Habsburg Prague, Capital of the Renaissance
Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning flourished.
Eastern Europe
How Do Europe’s Cold War Divisions Persist?
East was East and West was West – until 1989. The Wall is gone, but are its Cold War demarcations still there?
Inventing Cyrillic
The Cyrillic alphabet is celebrated across the Slavonic-speaking world, but not only as an appreciation of literacy – it has a political dimension too.
The Birth of Ovid
Writing from exile, the Roman poet Ovid revealed his birth date as 24 March 43 BC. But on the cause of said exile, he was unusually reticent.
The Livonian Knights Battle on the Baltic
On 16 February 1270, the Livonian Knights were defeated at the Battle of Karuse.
Goodbye Eastern Europe by Jacob Mikanowski review
Is it time to say goodbye to Eastern Europe, a world remade so frequently by empires, war and political ideologies that it scarcely stays the same for two generations in a row?
Everyday Misery
Returning to the communist ‘cage’ of a childhood in Albania.
Belarus Remembers
Belarusian memory of the Second World War once helped legitimise the Lukashenka regime. Now it is undermining it.
The Velvet Revolution In The Regions
Viewed from Prague, the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia was ‘joyful’. But, as some Czechs would discover, not all revolutions are equal.
‘The Last Front’ of the Freikorps
Events in the Baltic States at the end of the First World War had serious long-term consequences.