Slovakia historical timeline

Origins

Great Moravia held this territory in the ninth century, and in 863 the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius arrived, devised an alphabet for Slavic speech and translated the liturgy into it — the beginning of written Slavic literature, and the ancestor of Cyrillic. Hungarian rule followed from around the year 1000 and lasted roughly nine centuries. When the Ottomans took Buda in 1541, Bratislava — then Pressburg — became the coronation city of Hungary and stayed so for more than two hundred years.

Turning points

A national revival in the nineteenth century gave the language a written standard, codified by Ľudovít Štúr in the 1840s on the central dialects. Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918. During the Second World War Slovakia was a nominally independent client state of Germany, and most of its Jewish population was deported and killed; the Slovak National Uprising of August 1944 against that government is the central event of the national memory. Communist rule followed, then the Velvet Revolution of 1989. On 1 January 1993 Czechoslovakia divided in two — a separation negotiated by politicians and never put to a referendum in either republic, and carried out without a shot fired. Slovakia joined the European Union and NATO in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2009.

Influential people

Cyril and Methodius, who are patron saints of Europe partly on the strength of what they did here. Ľudovít Štúr, who settled what Slovak would look like on the page. Milan Rastislav Štefánik, astronomer, French general and co-founder of Czechoslovakia, who died in a plane crash coming home in 1919. And Alexander Dubček, the Slovak who led the Prague Spring.

Cultural evolution

Slovakia has among the highest densities of castles and châteaux of any country in the world, a legacy of a frontier that was fortified for centuries. The wooden churches of the Carpathian arc, built without a single nail, are UNESCO-listed, as is the fujara — a shepherd’s overtone flute nearly two metres long, played standing. The High Tatras compress an alpine range into a very small area and are the national landscape. And bryndzové halušky, potato dumplings with sheep’s cheese and bacon, is the dish everyone agrees on.

Present-day significance

Slovakia builds more cars per head of population than any other country in the world, with four manufacturers operating plants in a country of five and a half million — which makes the economy unusually exposed to one industry’s transitions. It is in the eurozone and on the Danube, and emigration of younger workers westward is the main long-term demographic pressure.