A Slavic highland makes more than a million cars a year
Slovakia, a landlocked Central European republic of about 49,000 square kilometres and more than 5.4 million people, borders Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Austria, and Czechia. In 2023 it built 1.08 million cars, with autos making 44 percent of industrial output—an outsized garage for a mostly mountainous land of the Slavs.
Bratislava is the capital and biggest city, Košice the second. Nicknamed the European Detroit, Slovakia turns out more cars per person than any other country. It belongs to the EU, the eurozone, Schengen and NATO, and has eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The native form Slovensko is first recorded in 1675, while the Czech-influenced Slovák appears from 1291 and underlies most foreign versions of the name.
Deep prehistory is well stocked. A Neanderthal skull about 200,000 years old turned up near Gánovce, and the Venus of Moravany, carved from mammoth bone around 22,800 BCE, is the oldest female figure found here. Shell necklaces from several sites are the earliest evidence of trade between the Mediterranean and Central Europe. Bronze Age copper mining around Špania Dolina brought prosperity, and from about 500 BCE Celts built fortified towns at Bratislava and Devín, where silver Biatec coins with Latin lettering are the first known writing in the country.
Rome's frontier ran along the Danube, with a cavalry fort called Gerulata at today's Rusovce, and in 179 CE a legion defeated the Germanic Quadi near Trenčín, then called Laugaricio. The Avars dominated the basin from 568; in 623 Slavs revolted under Samo, a Frankish merchant. The Principality of Nitra gave way to Great Moravia and then to Hungary, and Mongol raids in 1241–42 wrecked much of the land before King Béla IV rebuilt it. The 1848 Slovak Uprising failed but helped forge national identity.
A Nazi-controlled Slovak Republic existed from 1939 and joined the Axis in 1940. After the war Czechoslovakia became communist, saw the Prague Spring crushed in August 1968, and shed communism in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Slovakia became independent on 1 January 1993 in the peaceful split known as the Velvet Divorce.
Source: Slovakia
