Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
3. The settlement structure of Slovakia
Urban structure in Slovakia Table 19. The difference between 2001 census responses for ethnicity and for mother tongue in towns Ethnicity Mother tongue% Ruthenian 12,052 23,804 197.51 no answer given 39,280 47,924 122.01 German 3,673 4,405 119.93 Hungarian 200,617 226,837 113.07 Croatian 829 911 109.89 Czech 34,377 37,257 108.38 Polish 1,845 1,896 102.76 Total ethnicities 3,022,106 3,022,106 100.00 Slovak 2,674,069 2,629,657 98.34 Gvpsv 38,532 37,258 96.69 Serb 379 359 94.72 Ukrainian 7,178 5,398 75.20 other 9,275 6,400 69.00 Source: Štatisticky úrad SR, Bratislava The towns, as administrative centres, became both victims and scenes of language conflict. Former municipal boroughs, such as Komárno and Banská Štiavnica, were first degraded to villages, then declared towns again, but now without any privileges or development plans. The frequent reorganization of administration was mainly for the purpose of influencing language and ethnicity proportions. Instead of the former county towns, other towns became the centres of administration. In the so-called region system, which was set up in 1923, only 6 towns were made county towns: Bratislava and Košice, as well as Nitra, Martin, Zvolen (instead of Banská Bystrica) and Liptovský Mikuláš. The first results of the struggle for language and national ethnicity could be seen as early as in the decades of communism (1948-1989). The proportion of the people of Hungarian ethnicity fell to about 10% within the whole of the population. At the time of the 2001 census, only 9.7% of the population of Slovakia declared themselves Hungarian. Their proportion in towns was even lower, 6.6%. The towns can be categorized, as well. If we take large cities according to size, we can see that there are a rather low number of Hungarian inhabitants in them (Table 20). This is all the more so in the case of district towns (shown in bold in the table). The Hungarian population in Bratislava decreased from 31,000 to 16,000 and in Košice, where the number of the Hungarian inhabitants used to be 33,000, it is now 8,940. Nitra and Trnava became the centres of Matúšova zem, which had been divided into two parts for administrative purposes, so the pro57
