History History

According to archaeological evidence, the present territory of Slovakia has been inhabited for 270,000 years.

The Celts penetrated the Danube basin and dominated most of the country. Their political organisation is concentrated around the oppidum near the present-day city of Bratislava. They are the first to mint coins in the region.

The Celtic tribes were driven out by Germanic and Roman tribes. Periods of peace alternate with conflicts between the Roman legions and the Quads or Marcomans, Germanic peoples. This lasting contact allows the Roman culture to influence the local culture.

In the 4th century, as Roman power declined, the Quads had to face Attila's Huns and then the Avars, Turkish-Mongolian tribes, who launched numerous expeditions to Western Europe from Slovakia.

The Western Roman Empire collapses and the Huns lose Slovakia. This void is occupied by the Slavs who settle in to compete with the Avars.

The Slavs unite behind the Bohemian Samo freelance merchant. He managed to form the first state organization of the West Slavs, which included the western part of present-day Slovakia. When he died in 658, his empire collapsed and a period of cohabitation between Slavs and Avars began.

Slovakia is under a dual influence of Frankish and Byzantine. Pepin the Short defeated the Avars in 796, and Slovakia found itself under the rule of Charlemagne's empire.

On the death of the Emperor, the break-up of Charlemagne's Frankish empire allowed the Slavs of the Danube to regain a state organization composed of two independent principalities, that of Moravia and that of Nitra. Often regarded as the first Slovak sovereign, Pribina, Prince of Nitra, had the first Christian church built at his court in 828. This was the first time that the Slavs had a sovereign state and were able to establish relations with their neighbours.

Great Moravia was founded in 833, after the conquest of the Principality of Nitra by Mojmir, Prince of neighbouring Moravia, now a region of the Czech Republic. Mojmir was replaced by his nephew Ratislav, who sought to create an independent ecclesiastical diocese to free himself from Frankish rule.

Cyril and Methodius, two brothers familiar with the Slavic dialect spoken in Thessalonica, are sent to develop a Slavic version of Christianity. Cyril creates the first Slavic alphabet, Glagolitic, and translates many liturgical texts. Méthode writes the first collection of laws in Old Slavic. Their disciple Clement invented the "Cyrillic" alphabet. Their arrival is an important event in the development of religions and the carving up of the map of the Slavic people. Their cross, symbol of Slovakia, adorns its flag. The kingdom slowly disintegrates until its final disappearance under the repeated assaults of the Magyars.

The Magyars, a people originally from Central Asia, conquered Great Moravia in 907, settled down and became part of the European cultural universe by opening up to Western Christian preachers. In 1000, the first title of King of Hungary was given to Stephen I of the Árpád dynasty, with the approval of Pope Sylvester II. In 1018, Slovakia became part of the Hungarian kingdom for nine hundred years.

Tatar invasions decimated the population and plunged Slovakia into a long economic crisis. A massive influx of German settlers attracted by the privileges granted by Bela IV revitalized civil society. They came to settle as craftsmen in Kežmarok or contributed to the development of precious metal mining in Banská Bystrica and Banská Štiavnica.

In a succession struggle for the Hungarian throne, a magnate of the Hungarian kingdom, Matúš Čák Trenčiansky, took control of the Slovak territory and fourteen of its counties between 1301 and 1321. He established the seat of his power at the castle of Trenčin and owned up to fifty castles. It maintained the independence of all its territories until its defeat by the Hungarian King Charles-Robert of Anjou in 1312. Nevertheless, he managed to control the counties of Bratislava, Nitra and Trenčin until his death.

In 1526, at Moháč, Sultan Suleiman's army crushes the Hungarian army. This disaster brought the Austrian Habsburg dynasty to the Hungarian throne.

In 1536, the Ottomans get their hands on Buda. With its central part, which roughly corresponds to what is now Hungarian territory, cut off, Slovakia became the heart of the Hungarian kingdom. Bratislava became the capital and all Hungarian monarchs were crowned at St. Martin's Cathedral (Dóm svatého Martina) until 1835. The cities of Bratislava, Trnava, Košice and Levoča establish themselves as the main centres of economic exchange.

This period was marked by religious, but also social and political unrest. The Reformation and the ideas of Protestantism spread and allowed peasants, city dwellers and nobles to challenge the domination of the Catholic Church and the central power of the Habsburgs.

In the second half of the 16th century, the Church and Vienna began to fight Protestantism with vigour. The Counter-Reformation was led mainly by the Jesuits. The process of recatholicisation consists of systematically favouring Catholics.

In the second half of the 18th century, the philosophy of the Enlightenment spread to the circles of Vienna. Maria Theresa of Austria (1740-1780) and her son Joseph II (1780-1790) embodied the image of enlightened despots. They became aware of the backwardness of the Empire, accelerated the decentralisation of power and carried out an ambitious programme of economic, social and cultural modernisation of society. They made Bratislava (Pressburg) a cultural capital, both Austrian and Hungarian, open to the other European influences of the time.

In opposition to the imperialism of Hungarian culture, the Slovak language was codified by Anton Bernolak (1787) and Ludovit Stur (1863) who demanded independence from Slovakia. The impetus of the French Revolution spread the concept of the nation-state in Europe.

In 1848, serfdom was abolished at the Bratislava Convention. The industry develops in a country where the mines of Slovakia represent three quarters of the Hungarian production. In September 1848, the Slovak patriots gathered in a Slovak National Council proclaimed Slovakia's independence. The Empire stamps out rebellion and adopts a very repressive political line against any political or national claim.

In 1863, the Slovak cultural and scientific association Matica slovenská was established to develop national consciousness through culture. Three Slovak high schools were opened and new hope was born. This act initiated the beginning of the propagation of Slovak culture.

In 1867, the Austro-Hungarian compromise transforming the Empire into a dual monarchy, Austrian and Hungarian, resulted in the brutal Magyarisation of Slovakia. Matica slovenská was abolished in 1875. Without prospects, Slovaks emigrated en masse to the United States.

During these years of war, the idea of a rapprochement with the Czechs, who were linguistically close, gradually matured abroad. This struggle for the creation of a Czechoslovak state was led by the Slovak Milan R. Štefánik and the Czechs Tomáš G. Masaryk and Edvard Beneš. In 1916 they established the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris, which they imposed on the Allies. They organized resistance against Austro-Hungarian rule and prepared for the construction of a Czechoslovak state. Milan R. Štefánik is today considered a national hero to such an extent that he gave his name to Bratislava airport.

The Czech National Committee proclaims the independence of the Czechoslovak Republic. However, the balance between the two partners is unequal, power is centralised in Prague and the Slovaks have a Diet in Bratislava. The Czech part is also developing more industrially than Slovakia, which remains rural and poor. The first reforms in the 1920s guaranteed basic civil rights. Freedom of the press and education became a priority. Czechoslovakia is the only country in its area that managed to maintain democracy in the troubled inter-war period. It is also one of the most advanced states in Europe, despite the 1929 crisis.

Czechoslovakia was cut off the north-western third of its territory, the Sudetenland, during the Munich agreements, when Daladier's France and Chamberlain's England abdicated in the face of Hitler's conditions. They thus abandoned their allies of yesterday. It was the beginning of the Second World War.

On March 13, 1939, Hitler summoned Bishop Jozef Tiso to Berlin and ordered him to choose between Slovak independence under German protection or the division of the country between Hungary, Poland and Germany. The Slovak president chose independence and on March 14, 1939, Slovakia became a vassal state of Nazi Germany until the arrival of the Soviet army. The next day, Prague is invaded by German soldiers and Czechoslovakia disappears. The Nazis seek to divide and conquer in Central Europe, and while they provide aid to the new Slovak state, they allow Hungary to invade 10,000 square kilometres of its southern part where the Hungarian minorities live. In August 1944, a resistance movement against the Nazi occupiers was launched from Banská Bystrica. This Slovak national uprising fell in 1945 in the face of assaults by Soviet troops. The Slovak territory is reconstituted without the eastern region of Transcarpathia of Ruthenes, annexed by the USSR, then allocated to the Soviet Ukraine.

The Yalta conference in February 1945 brought together the countries that had won the war. They then share the world and its zones of influence. Fearful of the capitalist model advocated by the United States, feeling betrayed by the Western Europeans since the Munich agreements which authorised Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland, it was quite natural for Czechoslovakia to draw closer to the USSR. Soviet rhetoric and its positioning as a defender of nations under the influence of outside powers has been able to seduce a Czechoslovakia under reconstruction

The new map of Europe is taking shape and to get its hands on Czechoslovakia, the USSR is using its good old recipe: the "salami tactic". It consists, through the organization of the international communist movement, first to seize the key positions of power before, in a second step, to clean up by gradually eliminating political opponents. With its long experience and after two weeks of pressure, it reached its goal in February 1948 with the "Prague coup". The radical Klement Gottwald became head of government and forced President Edvard Beneš to accept the arrival of pro-communist ministers in key positions. The operation was a success, the Communist Party took power by a majority, Czechoslovakia refused the help of the Marshall Plan, turned its back on the West and embarked on several decades of communism.

The USSR imposes its rules in a simple way, translates its laws into Czech and Slovak and enforces them as they stand. The country is transforming: on the agricultural level, there is a great wave of land collectivization and the economic organization follows the five-year planning model, which results in large investments and the construction of new districts or rather blocks of flats, still visible today in every city of the country. Czechoslovakia, because of its pre-communist industrial vocation, is characterized by a high growth rate of 7.5% between 1948 and 1975, but according to Soviet standards these figures were clearly exaggerated. In reality, the strong centralization of planning suffocated the economy and the situation deteriorated from 1963 onwards. A commission of brilliant experts came up with a solution, structural reforms of the economy must be accompanied by public policy reforms, the Prague Spring is on its way!

In 1968, Alexander Dubček became the first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He set about establishing socialism with a human face, which he called the Prague Spring. This ambitious economic and political project aims at a general democratization of society: depoliticization of the economy, federalization of the Party, freedom of the press ... Moscow loses face and as often chooses force to solve this problem. On 21 August 1968, Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia and 80,000 soldiers were permanently stationed in the area. As a sign of protest, a student, Jan Palach, set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square in the centre of Prague. The Western countries only verbally condemned this intervention, which nevertheless greatly tarnished the image of the Soviet Union.

After the Prague Spring, the reform process is blocked and replaced by a new wave of purges, only the federalisation of the party remains. This phase of normalisation is marked by under-productivity of work, energy waste, poor quality products, over-pollution... All the signs are in the red, the regime is worn out and the population resigned. This system is reaching its limits and the growth curve, after slowing down in the 1970s, stagnating in the 1980s, literally plummets between 1985 and 1988 until it becomes the weakest of the Eastern European countries. In this morose context, the coming to power of Gorbachev and his policy of "reconstruction"(perestroika) opened up new hopes until the turn of 1989.

The situation became tense on 17 November 1989 when a student demonstration in Prague was brutally suppressed by the police, the demonstrators then protested silently by lighting candles. The party gradually lost control over the institutions and the Velvet Revolution marked the end of the communist era in Czechoslovakia.

After three years of independence and seventy-four years of living together, the Czech Republic and Slovakia decided to separate in July 1992, following a vote in the Prague and Bratislava chambers of parliament. This "velvet divorce" marked the end of the union between two nations so close in language and culture, but so far apart at the same time. These peoples have always lived side by side, but never really together. First of all, they had no common history, while Slovakia was dominated by Hungary, the Czechs were under Austrian influence. Secondly, the Czechs resented the Slovaks who, choosing independence, lacked support during the Second World War. The Slovaks, on the other hand, felt dominated by the Czechs and their central power. Although it seemed inevitable, this partition was mainly the will of politicians with personal ambitions like Vladimír Mečiar, because if we look at opinion polls, 75% of the Czechoslovak population did not want separation. Anyway, the decision was taken and on¹ January 1993 the independent Slovak Republic was born without arousing either passion or conflict.

The first leaders of this brand new country to rebuild are pursuing a dictatorial policy and using dubious ploys to take advantage of the transition to a market economy. It was not until the 2000s that an effort to modernise both the economy and the democratic structures was undertaken. Slovakia is regaining international credibility and moving closer to Western Europe.

Slovakia joins NATO and, above all, the European Union.

Slovakia is changing currency and switching to the euro.

Murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his partner. He was investigating links between the Calabrian mafia and Slovak politicians, including Prime Minister Robert Fico. This led to the biggest demonstrations in the country since the Velvet Revolution. Under pressure, the Fico government resigns and Igor Matovič wins the early elections to form a center-right government. A wind of hope blows across the country.

Zuzana Čaputová, an anti-corruption activist, is elected President of the Slovak Republic. Could this be a new turning point?

Like everywhere else in the world, the Covid-19 epidemic is hitting the country. Prime Minister Igor Matovič, head of the coalition government since March 2020, is heavily criticized for his handling of the health crisis. He resigns in April 2021 and is succeeded by Eduard Heger.

When Robert Fico and his Smer party won the elections in October 2023, it was his fourth time at the head of the Slovak government since 2006. Described as populist, pro-Russian and homophobic by the Western press, his return to prominence was marked by his bill to reduce penalties for corruption and economic crime. His grip on power is back, the wind of hope of 2018 has died down and authoritarian drift is not far off!