Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
2. Towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary) before 1918
Ethnie Composition of towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary) est with its 2,283 inhabitants. The degree of urbanization of the five counties, or rather the survival of traditions is clearly indicated by the fact that only in Szepes County there were 9 small towns, the most in the whole country in 1910. In the ‘mixed’ counties, or rather in those with Hungarian majority, there were municipal boroughs, such as Pozsony [Bratislava] and Kassa [Košice] as well as Selmecbánya [Banská Štiavnica] in Hont County. Apart from these, according to the 1861 memorandum, 18 further towns belonged there, including Sátoraljaújhely, a town remaining in Hungary after the Peace Treaty. These towns had a population of altogether 282,898 people, and the average population of the towns was 13,471 people, including the three municipal boroughs. Disregarding these, the average population was 8,071 people, which is larger than the average population of the towns in the northern counties with Slovak majority. A change occurred in the 1861 memorandum when, according to the 1920 Peace Treaty, Komárom [Komárno] municipal borough became a town of Czechoslovakia. Komárom, with a population of 22,337 people, followed Pozsony [Bratislava] and Kassa [Košice] in size. It was a further consequence of the Peace Treaty that Beregszász [Berehove] (pop. 12,933), Munkács [Mukacseve] (17,275) and Ungvár [Uzshorod] (16,919), Hungarian towns with a comparatively large population in 1910, also became Czechoslovakian towns. The latter three towns were attached to the Soviet Union after World War II, and to Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 2. 2 Ethnic Composition of towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary) The 1861 memorandum was intended to establish the Slovak language region. However, in the listed counties there was a rather complex society composed of several ethnic groups, and this was also true of the towns in these counties. Of the urban population of 403,778 living in this area in 1910, 49.6% were of Hungarian, 31.1% of Slovak and 17.2% of German ethnicity, but in addition to these groups, the censuses also registered several other ethnicities. 27
