Slovakia

Slavs settled the region by the sixth century, and in the ninth it was the core of Great Moravia, the first major Slavic state in Central Europe and the setting for the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius. After Great Moravia collapsed, the territory was absorbed into the Kingdom of Hungary, where it remained — as "Upper Hungary" — for roughly a thousand years. For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the Ottomans holding central Hungary, Bratislava (Pressburg) served as the Hungarian coronation city.

A Slovak national revival gathered pace in the nineteenth century, and Ľudovít Štúr codified the modern literary language in the 1840s. After the First World War the Slovaks joined the Czechs in the new state of Czechoslovakia. During the Second World War a nominally independent Slovak State under Jozef Tiso was a client of Nazi Germany and deported most of its Jews; the Slovak National Uprising of 1944 was a major armed revolt against that regime.

Communist Czechoslovakia followed from 1948, including the crushed reform attempt of the 1968 Prague Spring. The Velvet Revolution ended one-party rule in 1989, and on 1 January 1993 the country separated peacefully from the Czechs — the "Velvet Divorce". Slovakia joined the EU and NATO in 2004 and the euro in 2009. Its politics have been turbulent: the 2018 murder of journalist Ján Kuciak brought down a government, and Prime Minister Robert Fico, back in office from 2023, was shot and wounded in 2024.

Slovak identity is bound up with folk tradition — painted wooden houses, the long fujara shepherd's flute (a UNESCO-listed instrument), embroidered costume, and the wooden churches of the Carpathians. Village life, family gatherings, and the weekend cottage (chata) remain central even for city-dwellers. The country is majority Roman Catholic, with a Lutheran minority strong in some regions.

Hospitality is warm and food-centred, and hiking is close to a national pastime, with a dense network of marked trails and mountain huts. Ice hockey is the sport that stirs the country most, followed by football. Easter Monday still brings the old custom in which men sprinkle women with water or lightly switch them with braided willow, in exchange for painted eggs.

Slovaks are sometimes wry about living in a small country long ruled from elsewhere, but pride in the language, the mountains, and independence runs deep.

About 5.4 million people live in Slovakia. Bratislava, in the far west against the Austrian and Hungarian borders, is prosperous and well connected; central and eastern regions are poorer, and many Slovaks commute or migrate for work to Czechia, Austria, and Germany. The Roma minority, concentrated in the east, faces segregation and poverty.

The economy leans heavily on car manufacturing — Slovakia produces more cars per head than any other country, in plants run by Volkswagen, Kia, Stellantis, and Jaguar Land Rover — along with electronics and engineering. This makes it sensitive to swings in the European car market.

Outside working hours, life centres on family, the outdoors, and the village of origin, with people returning at weekends to tend gardens, forage for mushrooms, and keep up rural houses.

The national dish is bryndzové halušky: soft potato dumplings with sheep's cheese (bryndza) and fried bacon or pork fat. Cabbage soup (kapustnica), often with sausage and dried mushrooms, is the Christmas Eve staple. Other mainstays include segedínsky guláš (pork and sauerkraut goulash), potato pancakes, and pirohy dumplings.

Meat, potatoes, dumplings, and sauerkraut form the backbone of everyday cooking, with soups starting most main meals. Sweet dishes like steamed buchty filled with jam or poppy seed, and žinčica, the whey drink of the sheep-cheese regions, round it out.

Slovakia makes decent wine in the south — the Tokaj region straddles the Hungarian border — along with fruit brandies (slivovica, borovička) and the herbal spirit Demänovka. The cola-flavoured soft drink Kofola, a communist-era creation, remains hugely popular.

The High Tatras, a compact alpine range on the Polish border, are the headline: sharp granite peaks, glacial lakes such as Štrbské Pleso and Popradské Pleso, and Gerlachovský štít, the highest point in the Carpathians. Nearby, the Slovak Paradise national park offers ladder-and-chain hikes up waterfall gorges, and the Low Tatras and Malá Fatra add more trails and ski slopes.

Castles are everywhere. Spiš Castle in the east is among the largest in Central Europe; Orava Castle rises on a river cliff; Bojnice Castle looks like a fairy tale; and Bratislava Castle overlooks the Danube above a compact, restored Old Town. Devín, at the Austrian border, marks the old Iron Curtain.

Banská Štiavnica, a UNESCO-listed former silver-mining town, is set in a volcanic caldera. The country also has extensive show caves, including the ice cave at Dobšiná and the aragonite cave at Ochtiná, and a string of the wooden Carpathian churches. Košice, the eastern capital, has Slovakia's grandest Gothic cathedral.