Bratislava - Britain's Queen Elizabeth II arrived in Slovakia Thursday for her first visit to the ex-communist country that went independent 15 years ago and became an economic success story.

The queen and her husband, Prince Philip, came off a trip to Slovenia, a smaller country to the south that once was part of Yugoslavia.

In Slovakia on Thursday, the queen met with President Ivan Gasparovic, Prime Minister Robert Fico and Sir Nicholas Winton, 99, a Briton who saved hundreds of mostly Czechoslovak Jewish children from Nazi concentration camps on the eve of World War II.

Dressed in a red hat and coat and equipped with an umbrella, she toured the overcast and rainy downtown Bratislava, greeted by hundreds of onlookers.

She also unveiled a memorial dedicated to the Iron Curtain, the heavily fortified frontier between the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War era, at a site near the Slovak-Austrian border outside the capital.

On Friday, the queen's schedule includes a trip to the High Tatra mountains.

She was to visit a historic church and open an ice-hockey friendly between Slovak and British clubs in the mountain city of Poprad.

Excitement spilled from the pages of the Slovak newspapers in the days before the royal stay, scheduled to end Friday.

"The visit of the British Queen Elizabeth II is one of the greatest diplomatic events in Slovakia's contemporary history," the Sme daily newspaper wrote.

"Only a trip by George Bush, Vladimir Putin or Pope John Paul II could match it," the paper said.

Slovakia and the Czech Republic, once united as Czechoslovakia, split ways peacefully in 1993 after communism fell.

Slovakia joined NATO and the European Union in 2004.

In a sign of its economic success, the country of 5.4 million is due to switch to the euro on January 1. (dpa)