Compared to the developments in the Czech lands, where the idea of a Czech nation had become widespread by the late 1800s, the Slovak national awakening was, for a long time, driven by a relatively small group of enthusiasts. In the nineteenth century, the only highbrow artform to be established was literature. The situation changed radically after the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 when the formation of Slovak national culture became an important political goal in the new republic. This chapter explores the roles of Czech musicians, such as Vítězslav Novák, and musicologists, such as Dobroslav Orel, in shaping the concepts of Slovak national music. Additionally, the chapter traces the ways in which these concepts were developed by Slovak composers, such as Ján Levoslav Bella and Eugen Suchoň. Thus, modern musical culture in Slovakia aimed at authenticity while being steeped in the value system of Czech culture.

A decisive event not only for Polish and Lithuanian history, but also for the history of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe was the Union of Kreva in 1385. This not only decided upon the marriage of the Grand Duke Jogaila to Queen Hedwig of Anjou in Poland. Furthermore, the Union of Kreva – in addition to the establishment of a new dynasty, that of the Jagiellons – also formed the cornerstone for the increasingly interwoven history of Poland and Lithuania until the end of the eighteenth century, since it heralded an era of successive Polish-Lithuanian personal unions which favoured the political, economic, and also cultural entwinement of both countries. This chapter is devoted to the geographic horizon of knowledge in general, and travel reports in particular, in these two countries, which were so politically and culturally intertwined from the fourteenth century onwards. Discussing the earliest beginnings of chorographic writing from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance humanist period, I would like to end this overview with the aforementioned, caesura-like Union of Lublin, providing only a brief glimpse of subsequent pre-modern era Polish-Lithuanian travel accounts.