The history of Slovakia

Slovakia, a landlocked country of mountains and river valleys between the Carpathians and the Danube, has existed as an independent state only since 1993, but its people have a long history of their own. Celts, Germanic tribes and Roman soldiers left their mark before Slavs settled the land, and in the ninth century it formed part of Great Moravia, the first major West Slavic state. For close to a thousand years it then belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary, as the northern region often called Upper Hungary, where Bratislava served for centuries as the coronation city. In the twentieth century Slovaks shared Czechoslovakia with the Czechs, lived through a wartime state allied with Nazi Germany, four decades of communism and the Velvet Revolution, before the federation split peacefully and Slovakia joined NATO, the European Union and the euro.

Hunters lived in the region from the Old Stone Age, and the caves and river terraces of western Slovakia have yielded important finds. The best known is the Venus of Moravany, a small female figure carved from mammoth ivory around 22,800 BCE and found near Piešťany. Farming arrived around 5500 BCE, and in the Bronze Age the region's copper made it a busy part of central Europe.

In the last centuries BCE the Celts dominated the area. The Boii built a large oppidum on the hill where Bratislava Castle now stands and minted silver coins known as biatecs, while the Celtic Cotini worked iron in the central mountains. Around the turn of the eras Germanic peoples, especially the Quadi, moved in from the north-west and the Celtic world faded.

The Danube was the frontier of the Roman Empire, and the Romans held only a narrow strip on the river's southern bank near Bratislava, with the fort of Gerulata at today's Rusovce. North of the river lay the lands of the Quadi and Marcomanni, who traded with Rome and sometimes fought it. In the Marcomannic Wars of the 160s and 170s, the emperor Marcus Aurelius campaigned deep into the territory, and he noted that part of his Meditations was written among the Quadi on the river Hron. In 179 a detachment of the Second Legion wintering at Laugaricio carved an inscription on the rock under Trenčín Castle, the northernmost Roman inscription in central Europe.

In the late fourth and fifth centuries the region was swept by the migrations that followed the arrival of the Huns. From the fifth and sixth centuries Slavic farmers settled the valleys. In 568 the Avars, nomads from the steppes, established a khaganate in the Carpathian Basin that dominated the Slavs. According to the Frankish chronicle of Fredegar, in 623 or 624 the Slavs rose against them and chose as king Samo, a Frankish merchant, whose realm lasted about 35 years and is believed to have included western Slovakia.

By the late eighth century the Avar power had been broken by Charlemagne's campaigns, and Slavic principalities emerged on the edge of the Carolingian Empire. Around Nitra a prince named Pribina ruled a principality where, by about 828, the first known Christian church in the territory was consecrated by the archbishop of Salzburg. In 833 the Moravian ruler Mojmír I expelled Pribina and united Nitra with Moravia, forming the state known to historians as Great Moravia.

Great Moravia was the first major West Slavic state. Its ruler Rastislav, seeking to limit the influence of Frankish clergy, asked the Byzantine Empire for missionaries who could teach in the Slavic language. The brothers Constantine, later called Cyril, and Methodius arrived in 863. Constantine devised the Glagolitic alphabet, the two translated liturgical and biblical texts into Old Church Slavonic, and Methodius became archbishop. Under Svätopluk I, who ruled from 870 to 894, Great Moravia reached its greatest extent, but after Methodius died in 885 his disciples were expelled and the Slavonic liturgy gave way to Latin. Weakened by internal strife and Frankish wars, the state fell to the Magyars, who had settled the Carpathian Basin in the 890s; their victory over a Bavarian army near Pressburg in 907 confirmed their control. The mission of Cyril and Methodius remains a foundation of Slovak national identity, and the brothers appear on the country's coins and in its constitution.

Over the tenth and eleventh centuries the territory of today's Slovakia was gradually incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary, which Stephen I established as a Christian monarchy around 1000. For the next nine centuries Slovak history was part of Hungary's. Nitra remained for a time a duchy held by members of the royal family, and the region was organised into counties under royal castles. The Mongol invasion of 1241 and 1242 devastated the lowlands, and in its aftermath King Béla IV encouraged the building of stone castles and invited settlers. German colonists founded or enlarged towns, especially the mining towns of the central mountains, such as Banská Štiavnica and Kremnica, whose silver and gold made medieval Hungary one of Europe's richest kingdoms and Kremnica's mint struck gold florins known across Europe. Jewish communities are also recorded from the thirteenth century.

At the turn of the fourteenth century the magnate Matthew Csák ruled much of western Slovakia from Trenčín almost as an independent prince. In the fifteenth century Czech Hussite armies raided and occupied parts of the region, and the Czech mercenary captain Jan Jiskra held much of central and eastern Slovakia for two decades, spreading the Czech language as a written language among Slovaks. Matthias Corvinus founded the Academia Istropolitana, a university in Pressburg, in 1465.

After the Ottoman victory at Mohács in 1526, Hungary was divided among the Ottoman Empire, the princes of Transylvania and the Habsburg Monarchy, which held a strip of western and northern Hungary that included most of Slovakia. With Buda lost, Pressburg, today's Bratislava, became the Hungarian capital in 1536 and the seat of the Hungarian diet, and from 1563 to 1830 Habsburg kings and queens of Hungary, including Maria Theresa, were crowned in St Martin's Cathedral there. The archbishop of Esztergom moved to Trnava, where a university was founded in 1635. Slovakia became a frontier zone, studded with fortresses and raided by Ottoman forces, which took Nové Zámky in 1663.

The Protestant Reformation spread widely, Lutheranism among Germans and Slovaks and Calvinism among Hungarians, and it became bound up with noble revolts against the Catholic Habsburgs. The uprisings of István Bocskai, Gabriel Bethlen, Imre Thököly and finally Francis II Rákóczi, from 1703 to 1711, were fought largely on Slovak soil. The Counter-Reformation, led by the Jesuits from Trnava, brought most Slovaks back to Catholicism, though a substantial Lutheran minority remained. The highwayman Juraj Jánošík, executed in 1713, entered folklore as a Slovak Robin Hood.

In the eighteenth century, under Maria Theresa and Joseph II, the Habsburg lands were reformed, and in the 1780s the central offices of Hungary moved to Buda, though the diet continued to meet in Pressburg until 1848. Slovak scholars began to build a national culture. The Catholic priest Anton Bernolák codified a written Slovak based on western dialects in 1787, while Lutherans mostly used biblical Czech. In 1843 Ľudovít Štúr and his colleagues chose central Slovak dialects as the basis for a standard literary language, which, revised, is the language used today.

During the revolution of 1848 Slovak leaders, led by Štúr, Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Michal Miloslav Hodža, issued the Demands of the Slovak Nation, calling for autonomy and language rights. When the Hungarian revolutionary government of Lajos Kossuth rejected them, a Slovak National Council organised volunteer expeditions against it on the side of Vienna. The uprising failed to win autonomy, but it became a founding moment of modern Slovak politics. In 1861 the Memorandum of the Slovak Nation repeated the demands, and in 1863 the cultural society Matica slovenská was founded in Martin.

After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which gave Hungary self-government within Austria-Hungary, the Hungarian government pursued a policy of Magyarisation. Matica slovenská and the three Slovak secondary schools were closed in 1874 and 1875, Hungarian was imposed in schools, and the electoral system kept Slovaks almost out of parliament. In 1907 gendarmes fired on villagers at Černová, near Ružomberok, killing 15 people, an incident publicised abroad. Poverty drove hundreds of thousands of Slovaks to emigrate, especially to the United States, where they formed active national organisations.

During the First World War, Slovak and Czech émigrés worked for a common state. The Slovak astronomer and French general Milan Rastislav Štefánik joined Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš in the Czechoslovak National Council, and in the Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1918 Czech and Slovak organisations in America promised Slovakia its own administration and diet. Czechoslovakia was proclaimed in Prague on 28 October 1918, and two days later Slovak leaders meeting in Martin declared their wish to join it. Štefánik died in a plane crash near Bratislava in 1919. Czechoslovak troops had to fight to secure the region against Hungarian forces, which briefly set up a Slovak Soviet Republic in eastern Slovakia in June 1919, and the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 fixed the southern border, leaving a large Hungarian minority in Slovakia.

The interwar republic, centred on Prague, was a democracy that built Slovak schools, a university in Bratislava and an administration, often staffed at first by Czechs. But it was governed as a centralised state on the idea of a single Czechoslovak nation, and the promise of autonomy went unfulfilled. Andrej Hlinka's Slovak People's Party, the largest Slovak party, campaigned for self-rule, and the depression of the 1930s hit Slovakia's rural economy hard.

After the Munich Agreement of September 1938 forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany, Slovakia gained autonomy, but in November the First Vienna Award, imposed by Germany and Italy, gave southern Slovakia, including Košice, to Hungary. On 14 March 1939, under pressure from Adolf Hitler, the Slovak diet declared independence, and the next day Germany occupied the Czech lands. The Slovak State, led by the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, was an authoritarian one-party state and an ally of Nazi Germany; its army joined the invasion of Poland in 1939 and of the Soviet Union in 1941, and Hungary seized further territory in the east.

The regime persecuted the country's roughly 90,000 Jews, confiscating their property and passing a Jewish Code modelled on the Nuremberg laws in 1941. Between March and October 1942 the Slovak government deported about 57,000 Jews to German-occupied Poland, paying Germany for each person taken, and almost all were murdered in the Holocaust. Deportations stopped in late 1942, but resumed under German occupation in 1944, when more than 12,000 more were sent to the camps and others were massacred within Slovakia; Roma were also persecuted and killed.

On 29 August 1944 part of the army, democrats and communists launched the Slovak National Uprising from Banská Bystrica against the Tiso regime and the advancing German occupation. It was one of the largest uprisings in Nazi-held Europe, but German forces took Banská Bystrica in late October and carried out reprisals in which thousands were killed, while partisan resistance continued in the mountains. The Red Army drove the Germans out in 1944 and 1945, taking Bratislava on 4 April 1945. Tiso was tried and hanged in 1947.

Czechoslovakia was restored in 1945 within its pre-Munich borders, minus Carpathian Ruthenia, which went to the Soviet Union. The Beneš decrees expelled most of the German minority and stripped many Hungarians of citizenship, and a population exchange with Hungary followed. The communists, strong in the 1946 elections in the Czech lands though not in Slovakia, seized full power in February 1948. In the Stalinist years church property was confiscated, farms collectivised and religious orders dissolved, and leading Slovak communists, including Gustáv Husák, were jailed for "bourgeois nationalism". At the same time the regime built heavy industry and dams across Slovakia, transforming a largely rural society.

In January 1968 the Slovak Alexander Dubček became leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and launched the Prague Spring, a programme of "socialism with a human face" that relaxed censorship. On 21 August armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded and ended the reforms, one of the defining crises of the Cold War. One reform survived: from 1 January 1969 Czechoslovakia became a federation of Czech and Slovak republics. Husák, now leader of the party, presided over two decades of "normalisation", purges and conformity. Opposition in Slovakia grew largely around the Catholic Church, and on 25 March 1988 police dispersed a peaceful candlelight demonstration for religious freedom in Bratislava.

The fall of communism came quickly in the revolutions of 1989. After police beat students in Prague on 17 November 1989, mass protests spread, led in Slovakia by the movement Public Against Violence, and within weeks the regime gave up power; Václav Havel became president and Dubček chairman of the federal parliament. Free elections followed in 1990, but Czech and Slovak politicians could not agree on how to share power, a disagreement that began with a dispute over the country's name. After the elections of June 1992 won by Václav Klaus in the Czech lands and Vladimír Mečiar in Slovakia, the two leaders negotiated a separation, and on 1 January 1993 Czechoslovakia dissolved peacefully, without a referendum, into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Independent Slovakia's first years under Mečiar were marked by privatisation to political allies, conflict with President Michal Kováč, whose son was kidnapped and taken to Austria in 1995 in an operation linked to the Slovak intelligence service, and warnings from the West that left the country out of the first round of NATO and EU enlargement. The coalition of Mikuláš Dzurinda, which governed from 1998 to 2006, carried out economic reforms that attracted foreign carmakers, and Slovakia joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, the Schengen Area in 2007 and the eurozone in 2009.

Robert Fico, leader of the left-populist Smer party, was prime minister from 2006 to 2010 and again from 2012. In February 2018 the investigative journalist Ján Kuciak, who had been reporting on links between politicians and organised crime, was murdered with his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, and the mass protests that followed forced Fico to resign that March. The liberal Zuzana Čaputová was elected president in 2019, and anti-corruption governments held power from 2020 until their coalition collapsed in 2022.

Fico returned to power after the election of 2023 at the head of a nationalist and populist coalition, ending state military aid to Ukraine. On 15 May 2024 he was shot and seriously wounded by a gunman at Handlová, but recovered, and his ally Peter Pellegrini became president that June. His government abolished the special prosecutor's office, overhauled the public broadcaster and in 2025 passed a constitutional amendment recognising only two sexes, which the European Commission challenged under EU law. Protests against the government drew tens of thousands in November 2025. In 2026 Slovakia, with Hungary, blocked an EU sanctions package against Russia in a dispute with Ukraine over the halted flow of oil through the Druzhba pipeline, and a July referendum on restoring the special prosecutor's office failed for lack of turnout. Slovakia has about 5.4 million people, with large Hungarian and Roma minorities.