The tourism region of the Tatras encompasses today the northern half
(except for a tiny tip lying in Poland) of what used to be Scepusium or Szepes
County. It was a part of the Kingdom of Hungary from the creation of the county
in the second half of the 12th century to 1918 when Austria-Hungary ceased to
exist and Czechoslovakia was created. This northern borderland was never really
inhabited by Hungarians, but up until the last world war there was a
substantial population of Carpathian Germans in Spiš or "Zips",
