Holidays in Slovakia

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Slovakia

Two Nations Born at the Same Midnight

At midnight on 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia, a federal state formed in 1918 from the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ceased to exist, and the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic came into being simultaneously in its place. The dissolution followed a vote in the federal legislature that November, negotiated primarily between Czech prime minister Václav Klaus and Slovak prime minister Vladimír Mečiar, and notably proceeded without any public referendum on either side, even though opinion polls at the time suggested most citizens in both republics actually preferred to remain united.

What made the split genuinely unusual in the history of national breakups was how little drama accompanied it. Dubbed the Velvet Divorce, a deliberate echo of the peaceful Velvet Revolution that had ended communist rule four years earlier, the separation unfolded through negotiation rather than force, standing in stark contrast to the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia happening at almost exactly the same moment elsewhere in Europe. The practical effects of the split accumulated gradually rather than all at once: Czech television largely stopped broadcasting in Slovak in the years that followed, and within a generation, younger Czechs had noticeably weaker comprehension of a language their parents had grown up hearing every day as a normal part of shared national life.

Sixty Days at Eight O'Clock in the Evening

At 20:00 on 29 August 1944, Slovak Lieutenant Colonel Ján Golian issued a coded order over a resistance radio transmitter, the phrase "start the evacuation," setting the Slovak National Uprising formally in motion from its headquarters in the central town of Banská Bystrica. The revolt was aimed simultaneously at the invading German Wehrmacht and at the collaborationist Slovak government of Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest whose wartime state had allied itself with Nazi Germany.

What began with fewer than 20,000 mutinous soldiers eventually drew in tens of thousands more, alongside partisan fighters representing some thirty different nationalities, and at its peak the insurgents controlled more than half of what was then Slovak territory. German reinforcements diverted from Hungary prevented the rebels from linking up with the advancing Soviet Army through the Carpathian mountains, and after roughly sixty days of fighting, the uprising collapsed with the fall of Banská Bystrica on 27 or 28 October 1944, depending on the source consulted, though scattered partisan resistance continued for months afterward. Despite its military defeat, the uprising is remembered as one of the largest anti-Nazi insurrections anywhere in occupied Europe, and its anniversary has been marked as a national holiday in Slovakia continuously since the end of the war.

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