SlovakiaSlovensko

Slavs settled the Danube basin and the Carpathian foothills in the 5th and 6th centuries. In the 9th century the region around Nitra was part of Great Moravia, where the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius taught in a Slavic language from 863. When Magyar tribes arrived at the end of that century, Great Moravia collapsed and the area became the northern part of the new Kingdom of Hungary.

It stayed there until 1918. Hungarians called it the Felvidék, the Upper Lands. German miners, invited in the 13th and 14th centuries, founded the silver and gold towns of Banská Štiavnica, Kremnica and Banská Bystrica, which made the Hungarian crown rich. Castles such as Spiš, Orava and Trenčín guarded trade routes and, after the Mongol invasion of 1241, the frontier.

When the Ottomans took Buda after 1526, the Hungarian kingdom retreated north. Pressburg, now Bratislava, became its capital and coronation city: eleven Habsburg kings and eight queens, Maria Theresa among them, were crowned in St Martin's Cathedral between 1563 and 1830. The Hungarian Diet sat there until 1848.

Under Hungarian rule the Slovak-speaking majority in the north had no state, and educated Slovaks wrote in Latin, Czech or Hungarian. In the late 18th century the Catholic priest Anton Bernolák tried to standardise a written Slovak based on western dialects. In the 1840s Ľudovít Štúr and his circle chose the central Slovak dialect instead, and it is Štúr's version, reformed later, that is used today.

Hungarian nationalism after 1848 pushed back hard. From the 1870s schools were Magyarised, Slovak secondary schools and the cultural society Matica slovenská were closed, and hundreds of thousands of Slovaks emigrated, many to the coal and steel towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Those emigrants later helped fund and lobby for a joint state with the Czechs.

The revival lived in villages as much as in books: folk songs, embroidered costume, wooden architecture and the legend of Juraj Jánošík, an 18th-century highwayman turned into a Robin Hood by romantic poets. That folk culture is still visible at summer festivals such as Východná.

In 1918 the Slovaks joined the Czechs in Czechoslovakia. The new state brought Slovak schools and a Slovak capital, Bratislava, but many Slovaks felt run from Prague, and the Catholic, rural Slovak People's Party of Andrej Hlinka campaigned for autonomy.

When Hitler broke up Czechoslovakia in March 1939, a Slovak State was declared under the priest Jozef Tiso as a German ally. Southern Slovakia, with Košice, was handed to Hungary. The Slovak State paid Germany to deport about 58,000 Jews in 1942, and more were deported after 1944; most were killed. This period remains contested in public memory.

In August 1944 part of the army and the resistance rose against the regime and the Germans: the Slovak National Uprising, centred on Banská Bystrica. It was crushed within two months, but it gave post-war Slovakia an anti-fascist founding story, marked every 29 August.

After 1948 Slovakia was industrialised under communism, with arms factories and housing estates such as Petržalka in Bratislava. Alexander Dubček, leader of the 1968 Prague Spring, was a Slovak. After 1989 the question of the joint state returned, and on 1 January 1993 Czechs and Slovaks separated by agreement, without a referendum.

The Carpathian arc curls through the middle of the country. The High Tatras, shared with Poland, are the smallest alpine range in the world: about 26 km of granite ridge with Gerlachovský štít (2,655 m) as the highest point of the whole Carpathians, glacial lakes called plesá, and huts built in the 19th century for the first mountaineers.

Below them lie other ranges with different characters: the grassy ridges of the Low Tatras, the limestone gorges of the Slovak Paradise with their ladders and chains, the Malá Fatra above Terchová, and the karst of the south with more than 7,000 caves, including the Dobšinská ice cave and the Ochtinská aragonite cave, both on the UNESCO list.

Slovakia has one of Europe's densest brown bear populations, and conflicts with people have risen; the government has allowed culls, a divisive subject. Wolves and lynx also live in the forests. The national parks close high trails from November to mid-June to protect wildlife and hikers.

Slovakia is a mostly Catholic country, and religious practice is stronger than in Czechia. In the east, Greek Catholics and Orthodox Christians follow the Byzantine rite, and Rusyn villages near the Polish and Ukrainian borders keep timber churches with onion domes and painted iconostases. Eight wooden churches are on the UNESCO list.

The Spiš region holds the most Gothic art: Master Paul of Levoča carved the tallest Gothic wooden altar in the world, 18.6 m, for the Basilica of St James around 1517. Spišská Kapitula, a walled clerical town below Spiš Castle, and Žehra's painted church are part of the same World Heritage site.

Lutheran congregations built 'articular' wooden churches in the 17th and 18th centuries, when Protestants were allowed to build only outside town walls, without towers and without stone. Those at Kežmarok and Hronsek survive.

Slovakia joined the EU and NATO in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2009, the first of the Czechoslovak and Hungarian neighbours to do so. It produces more cars per head than any country in the world, with Volkswagen, Kia, Stellantis and Jaguar Land Rover plants, which makes it rich in the west and dependent on exports.

The gap between Bratislava, one of the EU's wealthiest regions, and the east is large. Roma communities in eastern settlements live in some of the worst poverty in the EU, and young people leave for Bratislava, Prague or abroad.

Politics is polarised. The murder of the journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée in 2018 brought down Robert Fico's government; he returned in 2023, survived an assassination attempt in 2024, and his government's changes to criminal law, media and NGOs have drawn mass protests and EU criticism — check the current situation.