The Nation That Wasn't There

by Richard
(2025-05-24)
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Or: How Slovaks Invented Themselves After Sitting Quietly for 700 Years

The Valley People

“Slovak” — if we can even use the term this early — was just a guy sitting between some hills, minding his business, and being of absolutely no interest to anyone.

No kings. No universities. No trade routes.
Just valleys, churches, sheep, and maybe a knife fight over potatoes every now and then.

The idea of a Slovak nation is like trying to build a choir out of people who’ve never heard each other sing.

Each valley had its own dialect, its own customs, even its own sense of time — some were still in the 18th century when radio arrived.

These weren’t just dialects. They were microcosms.
A man from Orava and a woman from Zemplín could both be labeled “Slovak,” but would need an interpreter and a marriage counselor by day two.

The truth is: Slovakia wasn’t a nation — it was a terrain feature.
A patchwork of dialects, parishes, and superstitions. The idea of a "Slovak people" would have made no sense to the Slovak people.

And yet... we became a nation anyway. Eventually. Somehow.

Great Moravia: That One Time We Almost Existed

Every proper national myth needs a Golden Age — and ours is Great Moravia, a “kingdom” so glorious that historians can’t agree where it was, how long it lasted, or what it even did.

Before it, there was the Principality of Nitra — a promising start, if your idea of promise is getting absorbed by stronger neighbors.
Then came Great Moravia: briefly powerful, vaguely Christian, and diplomatically impressive. Even the Byzantines and Franks cared.
We got Cyril and Methodius, a liturgical language, and the right to feel like we mattered.

And then… it vanished.
Like a sock in a washing machine.
No epic battle. No glorious fall. Just historical evaporation.

That’s how deeply we love myth here — our most important empire is the one nobody can locate.

700 Years of Beautiful Silence

Between the fall of Great Moravia and the late 18th century, nothing happened.
No kings, no revolutions, no national awakening. Just 700 years of being someone else's footnote.

Slovaks were peasants in the Hungarian Kingdom, soldiers in foreign wars, or names in a Latin registry no one reads.
We had no Havels, no Luthers, no Voltaires. We had hills, rosaries, and taxes.

And maybe, just maybe, we got really good at not being noticed.

Slovaks didn’t build a unified culture because there was no infrastructure to unify through.
The mountains didn’t just block armies — they blocked ideas, trade, gossip, progress.

One valley could be dancing to Turkish drum rhythms while the next was still praying to avoid them.
A national identity requires friction, conversation, and contradiction — but the Slovak experience was mostly echo chambers in the fog.

Bernolák: The First Guy to Say “We Should Talk Like This”

Anton Bernolák tried to do the impossible: give a voice to a people who didn’t know they were people.
He codified the Slovak language based on the western dialect — a noble, clever move.

But no one used it.

The Church spoke Latin. The government used Hungarian. The peasants spoke in dialects even their neighbors didn’t understand.
Bernolák created a linguistic bridge, but no one showed up to cross it.

Still, you have to admire the attempt.
The man invented a language for a nation that didn’t know it existed. That takes guts. And probably a lot of spare time.

Štúr & Co: Poets With Guns

Ľudovít Štúr had more luck than Bernolák — he gave Slovaks a language that stuck.
He tapped into Romantic nationalism, stood up to Magyarization, and looked good in sideburns.

But the awakening wasn’t all poetry and patriotism.

Slovak volunteer troops, marching for national liberation, ended up looting Slovak towns — because no one had explained to them who the enemy actually was.

It wasn’t pretty.
But revolutions rarely are. Especially when the rebels are trying to invent the country they’re fighting for while fighting for it.

Ironically, Ľudovít Štúr died after accidentally shooting himself in the leg while hunting. He didn’t know it at the time, but he may have started a long and proud tradition: Slovaks shooting themselves just when things were starting to look promising.

Meanwhile, in Bohemia: The Nation in a Cauldron

While Slovaks spent centuries tucked into valleys and whispering to sheep, the Czechs were boiling.
Not literally. But culturally.

Bohemia was a cauldron — compact, interconnected, full of towns, guilds, markets, rebellions, beer, and books.
Prague alone had more political revolts than all of Upper Hungary combined.

Czechs had:

And for a brief, glorious period, Prague was the actual capital of the Holy Roman Empire.
When Charles IV ruled, it wasn’t just a Czech city — it was the heart of Central Europe, while Slovakia was still being mostly invented by priests with good intentions and bad lighting.

Bohemia had printing presses. Slovakia had wooden spoons.

Czech identity was born in cafes, markets, protests, and universities.
Slovak identity was handed down from village priest to village priest, like a sermon rewritten in different dialects.

They wrote things down.
They printed.
They traded.
They organized.

In short: they were already a nation before nations were cool.

Slovaks, on the other hand, had a few notable exceptions — but mostly lived in stovepipe-sized cultural silos, often unaware of what was happening behind the next ridge.

So when someone eventually said, “Hey, maybe we should be one country!”
the Czech looked across and saw a scattered people with heart, hills, and hymns — but without roads, press, or political infrastructure.

And yet... it happened anyway.

Czechoslovakism: An Upgrade, Not a Betrayal

We like to talk about Czechoslovakism as if it was some elaborate Czech scheme to erase our identity.

But let’s be honest: in 1918, Slovakia wasn’t a nation ready to stand on its own. We were a region with churches, sheep, and a lot of priests.

Thank god we had Milan Rastislav Štefánik — a man who somehow convinced the world (and maybe even himself) that we belonged on the map. Without him, Masaryk and Beneš might have drawn a very different line.

Czechoslovakia wasn’t perfect, but it was something we’d never had before: a modern liberal state. And frankly, that beat the hell out of hymnals and feudal taxes.

Think of it like Italy in the 19th century — a Milanese banker and a Sicilian farmer suddenly decided they were both Italians.
Same with Czechs and Slovaks.
It was messy, optimistic, and ambitious.

And yes, Prague was the center. But it was a center that gave us trains, schools, press freedom, and elections.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Ah, Finally — A True Slovak State… Yeah, Let’s Not

Some nationalists like to sigh nostalgically about the Slovak State during World War II —
as if it was our long-lost moment of sovereignty, pride, and glorious leadership.

It wasn’t.

It was a puppet regime installed by Nazi Germany, run by clergy-backed authoritarians, and responsible for deporting its own citizens to death camps — sometimes even paying the Germans to take them.

We had our own army.
We had our own president.
And we used them to crush dissent, copy fascist laws, and sign up for history’s darkest club.

So yes — we finally had our very own state.
But if that’s the price of independence, maybe it’s okay to share a mailbox with the Czechs for a few more decades.

Let’s just say: it’s not the part of the story you put on a tourist brochure.

Communism: Just Say Yes, and Complain at Home

Slovaks didn’t love communism.
They accepted it the same way they accept long winters and bad wine — without joy, but with fatalism.

In public, we nodded.
In private, we cursed.
And we always made sure to hide the Radio Free Europe antenna under the roof tiles.

We weren’t rebels. We were survivors.

Modern Slovakia: Not Gonna Touch That With a Six-Foot Pole

Post-communist democracy came… sort of.

We elected psychopaths, communists in suits, mafia affiliates, and called it “transition.”
We nodded politely. Complained at home. And voted them back in.

The villains changed — now it’s the EU, vaccines, and 5G towers —
but the vibe remains the same:
Obey in public. Rage in private. Blame someone else.
If you can’t give people something to believe in, at least give them someone to hate.

And of course, they must hate the EU —
because the EU makes them obsolete.
It writes laws. It sets standards. It invites global thinking.
It says: “You can’t just be a loud man in a suit yelling about tradition. You need a plan, a budget, and a carbon target.”

And for many of these nationalist prophets, the myth of the nation — with them as its self-declared guardians — is all they have left.
They don’t fit in modern civilization. So they fight it.

Because in a world of progress, some people only feel important if they can pretend they’re the last line of defense against it.

Civilization Over Nation

Someone keeps telling me that I — a secular, liberal guy in a city — share more in common with a shepherd in Kysuce than with a writer in Prague or Paris.
And I’m supposed to believe this because we both speak Slovak?

But we don’t share values. We don’t share visions.
I share more with a liberal in Berlin or a feminist in Bordeaux than with someone who thinks EU is Satan and vaccines are genocide.

Because it’s not the nation that matters anymore. It’s civilization.

Final Thought: All Nations Are Made Up — Ours Too

Let’s be real: every nation was invented.
The French? Paris won the dialect war.
The Italians? A political experiment that mostly worked.
The Americans? Self-written mythology with fireworks.

Slovakia?
A slow-burning idea patched together from language, trauma, nostalgia, and a lot of singing about how hard life is.

It’s not heroic.
But it’s honest.

And maybe now it’s time to stop obsessing over nations — and start talking about freedom.
Not as something given to us, but something we actually live.

Because history might be about what we were.
But civilization is about what we choose to be.

“To believe is to live.” („Veriť znamená žiť.“) — M. R. Štefánik

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