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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 GovernmentOn the 2nd of March, 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his throne. This event occurred two days before the official announcement of a new government.
  • 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 6th of March 1945, a new pro-Soviet government took power in Bucharest after mass demonstrations by communist sympathizers and intense political…
  • Crown of CastileIn 1230, Ferdinand III stepped onto the vacant throne of León to claim a crown that had been his father's. He inherited Castile from his mother Queen…
  • 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 RepublicOn the 5th of March 1798, French troops completely overran Switzerland and the Old Swiss Confederation collapsed. The invasion proceeded largely peacefully…
  • 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 Russian Empire dissolved in 1918, leaving the Caucasus provinces to form their own Transcaucasian Federation. This new state lasted only two months…
  • Principality of TverIn 1246, Yaroslav Yaroslavich became the first prince of Tver. This event marked the detachment of the city from the Pereyaslavl-Zalessky principality.
  • 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 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…
  • 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…