The ancestors of the Slovaks living in current Hungarian territory arrived in the areas destroyed and depopulated during the Turkish rule in several waves since the late 17th century from the overpopulated counties of Upper Hungary stricken by famine and religious conflict. Due to partial exemptions from obligations to feudal land-owners, religious freedom and the new settlers' diligent work, the Slovak community founded or repopulated hundreds of towns and villages, such as Békéscsaba, Szarvas, Kiskőrös, Nyíregyháza, Tótkomlós and the Romanian border town of Nagylak, as well as various areas in Vojvodina in Serbia.
On their carriages, the Slovak settlers brought along not only their populous families, what few possessions and tools they had, but also their teacher-priests and their religious books. They made arable land out of the salty swamps of the Great Plains, grew grapes in the hills, mined rock and coal in the mountains, harvested timber from the woods and worked hard at the glass workshops, lime-kilns and charcoal kilns. They educated their children as best as they could, and built Evangelical and Catholic churches. The churches became ever larger and ever more beautiful, most of them still being in use today. They are just causes for pride among the descendants of their builders – particularly the Evangelical church of Békéscsaba, one of the most remarkable churches of its kind in Central Europe.
Some of the well-educated children of the ethnic Slovaks became notable personalities who did a great intellectual service for the country, such as the Evangelical priest of Szarvas, Sámuel Tessedik, an enlightened agricultural scientist and founder of the first practical agricultural school, and his contemporary colleague from Tótkomlós, Pál Wallaszky, the author of the first work on literary and art history written in Hungary. Salamon Petényi, the priest of Cinkota was the founder of scientific ornithology and palaeontology in Hungary, while the priest of Békéscsaba, Lajos Haan, member of the National Guard during the 1848 revolution and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a historian, was the first to publish a bilingual work on the history of a Hungarian city. András Áchim, agricultural policy expert and MP and János Melich, Szarvas linguist and chief librarian of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences are still remembered with great respect by Hungarians, and György Melis, a Kossuth-award winning opera singer from Szarvas, enjoys great popularity.
Ethnic Slovaks moved from their original ethnic community in the North to other parts of the Carpathian Basin at a time when they hadn't even started to become a nation or had their language regulated – and neither had the ethnic Hungarians at the time. That is the reason why this community still conserves unmatched archaic linguistic and ethnological values. After the First World War, due to the creation of Czechoslovakia, the geographic distance was exacerbated by a new country border. Slovaks in Hungary became a national minority, the identity of which was weakened by a sustained policy of "Hungarianization". During the Czechoslovakian-Hungarian population exchange after the Second World War, 73 thousand ethnic Slovaks moved out of Hungary, which represented not only a loss in numbers, but also the breaking up of what used to be relatively monolithic and closed Slovak communities. During the decades of state Socialism in Hungary, self-organized groups and associations were disbanded. In keeping with the Lenin-style fake nationality policy, there was a national Slovak association, run by the Party, without real membership, which tried to be active in the areas of folk culture, the protection of traditions and later in literature as well. The readership of the single Slovak-language weekly newspaper was continuously dwindling. In the 1970's, a Slovak radio broadcast was introduced, but it was virtually impossible to access, and ten years later, a Slovak television magazine started, with very little air time. Education in Slovak, available in very few schools, was abolished in 1961; it was replaced by five bilingual schools in the country. Apart from that, there were primary schools that taught Slovak two or three hours a week, but their number dwindled. Their effectiveness – and that of the participation in college and university studies and the utilization of opportunities to study in Slovakia – deteriorated in proportion with the loss of language use among families. That was the situation of ethnic Slovaks in Hungary at the time of the fall of Communism, with only 10,459 people claiming to be of Slovak ethnicity during the 1990 census.
However, social changes made their effects felt in the life of ethnic minorities as well. The Association of Slovaks Living in Hungary was transformed, and created the first national minority research institute in Békéscsaba. In the meantime, numerous officially registered national, regional and local Slovak civil society organizations were set up, with more than three dozen in existence today. In addition, numerous dance groups, choirs and orchestras were registered as separate legal entities, and in addition, there are over 50 cultural groups, folk choirs and Slovak clubs operating in the country without such legal status.
The 1993 parliamentary adoption of the Act on the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities opened a new chapter in the life of minorities in Hungary, including the Slovak minority. The most important change was the creation of the system of minority self-governments, and the radically new legal rights of these local, national, and – eventually – county-level bodies and their ongoing and more and more professional activity, and, last but not least, the guaranteed – if limited – budgetary support they receive. In this improved environment, the cooperation of Slovak self-governments and NGOs helped reinvigorate the Slovak community to the extent that the number of people claiming to be Slovak during the 2011 census showed an increase of almost 70 per cent at 17,692.
As a result of the latest minority self-government elections, held in October 2010, 122 four-member Slovak bodies were set up. The following January, the members of these bodies, the electors, elected the 29-member Assembly of the National Slovak Self-Government, and the Slovak self-governments of the capital and five counties (Békés, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, Komárom-Esztergom, Nógrád and Pest).
Another important achievement of the new Act on minorities is the possibility for cultural autonomy, which allowed minority self-governments to take over, set up and operate institutions. Locally, this was implemented through the takeover of a couple of regional cultural centres and museums representing country life and folk traditions (in Békéscsaba, Tótkomlós, Bakonycsernye, Medgyesegyháza) and the taking over of the operation of about 30 Slovak folk museums.
The National Slovak Self-Government started to set up its institutions around 2000. First of all, it took over the rights to the weekly Ľudové noviny and then the Research Institute of Slovaks in Hungary from the Association of Slovaks. This was followed by taking control of the Vertigo Slovak Theatre and the Slovak Documentation Centre, and then the foundation of the Slovak Public Education Centre, now operating ten local branches. One by one, the National Slovak Self-Government became the operator of the bilingual schools in Szarvas, Békéscsaba and Sátoraljaújhely, with the Slovak Pedagogic Methodology Centre providing support to other institutions teaching Slovakian around the country. The “Legatum” non-profit company was set up to provide technical and financial assistance to the minority self-governments that run the Slovak folk museums, and it also publishes the Slovak weekly newspaper and almanac. Making the most of its legal possibilities, this company also set up the Foundation for Ethnic Slovaks in Hungary, which operates a bursary system supporting children's secondary school studies.
Thanks to the legal and financial guarantees provided in Hungary, the National Slovak Self-Government currently runs a total of 10 institutions including its own Office, a company and a public service foundation. Slovakia provides the self-government with significant diplomatic, technical and financial support, and it has established a close cooperation with the organizations of Slovaks living in Romania and Vojvodina, with the World Federation of Slovaks Living Outside Slovakia, and the Federal Union of European Minorities in order to help the descendants of Slovak settlers preserve, enrich and pass on their culture in Hungary.
