1918–1938 Czechoslovakia, and a border where none had beenČeskoslovensko a hranica, kde nikdy nebola

In 1918–20 the new Czechoslovak-Hungarian border cut the county in two a few kilometres south of the town, and Moldava — Slovak and Hungarian speaking in roughly equal measure — became a Czechoslovak district town. Villages that had shared a market and a parish for centuries now found themselves in different states. Nobody had moved: the state had moved around them, which is the single most useful thing to understand about this whole region's twentieth century. Within twenty years the line would move again, and then again.V rokoch 1918 – 1920 preťala nová československo-maďarská hranica stolicu pár kilometrov južne od mesta a Moldava — zhruba rovnakým dielom slovenská a maďarská — sa stala československým okresným mestom. Dediny, ktoré po stáročia zdieľali trh a faru, sa zrazu ocitli v rôznych štátoch. Nikto sa nepresťahoval: presunul sa štát okolo nich, a to je to najužitočnejšie, čo možno o dvadsiatom storočí tohto kraja pochopiť. O dvadsať rokov sa tá čiara pohla znova — a potom ešte raz.