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

3. The settlement structure of Slovakia

The settlement structure of Slovakia

57.6% in 1910 to 66.8% in 1930, and to 86.6% in 1950, the proportion of citizens of Hungarian ethnicity fell from 30.6% to 10.3%. The personal tragedies behind these changes have not been spoken about openly up to the present day.

Mention must be made of the fact that all policies that the Slovak National Council and its organs carried out against the Hungarian people in the new Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948 already existed in embryonic form in the activity and methods of Alexander Mach, the extreme right-wing Interior Minister of the Slovak State. Mach, besides being anti-Semitic, was also extremely anti-Hungarian. It was he who came up with and announced the idea of Slovak and Hungarian population exchange in the newspapers, i.e. that the Hungarian people should be expelled from their homeland right in the middle of the war (Szalatnai 1993, p. 270).

Table 17. Number and proportion of the three main ethnicities compared to the data of the previous census in the area of present-day Slovakia

total%

Slovak

°/o

Hungarian%

German

%

other

%

1910

2,926,824-1,686,712

.

896,271-196,958

-146,883

-1921

2,998,244

102.4

1,941,942

115.1

634,827

70.8

139,800

71.0

281,675

191.8

1930

3,329,793

111.1

2,224,983

114.6

571,988

90.1

147,507

105.5

385,315

136.8

1950

3,442,317

103.4

2,982,524

134.0

354,532

62.0

5,179

3.5

100,082

26.0

1961

4,174,046

121.3

3,560,216

119.4

518,782

146.3

6,259

120.9

88,789

88.7

19704,537,290

108.7

3,878,904

109.0

552,006

106.4

4,760

76.1

101,620

114.5

19804,987,853

109.9

4,321,139

111.4

559,801

101.4

5,121

107.6

101,792

100.2

1991

5,274,335

105.7

4,519,328

104..6

567,296

101.3-.187,711

184.4

2001

5,379,455

107.9

4,614,854

106.8

520,528

93.0

5,405

105.5

238,668

127.1

Source: the author's own calculations on the basis of Popély (1991) and Štatisticky úrad SR, Bratislava

During the decades between the censuses the population of Czechoslovakia, and, since 1993 that of Slovakia, has been increasing steadily. Meanwhile, the percentage of the population of Slovak ethnicity increased, and very often at a higher rate than the national average. The proportion of people of Hungarian ethnicity fell dramatically up to the 1950 census. It was only in 1961 that it seemed to level off, but by 2001 this proportion had further decreased.

It must also be emphasized that the ’other’ category of the tables including census figures was defined differently over the years. In the beginning, it was a manipulative tool of the censuses in that Hungarians who had not been granted Czechoslovak citizenship were taken account

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