Curated category
Former countries in Europe
- SicilySicily sits at the center of the Mediterranean Sea, the largest and most populous island in that entire body of water, home to more than 4.7 million people.
- East GermanyEast Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic, was born on the 7th of October 1949 from the wreckage of a war and the hardening of a Cold War…
- Russian Provisional GovernmentThe Russian Provisional Government ruled one of the world's largest empires for exactly eight months in 1917, then ceased to exist overnight.
- Crown of AragonThe Crown of Aragon began with a monk who never wanted to be a king. Ramiro II, raised in the Monastery of Saint Pons de Thomières as a Benedictine, was the…
- NorthumbriaNorthumbria was a medieval English kingdom that survived from 654 to 1066 AD, straddling what is now Northern England and Southern Scotland.
- Socialist Republic of RomaniaOn the 25th of December 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad moments after a drumhead court-martial delivered its verdict.
- Crown of CastileThe Crown of Castile carried two names side by side. Sometimes it was called simply Castile. Sometimes, more fully, it was called the Crowns of Castile and…
- Vandal KingdomThe Vandal Kingdom ruled parts of North Africa and the Mediterranean for 99 years, from 435 to 534 AD. Its name lives on today in a word for mindless…
- Kingdom of Great BritainThe Kingdom of Great Britain came into being on the 1st of May 1707, not with a battle or a conquest, but with a signature.
- Roman RepublicThe Roman Republic began with an act of violence and ended with one. In 509 BC, according to Roman tradition, a noblewoman named Lucretia was raped by Sextus…
- Kievan Rus'Kievan Rus' stretched, at its greatest reach in the mid-11th century, from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and from the Carpathian…
- Helvetic RepublicThe Helvetic Republic existed for barely five years. It left Switzerland 12 million francs in debt, against a treasury that had started with only 6 million.
- Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi.
- Nazi GermanyNazi Germany lasted just twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, yet in that span it launched the deadliest war in human history and carried out the systematic…
- ColchisColchis, the ancient Georgian polity that Greek poets called a land of gold, sits at the eastern edge of the Black Sea in what is now western Georgia.
- Ligurian RepublicThe Ligurian Republic was born from a moment of violent upheaval, announced by Napoleon on the 6th of June 1797 after conflict had already torn through Genoa…
- Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet RepublicThe Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic was born from a Soviet invasion, lasted barely fourteen years, and helped write the founding charter…
- Principality of TverThe Principality of Tver once stood as Moscow's most formidable rival for control of the Russian lands. In 1371, its prince was the last ruler outside Moscow…
- Soviet UnionOn the 26th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule.
- Roman EmpireListen to the Roman Empire as more than emperors: the roads, the graffiti, and the slow unbraiding of a state that ran from Scotland to the Sahara.
- PrussiaPrussia stood at the centre of the North European Plain and, for more than four centuries, shaped the fate of an entire continent.
- Grand Duchy of FinlandThe Grand Duchy of Finland occupied a strange middle ground for more than a century: neither fully independent nor fully absorbed, it was a state that…
- Polish–Lithuanian CommonwealthThe Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was, for a stretch of two centuries, the largest country in Europe by territory. On the 1st of July 1569, the Union of…