A History of Central Eastern Europe

The borders of the countries
discussed herein have been both very
porous as concerns population movements
and very fluid as they have been marked
along many different lines through the
centuries. If the Slovak Republic and the
Republic of Hungary are the equivalent of
the United States, then the equivalent of
New Jersey for our KUTARNYA and SCHMID
ancestors would be Spiš in the Slovenská
republika and Zemplén in the Magyar
Köztársaság. These two branches of our
ever-growing family tree were separated by
just 90 miles, less than the distance from
New York City to Kennett Square,
Pennsylvania! In fact, the countries
themselves were fluid: Hungary, Çzechy,
Slovakia, Poland & the Ukraine cover the
area our Eastern European roots were
planted in … in today’s vernacular. But what
of Bohemia, Moravia, Wallachia even
Transyllvania? [Yes, Virginia, there really was a Count Dracula…no, not Count Chocula,
but DRACULA, or, more correctly, COUNT VLAD II, DRACUL and his son COUNT VLAD III,
DRACULA (Dracula = son of Dracul) who ruled in Wallachia in the first half of the 1400s]
While this work is concerned with the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, it is
important to note some of the major milestones of the area so as to make better sense
of the history of our ancestral homelands. Some of the biggies (all C.E.) were:
c400 – Arrival of the Hunnic tribes
c895 – Arrival of the Magyar tribes
1241 – 1250 Invasion of the Mongolian Tartars
1526 – 1695 Ottoman occupation
1686 – 1918 Germanic/Austrian occupation
1938 – 1945 Germanic/Nazi occupation
1948 – 1989 Communist Russia occupation
In the midst of the Magyar infiltration throughout the region several areas under local
Slavic tribal rule coalesced during the mid-9 th century. They were able to form separate
and identifiable geopolitical entities; these then are the genesis of the Slavic states that
would be continued in our day by the countries of the Czech and Slovak Republics and
some of the “new” countries after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia such as
Slovenia. The Magyar people are discussed more fully in the section on Hungary
beginning on the next page and the discussion on the Slavic people is found at the
beginning of the section on Slovakia. As shown in the following chart, both the Slavic
and the Magyar/Hunnic areas were often contained within the same borders.
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