SLOVAKIA

Today's lands of Slovakia were for centuries controlled mainly by Czechs or Hungarians. Fertile banks of Danube River attracted so many Hungarian colonists that their language dominated in the south of Slovakia. In 1918, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have created Czechoslovakia and Slovak language became official for the first time. Czechoslovakia broke up during World War II into western Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and eastern Slovakia. Germany incorporated the Protectorate and in Slovakia they installed a puppet government. This formal independence of 1939-1944 is now known as the 1st Slovak Republic and thus Slovakia became a state for the first time in history. After the war, the Soviet Union forced the re-unification of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but inside Czechoslovakia, Slovakia was obtaining gradually more and more autonomy. The path to independence was crowned on Jan. 1, 1993 when Slovaks and Czechs peacefully split into two sovereign states. In 2004, Slovakia joined the European Union and five years later exchanged Slovak koruna into euro.