Slovakia

From Great Moravia to the heart of Europe, a nation that waited a thousand years for its own state.

Slovakia's history is the story of a Slavic people who held the same Carpathian uplands for more than a millennium while almost never ruling themselves. Their lands lay at the core of ninth-century Great Moravia, centred partly on Nitra, where the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius created a Slavonic liturgy and the first Slavic script. After Great Moravia fell to the Magyars, the Slovak lands were absorbed around the year 1000 into the Kingdom of Hungary, where they remained for roughly a thousand years as 'Upper Hungary', and during the Ottoman wars Bratislava (Pressburg) served as the kingdom's capital and coronation city. A national awakening in the nineteenth century, crowned by Ľudovít Štúr's codification of a Slovak literary language in the 1840s, gave the people a modern identity in the face of Magyarization. Statehood came only in 1918, when Slovaks joined the Czechs in Czechoslovakia; a clerical-authoritarian Slovak State allied to Nazi Germany followed in 1939, the deportation of Slovak Jews and the Slovak National Uprising of 1944, then restoration, communism and federalization. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 ended communist rule, and the peaceful 'Velvet Divorce' created an independent Slovakia on 1 January 1993. It joined NATO and the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2009.