The High Tatras & Eastern Slovakia

The Tatars devastated the region in 1241, and afterwards King Béla IV invited German colonists to rebuild. They founded the towns of Spiš, among them Levoča, Kežmarok and Spišská Nová Ves, and gave them wide privileges; in 1412 King Sigismund pawned sixteen of them to Poland, which kept them until 1772. Spiš Castle grew from the 12th century into one of the largest castle sites in Slovakia, and Levoča became rich on trade, commissioning the huge carved altar of Master Paul in the early 16th century. In Šariš, Bardejov prospered as a trading town on the road to Poland.

Košice, a royal free town from the 14th century, was the chief city of Upper Hungary and a centre of the Protestant nobles' uprisings against Habsburg rule in the 17th and early 18th centuries; Francis II Rákóczi, who led the last of them, was reburied in its cathedral in 1906. Prešov, where Protestant noblemen were executed in 1687, and the Carpathian villages of the north-east, settled by Rusyns, lay on the frontier with Poland and Galicia.

In the 20th century Košice changed hands repeatedly: it was part of Czechoslovakia from 1920, Hungary from 1938 to 1945, and in April 1945 was the seat of the Košice Government Programme that shaped post-war Czechoslovakia. Most of the region's Jews were deported in 1942 and 1944. Communist planners built a vast steelworks at Košice, and the High Tatras became a mass holiday destination, only for a windstorm in November 2004 to flatten large areas of their forest.

The east is Slovakia's most varied region. Spiš keeps traces of its German past in its architecture and in surnames; the Gorals of Ždiar, below the Belianske Tatras, speak a dialect close to Polish and are known for their log houses. Rusyns in the north-east, around Svidník, Medzilaborce and Humenné, speak their own East Slavic language and follow the Greek Catholic or Orthodox church, and Andy Warhol, whose parents emigrated from the village of Miková, has a museum in Medzilaborce. Along the southern border many towns are Hungarian-speaking, and the region has Slovakia's largest Roma communities.

The eastern Slovak dialects, with their stress on the second-to-last syllable, sound distinctly different from the standard language, and easterners are known across the country for their warmth and their hospitality at weddings and village feasts. Wooden churches are a defining sight: the Greek Catholic churches of the Carpathian villages, with their onion domes and painted icon screens, and the Lutheran articular church in Kežmarok.

Košice has a university and theatre life that earned it the title of European Capital of Culture in 2013, and its Peace Marathon, first run in 1924, is the oldest marathon in Europe. Village Easter customs, pilgrimages to Levoča's Marian hill, and folk ensembles in Šariš and Zemplín keep older traditions alive.

Košice, with about 225,000 people, is Slovakia's second city; Prešov, with about 85,000, is the third. Poprad, Spišská Nová Ves, Michalovce, Humenné and Bardejov are the other main towns, and much of the population lives in villages.

The east is the poorest part of Slovakia. Košice's steelworks remains the city's largest employer, and the city has grown IT and service firms, but many districts in the north-east and along the southern border have high unemployment, and many easterners have left to work in Bratislava, Czechia, the United Kingdom and Germany. Segregated Roma settlements on the edges of villages, many without basic services, remain the region's hardest social problem.

Tourism sustains the Tatras and Spiš, where the resorts fill in summer and at New Year and Poprad serves as the service town. Elsewhere, life follows the farming year and the weekly rhythm of commuting, church and family gatherings, and fixing Košice's link to the national motorway network has been a local cause for decades.

The east eats heartily. Pirohy, half-moon dumplings filled with potato and bryndza or with sweetened curd cheese, are an everyday dish, often topped with fried onion or sour cream, and holubky, cabbage leaves stuffed with minced meat and rice, are festive food. Kapustnica here is often cooked with dried mushrooms and sausage, and in the Tatras Goral cooks serve smoked sheep's cheeses such as oštiepok.

Zemplín, in the south-east, is the Slovak part of the Tokaj wine region, a small area of volcanic hills around Malá Tŕňa, Viničky and Veľká Tŕňa. It makes dry and sweet whites from the Furmint, Lipovina and Muškát žltý grapes, and above all Tokajský výber, a sweet wine made by adding botrytised, shrivelled berries to the base wine and ageing it in cellars cut into the rock.

Šariš, the beer from the brewery at Veľký Šariš near Prešov, is one of Slovakia's best-known lagers. Fruit brandies are made in every village, and in Spiš and the Tatras hot tea spiked with rum or borovička is the drink of the ski slopes.

The High Tatras rise abruptly above the Poprad basin. Štrbské Pleso and Popradské Pleso are glacial lakes on the main walking routes, Starý Smokovec is the base for the funicular to Hrebienok and the waterfalls of the Studená dolina, and a cable car climbs from Tatranská Lomnica to the summit of Lomnický štít. Gerlachovský štít, the highest peak in the Carpathians at about 2,655 metres, is normally climbed with a certified mountain guide, while Rysy on the Polish border is the classic summit for walkers. The quieter Belianske Tatras rise above Ždiar, and further north-east the Dunajec gorge in the Pieniny is run on wooden rafts from Červený Kláštor.

South of the Tatras, the Slovak Paradise has gorges such as Suchá Belá and the Prielom Hornádu, climbed by ladders and chains, and the ice cave at Dobšiná. Spiš Castle's ruins crown a hill above Spišské Podhradie and the church town of Spišská Kapitula; Levoča has its walls, its town hall and Master Paul's altar in the Church of St James; and Kežmarok has a castle and its timber articular church.

Košice's main street runs past the cathedral of St Elisabeth, the largest church in Slovakia, the State Theatre and the singing fountain. Bardejov's square is lined with gabled Gothic and Renaissance houses, and the spa of Bardejovské Kúpele nearby has an open-air museum of wooden buildings. Wooden churches dot the villages of the north-east, and in the south the Slovak Karst has show caves such as Domica, and the Zádiel gorge, with the manor house of Betliar nearby.