Slovakia — Richard Golian

Slovakia is a country most people in Western Europe know almost nothing about. A small nation in the centre of the continent — shaped by Hungarian rule, Habsburg administration, two world wars, forty years of communism, a peaceful revolution, and a messy divorce from the Czech Republic. All of this in a territory smaller than Denmark. I was born here. I studied politics and philosophy in Prague, but Slovakia remains the lens through which I see Central Europe. There was a time when it was called the Tatra Tiger — one of the fastest-growing economies in the EU. Today it lags behind the rest of the Visegrád Four. What changed is worth understanding. But Slovakia is not just its politics and economic struggles. It is the Carpathian mountains, the medieval mining towns, the wild nature that rivals anything in the Alps but remains largely unknown. These articles are observations about a country caught between its post-communist past and a European future it has not fully committed to — written by someone who grew up here and still comes back.