History comes full circle

Ruso remembers darker days.

Slovakia and Hungary, both once parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its demise with World War I, were rivals from the first days of Slovak independence with the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993.

A long-running war of words, however, escalated into full-blown diplomatic crisis a little over a decade ago, exacerbated by hard-line nationalists on both sides of the border.

In Slovakia in 1999, Jan Slota, leader of the Slovak National Party that would enter government seven years later, warned he would “flatten Budapest with tanks” and called the Hungarian minority in Slovakia “a cancer on the body of the Slovak nation”.

Issues of language, geographical names and statues all served to inflame tensions, climaxing in 2009 when then Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom was denied entry to Slovakia.

In Rajka, when a Slovak real estate company began promoting the town as “Bratislava VI”, suggesting the town was effectively the Slovak capital’s sixth district, Ruso recalled members of the far-right Hungarian party Jobbik descending on the town to protest.

“I met them at this demonstration and wanted to shake their hands, but they refused, because I’m Slovak,” Ruso said. “Luckily, I was in the company of my Hungarian colleague, who explained I’m also a good man.”

A decade later, tempers have calmed.

“We learned how to work on our problems,” said Rajka’s Hungarian Mayor, Vince Kiss

“Even if I may think that this is a political mistake that Slovakia is so centralised around Bratislava, we accept it and we are happy to host those who make their earnings there.”

We learned how to work on our problems. – Rajka Mayor Vince Kiss

Karoly Kato, a train dispatcher with a Hungarian flag flying proudly atop his house, said he had many Slovak friends.

“There are always bad people on both sides,” he said. “I regularly play football with Slovaks.”

Kato said his neighbour was Slovak, but did not speak Hungarian. “So I learned some basic Slovak to get along with him.”

In many ways, history has come full circle. In the 19th Century, Rajka was mainly inhabited by Germans, their names dominating a memorial to the town’s victims of World War I.

There were Jews too, until the Holocaust, their memory honoured in May this year by a broken memorial stone placed in the yard of what was once a synagogue.

Now, after decades of being purely Hungarian, Rajka is again multinational, despite the rise of Orban.