outposts on the far bank at Iža and Devín. Marcus Aurelius wrote the first book of his Meditations on campaign against the Quadi somewhere along the river Hron in 172. Roman troops crossed the Danube for the last time in 374.

The Slavs arrived in the fifth and sixth centuries. By the time the nomadic Avars conquered the Carpathian Basin in 568, Slavs had settled most of what is now Slovakia. What followed was two centuries of an uneasy shared arrangement: Avar garrisons at Devín and Komárno controlled the southern lowlands, while the Slavs north of a line running roughly from Devín through Nitra to Košice kept their own burial rites and their own local power.

Why Great Moravia still matters to Slovaks

Great Moravia is the state Slovak national identity is anchored to, and it lasted less than eighty years.

It arose around 830 when Mojmír I unified the Slavic tribes north of the Danube. Under Rastislav, who ruled from 846, it did the one thing that made it permanently significant: in 863 Rastislav asked the Byzantine emperor for teachers who would preach in a language his people spoke. Constantinople sent the brothers Cyril and Methodius. Cyril devised the first Slavic alphabet and translated the Gospel into Old Church Slavonic, and in 880 Pope John VIII established an independent church province with Methodius at its head.

Under Svätopluk I, who ruled from 871 to 894, the realm reached its greatest extent, covering present-day Moravia and Slovakia along with parts of Hungary, Lower Austria, Bohemia, Silesia, southern Poland and northern Serbia. It did not survive him. His sons quarrelled, the Hungarian tribes moved into the Pannonian Basin from around 896, and in three battles near Bratislava in July and August 907 the Hungarians routed the Bavarian armies. Historians conventionally date the end of Great Moravia to that year.

What it left behind outlasted it by a thousand years. The Glagolitic script and its successor Cyrillic spread to the other Slavic countries, and the administrative structure of Great Moravia may have shaped the Kingdom of Hungary that replaced it.

How a thousand years of Hungarian rule worked

From the early tenth century the territory was absorbed into the emerging Kingdom of Hungary, and it stayed there until 1918. That is a longer continuous arrangement than most European states have existed for, and it was not a simple occupation.

Stephen I established at least eight counties on present-day Slovak territory around the year 1000, among them Nitra, Tekov, Hont and Zemplín. From 1048 a third of the kingdom, the Tercia pars regni, was governed separately from Nitra by members of the Árpád dynasty. The arrangement lasted sixty years and ended in 1107.

The Mongol invasion of 1241 devastated the north-west. Trenčín Castle held, but the regions along the Váh and the Nitra were stripped, and it is estimated that at least a third of the population died of famine and epidemic. What followed the withdrawal was a building programme: castles strengthened, and towns granted charters in rapid succession.

What made these towns rich was underground. The territory held gold, silver, copper, iron and salt, and by the middle of the fourteenth century Kremnica alone was producing 400 kg of gold a year. Banská Štiavnica and Banská Bystrica supplied a large share of the kingdom's silver, and in the second half of that century the Kingdom of Hungary accounted for around a quarter of Europe's total output.

The result was that this was among the most urbanised parts of the kingdom. A decree of Vladislaus II in 1498 listed the ten most important towns in Hungary, and six of them were in present-day Slovakia: Košice, Bratislava, Bardejov, Prešov, Trnava and Levoča.

What the Ottoman wars did to the towns

When the Ottomans took the centre of Hungary in the sixteenth century, the northern remainder, most of present-day Slovakia, became the Habsburg kingdom that historians call Royal Hungary. Bratislava was its capital and coronation city from 1536 until the late eighteenth century, and nineteen Habsburg sovereigns were crowned in St Martin's Cathedral between 1526 and 1830.

That status came at a price. For almost two centuries the territory was the principal battleground of the Turkish wars, and the mineral wealth that had built the towns was spent on fighting. Parts of the south were absorbed into Ottoman provinces; the Uyvar Eyalet was administered from Nové Zámky.

Where the Slovak language was settled

The Slovak national movement was linguistic before it was political, and it split twice over which Slovak to write.

Anton Bernolák produced the first codification in the 1780s, based on western Slovak dialect and supported mainly by Catholic intellectuals around Trnava. Lutheran writers went on using a Slovakised Czech, and figures such as Ján Kollár and Pavel Jozef Šafárik argued a pan-Slavic case in which Czechs and Slovaks were one nation whose languages should be drawn closer together.

The break came in the 1840s. Ľudovít Štúr built a standard on the central Slovak dialect and made the opposite argument: that Slovak was a separate language of a separate nation. Catholics and Lutherans both accepted his version in 1847, and after several reforms it is the standard language today. The language was fixed seventy-one years before the state was, and by ninety-two years before independence.

Politics followed the language, and went worse. Slovak leaders sided with Vienna in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 hoping for autonomy inside the Habsburg monarchy, and got neither. The cultural association Matica slovenská was founded at Martin in 1863 and dissolved by the authorities in 1875, accused of pan-Slavic separatism. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 placed the territory firmly in the Hungarian half of the monarchy, the policy of magyarisation intensified. In the Kingdom of Hungary only 5% of inhabitants could vote, and the Apponyi Act made state funding of elementary schools conditional on teaching Hungarian.

The episode that carried furthest was a killing. At Černová near Ružomberok in 1907, gendarmes shot dead fifteen villagers who had tried to stop a church being consecrated against their wishes; all fifteen gendarmes were themselves ethnic Slovaks. The incident drew international attention to the treatment of non-Hungarian minorities.

Why Slovakia joined the Czechs instead of standing alone

Emigrants took the decision, and took it abroad. Slovak organisations in the United States, which were numerous, backed a joint Czecho-Slovak republic, and so did groups in Russia and in neutral countries. Milan Rastislav Štefánik, a French citizen of Slovak origin serving as a French general, was the decisive Slovak figure in the Paris-based Czecho-Slovak National Council.

Prague proclaimed the republic on 28 October 1918 and the Slovak National Council at Martin acceded two days later. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 then drew the southern border well south of the language line for strategic and economic reasons, which left substantial Hungarian-populated areas inside Czechoslovakia and created a minority question that has not gone away.

Czechoslovakia was the only country in east-central Europe to remain a parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1938. It was also a state in which Slovaks were outnumbered, poorer, more rural, more Catholic and less experienced in self-government than the Czechs, governed from Prague. Interwar attempts to industrialise Slovakia largely failed, the Great Depression made it worse, and the autonomy movement built steadily from the 1920s onward.

What the wartime Slovak Republic was

On 14 March 1939 Slovakia declared independence. Independence was nominal. Germany controlled Slovak foreign policy and, increasingly, parts of domestic policy, and Jozef Tiso became prime minister and then president. Germany invaded the Czech lands the following day.

The state's own record is the reason this period is still argued about. Measures against the country's roughly 90,000 Jews began almost immediately. The Jewish Code of September 1941 resembled the Nuremberg Laws; more than 64,000 people lost their livelihoods. Between March and October 1942 the Slovak state deported approximately 57,000 Jews to German-occupied Poland, where almost all were killed, and parliament passed a bill retroactively legalising the deportations in May 1942. A further 12,600 were deported by German forces after 1944, and others were massacred inside the country at Kremnička and Nemecká. Around 10,000 Slovak Jews survived in Slovakia.

Against that, on 29 August 1944 Lieutenant Colonel Ján Golian gave the order that began the Slovak National Uprising. Around 18,000 partisans took part along with the regular army, and fighters from thirty other nations joined them; the troop figure itself is disputed, given as 60,000 in Slovak reference works and as more than 80,000 by the National WWII Museum. The rising was crushed on 27 October after two months, and the German counter-offensive devastated the country, but it allowed Slovakia to end the war among the nations that had contributed to the Allied victory.

Both records belong to the same six years, and Slovak historiography has never reconciled them. The state that deported its own citizens and the army that rose against the Germans were the same institutions eighteen months apart, and any account that resolves that cleanly has left something out.

How communism reshaped a farming country

Czechoslovakia was restored in 1945 without Carpathian Ruthenia, which was ceded to the Soviet Union. The Beneš decrees disenfranchised and persecuted the Hungarian minority in the south, and the German minority was expelled.

In the 1946 elections the Democratic Party won Slovakia with 62% while the Communists won the Czech lands, and in February 1948 the Communists seized power across the state. Four decades of strict control followed, broken once. Alexander Dubček, a Slovak, became first secretary in 1968 and proposed the reforms known as socialism with a human face; on 21 August 1968 Soviet, Hungarian, Bulgarian, East German and Polish troops invaded. Another Slovak, Gustáv Husák, replaced him in April 1969.

The period called normalisation that followed was harsher in the Czech lands, where the reform movement had been centred, than in Slovakia. Slovakia saw comparatively high economic growth through the 1970s and 1980s, and the industrial base built in those decades is the one the independent country inherited.

Why Czechoslovakia split without a referendum

The Velvet Revolution began on 17 November 1989 and ended Communist rule. Free elections followed in June 1990, won by the Civic Forum in the Czech lands and its Slovak counterpart Public Against Violence.

The split came from an election two years later. In June 1992 Václav Klaus's Civic Democratic Party won in the Czech lands on economic reform, and Vladimír Mečiar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia won in Slovakia on Slovak autonomy. Negotiations on a new federal constitution deadlocked, the two leaders agreed to dissolve the federation, and on 1 January 1993 both republics came into existence simultaneously and peacefully. There was no referendum. The division is one of the very few state break-ups of the twentieth century that produced no violence at all.

How independent Slovakia has governed itself

Mečiar's party governed for most of the first five years, and its record is contested. European and domestic critics held that the government breached democratic norms and the rule of law before it was replaced in 1998 by a coalition under Mikuláš Dzurinda. The reforms of the Dzurinda governments are what carried the country into the OECD, then into NATO on 29 March 2004 and the European Union on 1 May 2004. Slovakia adopted the euro in 2009 and sat on the UN Security Council for 2006 and 2007.

Politics since has alternated between Robert Fico's Smer and its opponents. Fico resigned in March 2018 after the largest street protests in decades, which followed the murder of the investigative journalist Ján Kuciak. Zuzana Čaputová was elected the country's first female president in 2019. Fico returned to office in October 2023 and announced that Slovakia would stop military aid to Ukraine; Peter Pellegrini, his ally, won the presidency in April 2024.

For a country that spent a millennium without a state, the striking thing about the thirty-odd years since 1993 is how ordinary they have been: coalitions, protests, elections, alternation. That is not a small outcome given how the century before it went.