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

3. The settlement structure of Slovakia

The settlement structure of Slovakia

towns increased considerably. In 1910 there were altogether 403,000 town-dwellers in contemporary Felvidék, and in 2001 there were more than 3 million of them in Slovakia. Regarding ethnicity proportions, the urban population with almost 50% Hungarian majority, which actually meant the coexistence of several ethnicities, had become a population of almost 90% Slovak ethnicity by 2001. All in all, the earlier figure of over 50% of different ethnicities fell to scarcely 10% in towns. More exactly, the Hungarian-dominated population, which was willing to accept other ethnicities, was replaced by a discriminative Slovak hegemony, which demanded assimilation.

Table 18. Changes in the proportion of ethnicities in Slovakia between 1910 and 2001

Source: KSH Budapest, Štatisticky úrad SR, Bratislava Note:

1910: the territory of the 1861 memorandum 2001: the territory of present-day Slovakia

Owing to the statistical tricks of Czechoslovak censuses, the number of the population of Hungarian ethnicity decreased dramatically in the new state compared to 1910, in contrast with the dominant, so-called ‘Czechoslovak’ ethnicity. The reason why the figure referring to ethnicity in statistical surveys or censuses was different from that indicating mother tongue in these years was fear (Table 19). Being afraid of the consequences, many people did not dare to admit the ethnicity corresponding to their mother tongue, so they marked that of the dominant nation, i.e. Slovak ethnicity. The difference between the two series of data is still rather striking. It is especially large between those who give Ruthenian as their mother tongue and those, half as many, who have declared themselves belonging to the Ruthenian ethnicity.

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