Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
3. The settlement structure of Slovakia
The settlement structure of Slovakia is even more important, the coexistence of several cultures were its essential components. The towns in historical Felvidék were inhabited by people of many different ethnicities and languages. Most of them achieved their independence with equivalent urban regulations and customs in the Middle Ages, which they had been developing and improving continuously. Consequently, they also had their own urban regulations and conventions. Local identity was of the utmost importance in these towns. Being a Carpathian German of Szepesség [Spiš], a citizen of Kassa [Košice] or Pozsony [Bratislava] meant completely different things, because the rules of social coexistence were not constituted according to what language these people spoke. In other words, in the towns of Felvidék, social and political rights and duties did not depend on the proportions of the people speaking the same language until 1918. Changing the name Pozsony to Bratislava between the two World Wars was a symbolic occupation. The change in the ethnicities of Bratislava took place in two ways. On the one hand, the Czech officials and Slovak village people moving into the town increased the number of Slavs, or in contemporary terminology, the Czechoslovak people. On the other hand, the abuses of the censuses were intended to prove a decrease in the proportion of non-Slav people. That was how, according to the 1930 census, the percentage of the Hungarian ethnicity in Bratislava fell to less than 20%, as a result of which the representative body of the town made the decision to abolish the right of Hungarian people to use their language with a majority vote at an extraordinary session in 1933. Thereupon, the Slovak youth in the gallery started to shout with joy and, in their happiness about the denial of the right of the Hungarian minority to use their language, organized a loud anti-Hungarian demonstration in the streets of Bratislava. The great Slovak dream came true: in Pozsony [Bratislava], a city of traditionally German and Hungarian character, the Czechoslovak people gained an overwhelming majority at last (Popély 1991, p. 109). The Slovak State, which was established in 1939, started aggressive changing of the linguistic and ethnicity proportions immediately. First they expelled the Czech inhabitants, and then they liquidated the large Jewish community of the town. It was between 1939 and 1945, during the first independent Slovak State, that Bratislava was the capital city of Slovakia with the full sphere of authority for the first time. This was where they set up the headquarters of the president, the government, the parliament, the Slovak National Bank and the foreign representations. It was only during a 66
