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Moravia
The eastern Czech land of the Morava River, wine country, and an early Slavic state
Moravia, the eastern third of Czechia, takes its name from the Morava River and its story from one of the first Slavic states in Central Europe. In the 9th century Great Moravia welcomed the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius, whose Slavonic liturgy and alphabet later spread across much of Eastern Europe. For most of the following thousand years Moravia was a margraviate under the Bohemian crown, distinct but never independent. Its land government was abolished in 1949, yet Moravia survives as a historical and cultural region with its own dialects, wine country, and folk traditions, and in recent Czech censuses hundreds of thousands of people have declared their nationality as Moravian.
Moravia covers about 22,350 square kilometers between the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands on the west and the White Carpathians and Beskids on the east. The Morava flows south through its center, past Olomouc and the fertile Haná plain, to meet the Thaya (Dyje) and then the Danube where Austria and Slovakia meet. The south, around Brno, Mikulov, and the Lednice–Valtice estate, is the Czech Republic's main wine region, while the Moravian Gate in the northeast has long served as a corridor between the Danube basin and the plains toward the Baltic. About 3 million people live there. All of Moravia lies within Czechia today, mostly in the South Moravian, Zlín, Olomouc, and Vysočina regions and the southern Moravian-Silesian Region.
Great Moravia formed around 833 and collapsed under Magyar attacks in the early 10th century. The Přemyslid rulers of Bohemia then absorbed Moravia, which from 1182 was a margraviate and from 1348 a crown land of the Bohemian Crown with its own diet. Olomouc served as its capital until Swedish troops occupied it during the Thirty Years' War, after which Brno became the seat of the land. Moravia passed with Bohemia to the Habsburgs in 1526 and to Czechoslovakia in 1918, which in 1920 added the Valtice area from Lower Austria. In 1928 Czechoslovakia merged Moravia with Czech Silesia into the Moravian-Silesian Land, which the communist government abolished in 1949. Since 1993 it has formed the eastern part of the Czech Republic.