About SLOVAKIA

Dear friends,
As I wrote to you last Sunday I will today stop sending you my daily greetings - unless you want to continue to receive them.
Below is my contribution for today.

Best greetings,
Niels

Hello to all of you on this day - February 23.  The day is here in Belgium now 2 hours and 34 minutes longer than on December 21.  See more in the enclosed annex.
I also enclose other information linked to this day.

I also want to send MY WARMEST CONGRATULATIONS to those of you celebrating your birthday or some other nice event today.  Have a lovely day !

My special comments today are about SLOVAKIA. Why? Because they have parliamentary elections on Saturday, February 29. I will come back to the election and the themes discussed in the election campaign in a few days. Today I want to tell you about the country.

Slovakia is since 2004 one of our 26 partners in the EU. We are working closely together with them every day in all what the EU is dealing with. And that is why I think it is important to know more about the country than we normally do.  I know it from my younger days, when I with my own travel agency APOLLON organised many group tours esp. to the Tatra Mountains in the North of the country. A lovely area, where the Mountains go up to 2.500 meters.

Slovakia has an area of 49.000 sq.km. It has many mountains and has borders with Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic.  It has 5,45 mill. inhabitants, including Hungarian and Roma minorities.  The capital is Bratislava. Until 1918 the city was called Pressburg (when the country was still part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire).  The distance to Vienna is only 55 km, and in the old days a tram was running between the two cities.
The language is Slovakian ( 80 %), Hungarian (9 %) and Roma (2%). Slovakian is often called the "Slavic Esperanto", because is can be understood by most of the other Slavic languages. 
After 1918 Slovakia was part of Czechoslovakia. During the German occupation from 1939-45 is was run by a dictatorship with the priest Jozef Tiso as leader. It supported Nazi Germany.  Tiso was executed after the war for war crimes.   During the Communist perio from 1948 to 1989 one of the well known reform leaders was Slovak, Alexander Dubcek  ( "the Prague Spring" ). 

Slovakia is independent since January 1, 1993, when Czechoslovakia was split up.  From 2004 it has been a member of NATO and of the EU. And since 2009 the EURO has been its currency.
Slovakian politics has since independence been run by different parties and different political trends.  Perhaps a change started in 2019, when a 45 year old woman Zuzana Caputova was elected president. She is pro-European and an environmental activist. 
I will in a few days come back to the political situation and the ongoing election campaign.

A well-known person with Slovak roots is Andy Warhol. His parents were Slovaks.

If you want to follow Slovak affairs in English the SPECTATOR is  a good choice:
https://spectator.sme.sk

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