Czech & Slovak Republics [antikvár]

Introduction Side-by-side in the heart of Europe sit the Czech and Slovak republics. In many ways they're like orphaned siblings raised separately, reunited just as they came of age, but in the end too different to live together. Despite common Slavic roots, and more apparent cultural similarities than differences, Ceske zemS (the 'Czech Lands' of Bohemia and Moravia) and Slovensko (Slovakia) came of age in different geopolitical neighbourhoods following the collapse of the Great Moravian Empire in the 10th century. For a thousand years both were nearly always under someone else's thumb - the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg dynasty for the Czechs, the Hungarian Empire for the Slovaks. In the 19th century, as the Austrian and Hungarian crowns merged, Czechs and Slovaks began re-exploring their national histories in parallel cultural-revival movements. With the defeat of Austria-Hungary in WWI, they declared joint independence as the doughty new state of Czechoslovakia. The partnership didn't go down well with Slovaks, who found themselves at the back end of more than just the country's name. Despite agreements to create a single federal state comprising two equal republics, Prague dominated the levers of power, leaving Bratislava a definite second among supposed equals. Three years after the fall of Europe's Communist dominoes in 1989, the two sibling-states suddenly and formally went their independent ways, as Ceska Republika and Slovenska Republika - a split due less to mutual hatred than to the incompatible ambitions of their respective politicians. But they're still bound together in many ways - by marriages, friendships and mutually comprehensible languages, by having shared the horrors of WWII, the daily fear and frustration of the Communist era, the dashed hopes of the Prague Spring and the