Slovenia

From the Slavic principality of Carantania to a European republic on the sunny side of the Alps.

Slovenia's history is the long story of a small Alpine and Adriatic people who preserved a distinct language and identity through more than a thousand years of foreign rule. Slavic ancestors settled the eastern Alps in the sixth and seventh centuries and organised the early principality of Carantania, remembered for its ritual enthronement of dukes in the Slovene tongue. From the late Middle Ages the Slovene lands were gathered into the Habsburg duchies of Carniola, Styria and Carinthia, and remained under Austrian rule for some six centuries. The Reformation gave the Slovenes their first printed books, when Primoz Trubar published a catechism and a primer in 1550 and founded a literary language. Napoleon's short-lived Illyrian Provinces, with Ljubljana as their capital, and a nineteenth-century cultural awakening led by the poet France Preseren prepared the way for modern nationhood. After the fall of Austria-Hungary in 1918 the Slovenes joined the Yugoslav state, becoming after 1945 the most prosperous republic of socialist Yugoslavia, before declaring independence on 25 June 1991 and winning it in the brief Ten-Day War. Slovenia joined NATO and the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2007.