July 27th, 2012 - Friday
I still couldn´t believe I was in Budapest.
After our breakfast, we got ready to go to a little town in northern Hungary, called Esztergom, about 46 km of Budapest..
I have just copied a little information from Esztergom from frommers.com
Formerly a Roman settlement,
Esztergom (pronounced
Ess-tair-gome), was the seat of the Hungarian kingdom for 300 years. Hungary's first king, István I (Stephen I) renamed from Vajk by German priests, received the crown from the pope in A.D. 1000. He converted Hungary to Catholicism, and Esztergom became the country's center of the early church. Although its glory days are long gone due to invasions from the Mongols and later the Turks, it was rebuilt once again in the 18th and 19th centuries. This quiet town remains the seat of the archbishop primate, known as the "Hungarian Rome."
From Esztergom west all the way to the Austrian border, the Danube marks the border between Hungary and Slovakia, with an international ferry crossing at Esztergom.
Read more:
http://wwwThey told me on the way a little about the history of Hungary and of how much territory they had lost aftger wars, specially after WWI and WWII.
They also told methat many Hungarians had to move to "new Hungary" leaving behind their homes and properties. That was the case of Judit´s grandfather, who had to start from scratch with his wife and their seven children.
They promised me to send a t-shirt written on it: "I´m older than Slovakia, as it was part of the Czech Republic and part of Hungary.
I have been reading about it and it is quite complex. Have also decided to copy a little more information on it and post it.
lovak–Hungarian War
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Slovak-Hungarian Border War |

Territorial changes of the Slovak Republic: land ceded to Hungary before (red) and after (blue) the war |
Date | 23 March 1939 – 4 April 1939[1] |
Location | Eastern Slovakia |
Result | Tactical Hungarian victory |
Territorial
changes | Slovakia is forced to cede a strip of Eastern Slovak territory |
|
Belligerents |
 First Slovak Republic
|
 Kingdom of Hungary
|
Commanders and leaders |
Augustín Malár | András Littay |
Strength |
3 infantry regiments
2 artillery regiments
9 armoured cars
3 tanks | 5 infantry battalions
2 cavalry battalions
1 motorised battalion
3 armoured cars
70 tankettes
5 light tanks |
Casualties and losses |
Slovak military:
22 killed,
360 Slovak and 211 Czech POW
Slovak civilians:
36 killed | Hungarian military:
8 killed,
30 wounded
Hungarian civilians:
15 killed |
[edit]Prelude
After the
Munich Pact, which weakened Czech lands to the west, the Hungarians remained poised threateningly on the Slovak border. They reportedly had
artillery ammunition for only 36 hours of operations, and were clearly engaged in a bluff, but it was a bluff the Germans had encouraged, and one that they would have been obliged to support militarily if the much larger and better equipped Czechoslovak Army chose to fight. The Czechoslovak army had built 2,000 small concrete emplacements along the border wherever there was no major river obstacle.
The Hungarian Minister of the Interior,
Miklós Kozma, had been born in
Carpathian Ruthenia, and in mid-1938 his ministry armed the
Rongyos Gárda('Ragged Guard'), which began to infiltrate into southern Slovakia and
Carpatho-Ukraine. The situation was now verging on open war. From the German and
Italian points of view, this would be premature, so they pressured the Czechoslovak government to accept their joint
Arbitration of Vienna. On 2 November 1938 this found largely in favour of the Hungarians and obliged the Prague government to cede 11,833 km² of the mostly Hungarian populated (according 1910 census
[2]) south part of Slovakia to Hungary. The partition also cost Slovakia
Košice/Kassa, its second largest city, and left the capital,
Bratislava/Pozsony, vulnerable to further Hungarian pressure.
The
First Vienna Award did not fully satisfy the Hungarians, so this was followed by twenty-two border clashes between 2 November 1938 and 12 January 1939.
On the evening of 13 March 1939
Jozef Tiso (the recently ousted Slovak leader) and
Ferdinand Ďurčanský met
Adolf Hitler,
Joachim von Ribbentrop and Generals
Walther von Brauchitsch and
Wilhelm Keitel in
Berlin. Hitler, made it absolutely clear that either Slovakia would declare independence immediately and place itself under
Nazi Germany's "protection", or he would let the Hungarians, who were - reported by Ribbentrop - gathering on the border, to take over even more land. During this time, being aware of the German position, the Hungarians were preparing for action on the adjacent Ruthenian border.
During the afternoon and night of 14 March the Slovak people proclaimed their independence from Czecho-Slovakia, and at 5:00 am on 15 March Hitler declared that the unrest in Czecho-Slovakia was a threat to the German security, sending his troops into
Bohemia and
Moravia, which gave virtually no resistance.
The Slovaks were surprised when the Hungarians recognised their new state as early as 15 March. However, Hungarians were not satisfied with their frontier with Slovakia and, according to Slovak sources, weak elements of their 20th Infantry Regiment and frontier Guards had to repulse a Hungarian attempt to seize Hill 212.9 opposite
Uzhhorod. In this, and the subsequent shelling and bombing of the border villages of
Nižné Nemecké and
Vyšné Nemecké, the Slovaks claimed to have suffered 13 dead and they promptly petitioned the Germans, invoking Hitler's promise of protection.
On 17 March the Hungarian Foreign Ministry told the Germans that Hungary wanted to negotiate with the Slovaks over the eastern Slovak boundary on the pretext that the existing line was only an internal Czechoslovak administrative division, not a recognised international boundary, and therefore needed defining now that Carpatho-Ukraine had passed into Hungarian hands. They enclosed a map of their proposal that shifted the frontier about 10 kilometres west of
Uzhhorod, beyond
Sobrance, and then ran almost due north to the Polish border.
The Hungarian claim partly relied on the 1910 census, which stated that
Hungarians and
Ruthenians, not
Slovaks, formed the majority in north-eastern Slovakia. In addition to the demographic issue, Hungarians also had another purpose in mind, that they were trying to protect Uzhhorod and the key railway to Poland up the
Uzh River, which was within the view of current Slovak border. They therefore resolved to push the frontier back a safe distance beyond the western watershed of the Uzh Valley.
Berlin let the Hungarians know that it would acquiesce to such a border revision, and told Bratislava so. On 18 March the Slovak leaders, in
Vienna for the signing of the Treaty of Protection, were grudgingly forced to accept this, and Bratislava ordered Slovak civil and military authorities to pull back. All other potential Hungarian requests were supposed to be illegal in Slovakia.
The Hungarians were aware that Slovakia had signed a treaty guaranteeing Slovakia's borders on 18 March and that it would come into force when Germany countersigned it. They therefore decided to act immediately and take advantage of the disorganized Slovak army, which had not yet fully consolidated. Thus their forces in western Carpatho-Ukraine began to advance from the River Uzh into eastern Slovakia at dawn on 23 March, some six hours before Joachim von Ribbentrop countersigned the Treaty of Protection in Berlin.
Of course, there is a lot more to it, but History is long...
We did have a fun day wandering around in both towns. In fact, we went to Slovakia to have lunch, which was delicious and fairly cheap! I recommend it.
We also tried all kinds of beer, I´m afraid. "Köszönöm", girls, which means thank you in Hungarian.
On the way to Esztergom, waiting for the bus in front of their apartment building.
As soon as we arrived in Esztergom, we found a little bar and had a beer. It was quite hot!
I soon learned the word for beer in Hungarian: Sör!! It sounds like sure in English. That was easy!
I had a little money now. It´s the forint. Exchanged it at the metro station.
The basilica.
A very charming little town.