Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)

2. Towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary) before 1918

Towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary) before 1918

Szakolca (Skalica) and Tapolcsány (Tepličany) had become ethnically Slovak by the 15th century (Kováč 2001, 45). This statement is made questionable by the fact that King Matthias wrote his letters to the towns and lords in Felvidék in the Czech language, which is a proof of the Slovak language not existing at that time. In 1541 Hungarians fleeing northwards from the advancing Turks moved into the Northern Hungarian towns, which resulted in disturbances in town administration. One piece of evidence for this is the decree of Ferdinand I, which ordained that the leader of the town should be changed every year and should always be of different ethnicity, rotating among German, Slavic (Slovak) and Hungarian. In the eastern part of Felvidék the centre of the Protestant church became Szepesváralja (Spišské Podhradie) with Slavic (Slovak) leaders. From the mid-17th century, besides the German language, the western Slovak dialect started to appear in the administration records of certain towns.

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, at the time of the renewal of the Hungarian national movement, the language movement of the Slovak nation also began. Since the Slovak language movement was organized in theological colleges, Pozsony (Bratislava) and Nagyszombat (Trnava) became the centres of both the Catholic and the Lutheran Slovak ecclesiastical intelligentsia. For similar reasons, the Slovak Reading Society was established in Pest in 1826, and the first Slovak- Czech-Latin-German-Hungarian dictionary was also published. Church schools were starting to gain importance. Apart from Pozsony (Bratislava), Lőcse (Levoča), Késmárk (Kežmarok), Selmecbánya (Banská Štiavnica) and Eperjes (Prešov) became such secular centres. A regional centre to the Slovak national movement did not emerge until the second half of the 19th century, which can also be seen by the fact that some Lutheran priests wanted to set up the first Slovak linguistic department in Pest, according to the Slovak Royal Memorandum written by them in 1842.

20