Curated playlist
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. Its triangular shape gave it an ancient Greek name, Trinacria, meaning "having…
- 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 divide. It lasted exactly forty-one years. In that time, a state that began with a…
- 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. It was announced two days before Nicholas II signed away the throne on the 2nd of March, and it…
- 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 youngest of three brothers in the Aragonese royal line. When his brother Alfonso I…
- NorthumbriaNorthumbria was a medieval English kingdom that survived from 654 to 1066 AD, straddling what is now Northern England and Southern Scotland. Its name meant, quite literally, the people north of the Humber. Between its first king and its…
- 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. The trial lasted an hour and a half. Just days before, Ceaușescu had been…
- 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 León. That double name survived because, for a long stretch of its history, one…
- 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 destruction: vandalism. Yet the story of this kingdom is far more complicated than that…
- 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. Two ancient kingdoms, England and Scotland, folded themselves into a single state through a Treaty of Union agreed…
- 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 Tarquinius, son of the king. The outrage that followed swept the monarchy from…
- 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 Mountains in the west to the Taman Peninsula in the east. That is an enormous…
- 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. On the 12th of April 1798, 121 cantonal deputies proclaimed it "One and…
- Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi. Their Islamic contemporaries named their realm the land of the Romans, Bilad al-Rum. The word…
- 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 murder of millions of people. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on the…
- 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. Between 70 and 300 languages were spoken in the single city of Dioscourias alone,…
- 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 the previous month. One of Europe's oldest independent trading states had just…
- 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 of the USSR itself. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, three ancient nations…
- 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 ever to hold the title of grand prince of Vladimir, the most coveted seat of…
- Soviet UnionOn the 26th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule. The country he led had spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until that day. It was the…
- Roman EmpireThe Roman Empire was one of the most expansive and enduring political structures the ancient world produced, stretching from Hadrian's Wall in drizzle-soaked northern England to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syria. At its height…
- PrussiaPrussia stood at the centre of the North European Plain and, for more than four centuries, shaped the fate of an entire continent. From a secularized monastic territory in 1525 to the engine of German unification in 1871, its story touches…
- 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 governed itself under the shadow of a foreign emperor. In 1809, after Sweden lost the…
- 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 Lublin brought together the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into a…