Hungary in the context of "Slovaks"

A county seat is an administrative center, seat of government, or capital city of a county or civil parish. The term is in use in six countries: Canada, China, Hungary, Romania, Taiwan, and the United States. An equivalent term, shire town, is used in the U.S. state of Vermont and in several other English-speaking jurisdictions.

A village is a human settlement or a residential community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand. Although villages are often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighborhoods. Villages are normally permanent, with fixed dwellings; however, transient villages can occur. Further, the dwellings of a village are fairly close to one another, not scattered broadly over the landscape, as a dispersed settlement.

In the past, villages were a usual form of community for societies that practiced subsistence agriculture and also for some non-agricultural societies. In Great Britain, a hamlet earned the right to be called a village when it built a church. In many cultures, towns and cities were few, with only a small proportion of the population living in them. The Industrial Revolution attracted people in larger numbers to work in mills and factories; the concentration of people caused many villages to grow into towns and cities. This also enabled specialization of labor and crafts and the development of many trades. The trend of urbanization continues but not always in connection with industrialization. Historically, homes were situated together for sociability and defence, and land surrounding the living quarters was farmed. Traditional fishing villages were based on artisan fishing and located adjacent to fishing grounds.

Rumelia (Ottoman Turkish: روم ايلى, romanized: Rum İli, lit. 'Land of the Romans'; Turkish: Rumeli; Greek: Ρωμυλία) was a historical region in Southeastern Europe that was administered by the Ottoman Empire, roughly corresponding to the Balkans. In its wider sense, it was used to refer to all Ottoman possessions and vassals in Europe. These would later be geopolitically classified as "the Balkans", although Hungary and Moldova are sometimes excluded. In contemporary English sources, Rumelia was known as Turkey in Europe.

Serbia, officially the Republic of Serbia, is a landlocked country in Southeast and Central Europe. Located in the Balkans, it borders Hungary to the north, Romania to the northeast, Bulgaria to the southeast, North Macedonia to the south, Croatia to the northwest, Bosnia and Herzegovina to the west, and Montenegro to the southwest. Serbia also claims to share a border with Albania through the disputed territory of Kosovo. Serbia has about 6.6 million inhabitants, excluding Kosovo. Serbia's capital, Belgrade, is also the largest city in the country.

Continuously inhabited since the Paleolithic age, the territory of modern-day Serbia faced Slavic migrations in the 6th century. Several regional states were founded in the Early Middle Ages and were at times recognised as tributaries to the Byzantine, Frankish and Hungarian kingdoms. The Serbian Kingdom obtained recognition by the Holy See and Constantinople in 1217, reaching its territorial apex in 1346 as the Serbian Empire. By the mid-16th century, the Ottoman Empire annexed the entirety of modern-day Serbia; their rule was at times interrupted by the Habsburg Empire, which began expanding towards Central Serbia from the end of the 17th century while maintaining a foothold in Vojvodina. In the early 19th century, the Serbian Revolution established the nation-state as the region's first constitutional monarchy, which subsequently expanded its territory.

South Slavs are Slavic people who speak South Slavic languages and inhabit a contiguous region of Southeast Europe comprising the eastern Alps and the Balkan Peninsula. Geographically separated from the West Slavs and East Slavs by Austria, Hungary, Romania, and the Black Sea, the South Slavs today include Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes.

In the 20th century, the country of Yugoslavia (from Serbo-Croatian, literally meaning "South Slavia" or "South Slavdom") united a majority of the South Slavic peoples and lands—with the exception of Bulgarians and Bulgaria—into a single state. The Pan-Slavic concept of Yugoslavia emerged in late 17th-century Croatia, at the time part of the Habsburg monarchy, and gained prominence through the 19th-century Illyrian movement. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, was proclaimed on 1 December 1918, following the unification of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs with the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. With the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, several independent sovereign states were formed.

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to the east, and the Black Sea to the southeast. It has a mainly continental climate, and an area of 238,397 km (92,046 sq mi) with a population of 19 million people. Romania is the twelfth-largest country in Europe and the sixth-most populous member state of the European Union. Europe's second-longest river, the Danube, empties into the Danube Delta in the southeast of the country. The Carpathian Mountains cross Romania from the north to the southwest and include Moldoveanu Peak, at an altitude of 2,544 m (8,346 ft). Bucharest is the country's capital, largest urban area, and financial centre. Other major urban areas include Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Iași, Constanța and Brașov.

Settlement in the territory of modern Romania began in the Lower Paleolithic, later becoming the Dacian Kingdom before Roman conquest and Romanisation. The modern Romanian state was formed in 1859 with the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia under Alexandru Ioan Cuza, becoming the Kingdom of Romania in 1881 under Carol I of Romania. Romania gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877, formalised by the Treaty of Berlin. After World War I, Transylvania, Banat, Bukovina, and Bessarabia joined the Old Kingdom, forming Greater Romania, which reached its largest territorial extent. In 1940, under Axis pressure, Romania lost territories to Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union. Following the 1944 Romanian coup d'état, Romania switched sides to join the Allies. After World War II, it regained Northern Transylvania through the Paris Peace Treaties. Under Soviet occupation, King Michael I was forced to abdicate, and Romania became a socialist republic and Warsaw Pact member. After the uniquely violent Romanian revolution in December 1989, Romania began a transition to liberal democracy and a market economy.

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the north; Poland and Slovakia to the west; Hungary, Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov to the south and southeast. Kyiv is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Kharkiv, Odesa, and Dnipro. Ukraine's official language is Ukrainian.

Humans have inhabited Ukraine since 32,000 BC. During the Middle Ages, it was the site of early Slavic expansion and later became a key centre of East Slavic culture under the state of Kievan Rus', which emerged in the 9th century. Kievan Rus' became the largest and most powerful realm in Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries, but gradually disintegrated into rival regional powers before being destroyed by the Mongols in the 13th century. For the next 600 years the area was contested, divided, and ruled by a variety of external powers, including the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Tsardom of Russia.

The revolutions of 1989, also known as the fall of communism, were a wave of liberal democratic movements that resulted in the collapse of most Marxist–Leninist governments in the Eastern Bloc and other parts of the world. This wave is sometimes referred to as the "autumn of nations", in reference to the revolutions of 1848 as the "spring of nations". The revolutions of 1989 were a key factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union—one of the two superpowers—and abandonment of communist regimes in many parts of the world, some of which were violently overthrown. These events drastically altered the world's balance of power, marking the end of the Cold War and beginning of the post-Cold War era.

The earliest recorded protests, which led to the revolutions, began in Poland on 14 August 1980, the massive general strike which led to the August Agreements and establishment of Solidarity, the first and only independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc, whose peak membership reached 10 million. The main region of the 1989 revolutions was Central Europe, starting in Poland with the 1988 Polish strikes, and continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. On 4 June 1989, Poland conducted the first elections that led to the dissolution of the communist government, with Solidarity winning an overwhelming victory, leading to the peaceful fall of communism in Poland. Influenced by Poland, Hungary organised round table-format talks and began dismantling its section of the Iron Curtain. In August 1989, over a quarter of the Baltic states population physically chained for 675 kilometres (419 mi) in the Baltic Way protesting the occupation by the Soviet Union, while the opening of a border gate between Austria and Hungary set in motion a peaceful chain reaction, in which the Eastern Bloc disintegrated. This led to mass demonstrations in cities of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which served as the symbolic gateway to German reunification in 1990. A feature common to these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance, demonstrating popular opposition to the continuation of one-party rule and contributing to pressure for change. Romania was the only country in which citizens and opposition forces used violence to overthrow its communist regime, although Romania was politically isolated from the rest of the Eastern Bloc.

The Crown of the Kingdom of Poland (Polish: Korona Królestwa Polskiego; Latin: Corona Regni Poloniae) was a political and legal concept formed in the 14th century in the Kingdom of Poland, assuming unity, indivisibility and continuity of the state. Under this idea, the state was no longer seen as the patrimonial property of the monarch or dynasty, but became a common good of the political community of the kingdom. This notion allowed the state to maintain stability even during periods of interregnum and paved the way for a unique political system in Poland, characterized by a noble-based parliament and the free election of the monarch. Additionally, the concept of the Crown extended beyond existing borders, asserting that previously lost territories still rightfully belonged to it. The term Crown of the Kingdom of Poland also referred to all the lands under the rule of the Polish king. This meaning became especially significant after the union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, when it began to be commonly used to denote the Polish part of the joint Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The idea of the Crown in Central Europe first appeared in Bohemia and Hungary, from where the model was taken by kings Ladislaus the Short and Casimir III the Great to strengthen their power. During the reign of Louis the Great in Poland, who spent most of his time in Hungary, as well as during the interregnum following his death and the regency during the minority of his daughter Jadwiga, the idea was adopted by the lords of the kingdom to emphasize their own role as co-responsible for the state.

Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, of which the capital Vienna is the most populous city and state. Austria is bordered by Germany to the northwest, the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia to the northeast, Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The country occupies an area of 83,879 km (32,386 sq mi) and has a population of around 9 million.

The area of today's Austria has been inhabited since at least the Paleolithic period. Around 400 BC, it was inhabited by the Celts and then annexed by the Romans in the late 1st century BC. Christianization in the region began in the 4th and 5th centuries, during the late Roman period, followed by the arrival of numerous Germanic tribes during the Migration Period.