Town and Village

Abstract

Although some Slav historians claim that the Slavs developed towns of their own, the overwhelming influence on urban development in Eastern Europe has come from outside. Until twentieth century industrialisation the town played a smaller part in everyday life in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. In so many instances it represented a foreign influence, even foreign population, amid rural peasant economies. In the contemporary scene the most urbanised part is in the west—in the German Democratic Republic, in Bohemia—Moravia and in western Poland. The large town-like villages of the Puszta give an anomalous character to urbanisation in Hungary. Small towns are well developed in northern Jugoslavia, but the southern part has a low level of urban development, like Bulgaria and Rumania. Few real towns have existed until recently in Albania. In nearly all these countries the urban scene is dominated by the large capital city, yet only five of Europe’s thirty-nine ‘million cities’ lie in Eastern Europe.