Žilina

Sister cities

• Dnipro

History

The area around today's Žilina was inhabited in the late Stone Age (about 20,000 BC). In the 5th century, Slavs started to move into the area. However, the first written reference to Žilina was in 1208 as terra de Selinan. From the second half of the 10th century until 1918, it was part of the Kingdom of Hungary. In the middle of the 13th century, terra Sylna was the property of the Cseszneky de Milvány family. The city started to develop around 1300, and, according to records in 1312, it was already a town. In 1321, King Charles I made Žilina a free royal town. On 7 May 1381, King Louis I issued Privilegium pro Slavis, which made the Slav inhabitants equal to the Germans by allocating half of the seats at the city council to Slavs. The town was burned in 1431 by the Hussites. During the 17th century, Žilina gained a position as a center of manufacturing, trade, and education, and, during the Baroque age, many monasteries and churches, as well as the Budatín Castle, were built. In the Revolutions of 1848, Slovak volunteers, part of the Imperial Army, won a battle near the city against Hungarian honveds and gardists. The city boomed in the second half of the 19th century as new railway tracks were built: the Kassa Oderberg Railway was finished in 1872 and the railway to Bratislava (Pozsony in Hungarian) in 1883, and new factories started to spring up, such as the drapery factory Slovena (1891) and the Považie chemical works (1892). It was one of the first municipalities to sign the Martin Declaration (30 October 1918), and until March 1919, it was the seat of the Slovak government. On 6 October 1938, shortly after the Munich Agreement, the autonomy of Slovakia within Czechoslovakia was declared in Žilina. During the Holocaust in Slovakia, tens of thousands of Jews…