One of the big surprises of my travels this summer has been Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. A desolate ghost town just a few years ago, today Bratislava is arguably the fastest-changing city in Europe. I spent a day visiting Bratislava with Martin Sloboda, a local tycoon of a guide www. Martin explained to me why people who were between 15 and 25 in are most successful today, and the leaders of Slovakia.
Throughout the communist period and in post-communist Czechoslovakia, there was no real political diplomatic class among Slovaks because Czechs dominated Czechoslovak government. This trend played out in recent election, where for the first time, no former communist was sent to government unique in Eastern Europe. Spending a day with Martin to update our Bratislava chapter, I was able to fine-tune our existing coverage. I also picked up lots of new ideas.
Slovakia and Bratislava is particular has long been a bridge between East and West. When Budapest was taken by Ottoman Turks in the s, the political and religious elite of Hungary retreated to Bratislava — far from the Ottomans and close to Vienna, but still within greater Hungary, at an easy-to-defend location on the Danube.
Bratislava hosted 19 coronations between to In fact, the last Hungarian coronation was not in Budapest, but in Bratislava. In s, the Ottoman threat was gone, and the strategic military importance of Bratislava was over. Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa needed a comfy palace. A third of the Slovak population emigrated to the US between and There were lots of deserters during World War I — opting to fight against rather than with Hungary.
Meanwhile, you could say that historic Hungarian cultural oppression of the Czechs and Slovaks led to the creation of modern Czechoslovakia, as those smaller groups sought safety in numbers after World War I. The United States has long been a big supporter of Czechoslovakia. Between the world wars, Czechoslovakia was the only democracy and had the best economy in this part of Europe. Because of its location nearly on the border with Austria and the West , Bratislava has many bomb shelters, built during the tense times around the Cuban Missile Crisis.
