JAŠEK, Peter: Hello, Europe! March across the Iron Curtain in December 1989 and Slovakia's symbolic return to Europe

Two marches were an integral part of the Velvet Revolution in Slovakia, and they framed it to a significant measure. The prologue of the revolutionary events in Slovakia was the march of Bratislava students, especially from the Faculty of Philosophy of Comenius University, on 16 November 1989. The subsequent brutal suppression of the student demonstration in Prague on 17 November 1989 sparked a nationwide upsurge characterized by the gradual mobilization of citizens visiting the squares en masse and demanding political and social change. The second march, forever inscribed into the history of the democratic revolution in 1989, was the Hello, Europe! march on 10 December 1989. It symbolically dismantled the Iron Curtain on the border with Austria, a hated symbol of the Cold War, the divided world and the communist regime that had ruled Czechoslovakia since 1948.