"I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells [a town in Kent, England, southeast of central London]."
-- Tom Stoppard===========================
(in the capital and largest city of Slovakia) Bratislava lies in the extreme southwestern part of the country, along the Danube where that river has cut a gorge in the Little Carpathian Mountains near the meeting point of the borders of Slovakia, Austria, and Hungary. Vienna is 35 miles (56 km) to the west. Bratislava's history has been influenced by people of many nations and religions, including Austrians, Bulgarians, Croats, Czechs, Germans, Jews, Hungarians, Romani, and Slovaks. It was the coronation site and legislative center and capital of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1563 to 1783; eleven Hungarian kings and eight queens were crowned in St Martin's Cathedral. Most Hungarian parliament assemblies were held here from the 17th century until the Hungarian Reform Era, and the city has been home to many Slovak, Hungarian, and German historical figures. Today Bratislava is the political, cultural, and economic center of Slovakia.
+ Archaeological evidence suggests prehistoric habitation of the site, which was later fortified and settled by the Celts and Romans and finally in the 8th century was inhabited by the Slavs. The community developed as a trade center and was granted the rights of a free royal town in 1291. The first university in what was then Hungary, the Istropolitana Academy, was founded here in 1465. Bratislava served as the Hungarian capital from 1526 until 1784, when most of the middle Danube basin was in the hands of the Turks, and the Hungarian parliament continued to meet here until 1848. The Habsburg rulers were crowned kings of Hungary in the city’s Gothic Cathedral of St. Martin.
+ The city is dominated by its enormous castle, which stands on a plateau high above the Danube. In 1741 Empress Maria Theresa of Austria fled to Bratislava when Vienna was threatened by French and Bavarian troops. The so-called Peace of Pressburg (1805) was signed by Napoleon and the Austrian emperor Francis II, after the Battle of Austerlitz, in the city’s Baroque Archbishop’s Palace. Following World War I, Bratislava was made the capital of Slovakia in the first Czechoslovakian Republic, and it remained the capital when Slovakia emerged as an independent nation in 1993.
+ Slovakia's capital since the country's independence in 1993, Bratislava remains a mosaic of illustrious history: a medieval and Gothic Old Town, baroque palaces commissioned by Hungarian nobles, and the crowning castle, rebuilt to Renaissance finery. Despite the march of modernism, Bratislava still has nature on its doorstep. Rolling north are the Malé Karpaty (Small Carpathians), their lowlands draped with vineyards.
+ Shown here, is the main square in Stare Mesto (the Old Town of Slovakia's capital), which takes visitors back a few centuries as they wander its cobblestone streets:
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