The One Day Republic

Norman Davies has a fascinating book list and interview up, dealing with lost nations, past, present and most likely future. In among Poland-Lithuania and the fate of the Eurozone, there's a nice tidbit about a country with a tiny lifespan:

The past is full of everything. Great powers, obscure powers – which may have other achievements to their name. There are powers which last for centuries, but I found a republic which lasted for one day.
Goodness me. Which day?

March 15, 1939. The republic of Subcarpathian Ruthenia. It was the day that Hitler marched into Prague. The Germans swallowed Bohemia and Moravia, formed a protectorate and Slovakia became a client statelet of the Reich. And the third part of Czechoslovakia, this Subcarpathian Ruthenia, was left with nobody to tell it what to do. So it declared its independence at around 10 o’clock in the morning. And by the evening the Hungarian army arrived and swallowed it up. Fortunately there was a British travel writer – or someone posing as such – there at the time who described all this.

Read the whole thing, and then buy all of the books on the list.

(via bookslut)