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

2. Towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary) before 1918

The towns of Felvidék (Upper Hungary) according to their population

eight counties to the south of the Slovak language boundary in Nyitra (Nitra) the Slovak people represented a proportion of 70.97%, but in Bars (Tekov) County it was higher than 50% and in Pozsony (Bratislava) County it was just half a per cent lower than 50%. Meanwhile, this was a region with several ethnicities, because apart from the two large ethnic groups there was also a high number of Germans, Ruthenians, Polish (Gorals), Czech Moravians, Romanians, Serbs, Croatians and Gypsies, as well as English, Italians, French, Russians and others in low numbers.

The towns of this area, which had been marked out in 1861, had some specific characteristic features. The 39 towns that can be found there accounted for 28.3% of the 138 towns of the Hungarian Empire. However, only a small percentage of the urban population lived in these small towns: in 1890, 13.5% of the population of all towns, whereas in 1910, only 12.7%. It is worth examining the characteristic features of these towns in more detail, comparing them to the towns of contemporary Hungary.

Table 2. The main characteristic features of the towns in Hungary in 1910

Number of municipal boroughs:

27

Average population:

81,323 people

Excluding Budapest:

50,590 people

Population of Budapest:

880,371 people

Number of towns:

111

Average population:

13,752 people

Excluding the towns mentioned in the Slovak memorandum:16,851 people

Source: ibid

The towns of historical Hungary showed a strong hierarchy. The population of Budapest, the largest city (880,371 people), was more than seven times larger than that of Szeged, a city with the second-largest population (118,328 people). There were only 10 towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants and their average population was only 77,387 people. All of the 27 municipal boroughs had more than 20,000 inhabitants, except for Selmecbánya [Banská Štiavnica], the smallest one, which had a population of 15,185 people. Pozsony [Bratislava] (78,223 people) and Kassa [Košice] (44,211 people), the two largest towns of Felvidék, acted as regional centres.

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