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

2. Towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary) before 1918

Towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary) before 1918

their national proportion is 1.7%. However, in 2001 Slovak demographers estimated their actual number at 379,000, which accounted for 7% of the whole population (Kocsis-Bottlik-Tátrai 2006).

2. 3 Occupational composition of towns in Felvidék (Upper Hungary)

The special features of the towns of Felvidék (Upper Hungary), i.e. the short distances between them, their ‘density’ per one unit of area and their small size, are all in close connection with the opportunities for employment and subsistence. The utilization of the resources provided by the mountains boosted opportunities for mining, industry and forestry, and as a result, transport and trade were also strengthened. Even today the term Felvidék is often associated with the mining and industry of the time. According to statistical figures, this sector was still of utmost importance in the 1910s, in spite of the fact that the mineral resources of the mountains and the gold and silver had mostly been extracted by that time.

It is a well-known fact that the Hungarian bourgeois period was the period of economic prosperity in Hungary, and especially the degree of industrialization changed at a very quick pace year by year. It was a typical of the time to judge the importance of a town by its degree of industrialization. Felvidék could meet this criterion in every respect. In the area around Zólyom [Zvolen] County industry played an important role at a national level, too. In Zólyom [Zvolen] County 38.4% of the population was employed in industry, and in Szepes [Spis], Liptó [Liptov], Gömör- Kishont [Gemer-Malo-Hont], Turóc [Turiec] and Nógrád [Novohrad] Counties, which surround Zólyom [Zvolen] County, this proportion was also higher than 30%.

There were three towns in historical Hungary where the proportion of those employed in the industry exceeded 40%; one of them was Pozsony [Bratislava]. The degree of industrialization is also indicated by the percentage of the people employed in industrial workplaces. The national average was that 100 independent craftsmen employed 225 people. The average for the countryside was 174 employed and the average in towns was 401 employees. In the whole country the percentage of those employed was the highest in Selmecbánya [Banská Štiavnica], where 100 craftsmen employed 695 people and in Pozsony [Bratislava] (the third on a country-wide scale) it was 528.

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