New Reader, 121 on the nation list

The High Tatra Mountains, northern Slovakia

I want to go there. So I thought when a reader from the 121st country to click on the blog arrived...Slovakia. Of course, when I grew up it was part of Czechoslovakia, carrying a long history of invasion and turmoil in central Europe. But not now.

Map from the CIA

After a "Velvet Divorce" as part of the "Velvet Revolution" in 1992, the former country became two. It had the highest economic growth rate for three years  in the late 2000s, before voting against the Greece bailout by the EU. But it is still flourishing, and made recent news for women business people emulating Steve Jobs. See the New York Times article.

Ancient castle overlooking Danube, in capital of Bratislava
originally build including stones from Roman ruins.

It's taken a long time to get there, since the Slavs began arriving in the area in the fifth and sixth centuries. It's been part of various empires and invasions, including the Moravian Empire, testified to by castles on many hills. any castles. Longest was the Kingdom of Hungary from 1,000 to 1919. Relatively peaceful after WWI when it became Czechoslovakia, the country was sold down the river by Britain in 1938 when Chamberlain gave in to Hitler at Munich. Slovakia caved to Hitler during WWII.
A communist coup in 1938 put the country under the control of the USSR until 1989-90 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the USSR.
Now the country has about 5.4 million people and is somewhere between the size of South Carolina and Mississippi. Slovakia has its own website or if you spell it in Slovak, Slovensko .  More about the country can be found on the European website.

There is one famous Slovakian you've heard of--Andy Warhol, whose parents were Slovakians. Another Slovak of note, to whom many aviators owe their lives, was  Štefan Banič--who invented the parachute in 1913.
The country's flag colors echo several Slavic countries, with white, blue and red. Except for the Slovak coat of arms, it would be identical to Russia. It's also very similar to Slovenia's flag, a country it is often confused with, even by world leaders. 
The Slovak name for the country, Slovensko, is identical to Slovenian word for the Slovenian language,That’s just one of the near-similarities between Slovenia and Slovakia that cause confusion for outsiders.  And the fact that they’re both in the EU, both in NATO, both formerly part of Austria-Hungary, and both border Austria.

Real "Red" states, rebellion, flags and freedom-1

This is a complicated story of several countries and flags, two of their descendants. and a heritage of war, communism and independence.

Slovenia's flag today

How else could I summarize the countries  and flags of many readers of this blog, Slovenia and Vietnam, both of which have involved American history and affected American politics? In fact, Slovenia ranks tenth in the number of all time readers, and I, who pride myself on geography, had to look it up on the map, even though I knew where Yugoslavia and The Balkans were.
When I grew up in the Cold War, These were "Red" states--Communists. Slovenia was a member of the country Yugoslavia, headed by the dictator Tito who had fought the Nazis in WWII. But when we were all afraid of communism, Tito was as close as we could get to a good Communist because he maintained independence from the USSR. Still though, Yugoslavia's flag carried that dreaded red star we associated with Russia.

Yugoslavian flag, 1945-1991

The area of Yugoslavia, which means "Southern Slavs," has and long and turbulent history, part of the Balkans where World War I was started when Serbs assassinated the Austrian Duke Ferdinand in 1914 in Sarajevo, fighting Austrian dominance. After the war, the country was formed in 1918 as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. It became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929.
Invaded by the Axis in 1941, the Partisan Resistance Movement, led by Tito, added the red star to the middle of their flags, including Slovenia's. At the end of the war, the national flag of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia continued the red star, until the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991.

That again brought a three-year war to the region and involved American, NATO and Russian forces trying to settle conflicts between the new countries of Bosnia / Herzegovina and Croatia, neighbors to Slovenia and Macedonia--all former parts of Yugoslavia. As a matter of fact,  residents of all those countries have been readers of this blog.
 Today, the national flag, designed in 1991, features three equal horizontal bands of white, blue and red, with the Slovenian coat of arms in the upper hoist side of the flag centred in the white and blue bands. The coat of arms is a shield with the image of Mount Triglav, Slovenia's highest peak, in white against a blue background at the center; beneath it are two wavy blue lines for the Adriatic sea and local rivers, and above it are three six-pointed golden stars arranged in an inverted triangle which are taken from the coat of arms of a great Slovenian dynastic house of the late 14th and early 15th centuries.
The flag's colors come from a medieval coat of arms. The existing tricolor dates from 1894 in the Spring of Nations, designed by a group of students in the capital of Ljubljana.
I told you it was complicated...flags have such interesting stories matching those of their countries.  Next, Vietnam.