Košice
Košice is the largest city in eastern Slovakia. It is situated on the river Hornád at the eastern reaches of the Slovak Ore Mountains, near the border with Hungary. With a population of approximately 240,000, Košice is the second-largest city in Slovakia, after the capital Bratislava. Being the economic and cultural centre of eastern Slovakia, Košice is the seat of the Košice Region and Košice Self-governing Region, the Slovak Constitutional Court, three universities, various dioceses, and many museums, galleries, and theatres.
History
The first evidence of inhabitance can be traced back to the end of the Paleolithic era. The first written reference to the Hungarian town of Kassa (as the royal village – Villa Cassa) comes from 1230. After the Mongol invasion in 1241, King Béla IV of Hungary invited German colonists to fill the gaps in population. The city was in the historic Abauj County of the Kingdom of Hungary.
The city was made of two independent settlements: Lower Kassa and Upper Kassa, amalgamated in the 13th century around the long lens-formed ring, of today's Main Street. The first known town privileges come from 1290. The city proliferated because of its strategic location on an international trade route from agriculturally rich central Hungary to central Poland, itself along a greater route connecting the Balkans and the Adriatic and Aegean seas to the Baltic Sea. The privileges given by the king were helpful in developing crafts, business, increasing importance (seat of the royal chamber for Upper Hungary), and building its strong fortifications. In 1307, the first guild regulations were registered here and were the oldest in the Kingdom of Hungary.
As a Hungarian free royal town, Kassa reinforced the king's troops in the crucial moment of the bloody Battle of Rozgony in 1312 against the strong aristocratic Palatine Amadé Aba (family). In 1347, it became the second-place city in the hierarchy of the Hungarian free royal towns with the same rights as the capital Buda. In 1369, it received its own coat of arms from Louis I of Hungary. The Diet convened by Louis I in Kassa decided that women could inherit the Hungarian throne.
The significance and wealth of the city at the end of the 14th century were mirrored by the decision to build an entirely new church on the grounds of the previously destroyed smaller St. Elisabeth Church. The construction of the biggest cathedral in the Kingdom of Hungary – St. Elisabeth Cathedral – was supported by Emperor Sigismund, and by the apostolic see itself. Since the beginning of the 15th century, the city played a leading role in the Pentapolitana – the league of towns of the five most important cities in Upper Hungary (Bártfa, Locse, Kassa, Eperjes, and Kisszeben). During the reign of King Hunyadi Mátyás, the town reached its medieval population peak. With an estimated 10,000 inhabitants, it was among the largest medieval cities in Europe.
The history of Kassa was heavily influenced by the dynastic disputes over the Hungarian throne. Together with the decline of the continental trade brought the city into stagnation. Vladislaus III of Varna failed to capture the city in 1441. John Jiskra's mercenaries from Bohemia defeated Tamás Székely's Hungarian army in 1449. John I Albert, Prince of Poland, could not capture the city during a six-month-long siege in 1491. In 1526, the city homaged for Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor. John Zápolya captured the town in 1536 but Ferdinand I reconquered the city in 1551. In 1554, the settlement became the seat of the Captaincy of Upper Hungary.
In 1604, Catholics seized the Lutheran church in Kassa. The Calvinist Stephen Bocskay then occupied Kassa during his Protestant, Ottoman-backed insurrection against the Habsburg dynasty. The future George I Rákóczi joined him as a military commander there. Giorgio Basta, commander of the Habsburg forces, failed in his attempt to capture the city. At the Treaty of Vienna (1606), in return for giving territory including Kassa back, the rebels won the Habsburg concession of religious toleration for the Magyar nobility and brokered an Austrian-Turkish peace treaty. Stephen Bocskay died in Kassa on December 29, 1606, and was interred there.
For some decades during the 17th century, Kassa was part of the Principality of Transylvania, and consequently a part of the Ottoman Empire and was referred to as Kaşa in Turkish. On September 5, 1619, the prince of Transylvania, Gabriel Bethlen captured Kassa with the assistance of the future George I Rákóczi in another anti-Habsburg insurrection. By the Peace of Nikolsburg in 1621, the Habsburgs restored the religious toleration agreement of 1606 and recognized Transylvanian rule over the seven Partium countries: Ugocsa, Bereg, Zemplén, Borsod, Szabolcs, Szatmár and Abaúj (including Kassa). Bethlen married Catherine von Hohenzollern, of Johann Sigismund Kurfürst von Brandenburg, in Kassa in 1626.
Kassa and the rest of the Partium were returned to the Habsburgs after Bethlen's death, which took place in 1629.
On January 18, 1644, the Diet in Kassa elected George I Rákóczi the prince of Hungary. He took the whole of Upper Hungary and joined the Swedish army besieging Brno for a projected march against Vienna. However, his nominal overlord, the Ottoman Sultan, ordered him to end the campaign, but he did so with gains. In the Treaty of Linz (1645), Kassa returned to Transylvania again as the Habsburgs recognized George's rule over the seven counties of the Partium. He died in 1648, and Kassa was returned to the Habsburgs once more.
Kassa became a centre of the Counter-Reformation. In 1657, a printing house and university were founded by the Jesuits, founded by Emperor Leopold I. The 1664 Peace of Vasvár at the end of the Austro-Turkish War (1663-1664) awarded Szabolcs and Szatmár counties to the Habsburgs, which put Kassa further inside the border of Royal Hungary again. A modern pentagonal fortress (citadel) was built by the Habsburgs south of the city in the 1670s. The city was besieged by Kuruc armies several times in the 1670s, and it revolted against the Habsburg emperor. The rebel leaders were massacred by the emperor's soldiers on November 26, 1677.
Another rebel leader, Imre Thököly captured the city in 1682, making Kaşa once again a vassal territory of the Ottoman Empire under the Principality of Upper Hungary until 1686. The Austrian field marshal Aeneas de Caprara got Kassa back from Ottoman Turks in late-1685. In 1704–1711 Prince of Transylvania Francis II Rákóczi made Košice the main base in his War for Independence. The fortress was demolished by 1713.
When not under Ottoman suzerainty, Kassa was the seat of the Habsburg "Captaincy of Upper Hungary" and the chair of the Chamber of Szepes County (Spiš, Zips), which was a subsidiary of the supreme financial agency in Vienna responsible for Upper Hungary). Due to the Ottoman occupation of Eger, Kassa was the residence of Eger's archbishop from 1596 to 1700.
From 1657, it was the seat of the historic Royal University of Kassa (Universitas Cassoviensis), founded by Bishop Benedict Kishdy. The university was transformed into a Royal Academy in 1777, then into a Law Academy in the 19th century. It ceased to exist in the turbulent year of 1921. After the end of the anti-Habsburg uprisings in 1711, the victorious Austrian armies drove the Ottoman forces back to the south, and this major territorial change created new trade routes which circumvented Košice. The city began to decay and turned from a rich medieval town into a provincial town known for its military base and dependent mainly on agriculture.
In 1723, the Immaculata statue was erected in the place of a former gallows at Hlavná ulica (Main Street) commemorating the plague from the years 1710–1711. This was one of the centres of the Hungarian linguistic revival, which published the first Hungarian-language periodical called the Magyar Museum in Hungary in 1788. The city's walls were demolished step by step from the early 19th century to 1856; only the Executioner's Bastion remained with few parts of the wall. The city became the seat of its own bishopric in 1802. The city's surroundings became a theatre of war again during the Revolutions of 1848, when the Imperial cavalry general Franz Schlik defeated the Hungarian army on December 8, 1848, and January 4, 1849. The city was captured by the Hungarian army on February 15, 1849, but the Russian troops drove them back on June 24, 1849.
In 1828, there were three manufacturers and 460 workshops. The first factories were established in the 1840s (sugar and nail factories). The first telegram message arrived in 1856, and the railway connected the city to Miskolc in 1860. In 1873, there were already connections to Eperjes, Zsolna, and Csop (in today's Ukraine). The city gained a public transit system in 1891 when the track was laid down for a horse-drawn tramway. The traction was electrified in 1914. In 1906, Francis II Rákóczi's house of Rodostó was reproduced in Kassa, and his remains were buried in the St. Elisabeth Cathedral.
After World War I and during the gradual break-up of Austria-Hungary, the city at first became a part of the transient "Eastern Slovak Republic", declared on December 11, 1918, in Košice and earlier in Prešov under the protection of Hungary. On December 29, 1918, the Czechoslovak Legions entered the city, making it part of the newly established Czechoslovakia. However, in June 1919, Košice has occupied again, as part of the Slovak Soviet Republic, a proletarian puppet state of Hungary. The Czechoslovak troops secured the city for Czechoslovakia in July 1919, which was later upheld under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.
The fate of Košice Jews
Jews had lived in Košice since the 16th century but were not allowed to settle permanently. There is a document identifying the local coiner in 1524 as a Jew and claiming that his predecessor was a Jew as well. Jews were allowed to enter the city during the town fair, but were forced to leave it by night, and lived mostly in nearby Rozunfaca. In 1840 the ban was removed, and, a few Jews were living in the town, among them a widow who ran a small Kosher restaurant for the Jewish merchants passing through the town.
Košice was ceded to Hungary, by the First Vienna Award, from 1938 until early 1945. The town was bombarded on June 26, 1941, by a still unidentified aircraft, in what became a pretext for the Hungarian government to declare war on the Soviet Union a day later.
The German occupation of Hungary led to the deportation of Košice's entire Jewish population of 12,000 and an additional 2,000 from surrounding areas via cattle cars to the concentration camps.
In 1946, after the war, Košice was the site of an orthodox Zionist revival, with a Mizrachi convention and a Bnei Akiva Yeshiva (school) for refugees, which, later that year, moved with its students to Israel.
A memorial plaque in honour of 12,000 Jews deported from Košice and the surrounding areas in Slovakia was unveiled at the pre-war Košice Orthodox synagogue in 1992.
Soviet occupation
The Soviet Union captured the town in January 1945, and for a short time, it became a temporary capital of the restored Czechoslovak Republic until the Red Army had reached Prague. Among other acts, the Košice Government Programme was declared on April 5, 1945.
A large population of ethnic Germans in the area was expelled and sent on foot to Germany or to the Soviet border.
After the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia seized power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the city became part of the Eastern Bloc. Several cultural institutions that still exist were founded, and large residential areas around the city were built. The construction and expansion of the East Slovak Ironworks caused the population to grow from 60,700 in 1950 to 235,000 in 1991. Before the breakup of Czechoslovakia (1993), it was the fifth-largest city in the federation.
Under Slovakia
Following the Velvet Divorce and the creation of the Slovak Republic, Košice became the second-largest city in the country and became a seat of a constitutional court. Since 1995, it has been the seat of the Archdiocese of Košice.