I'm Slovak, and when I was a kid, I was really wondering what is the thing that makes people Slovak, what is the unifying thing. And only later in life I realized, that there is not much to it. It's just people that happened to be living in this area and stayed throughout the different times. Many cultures came and left. All the slavic languages we kind of fluid for a very long time, the standardization is recent, if you look at it from global point of view. The sad part is, this is not really even taught in local schools. And I also find it fascinating, that it's such a wild blend of cultures and yet the country/nature where the people lived formed them to something unique.