Curated category
Former countries in the Balkans
- Austrian EmpireThe Austrian Empire began with a stroke of the pen in 1804, when Holy Roman Emperor Francis II declared himself Emperor of Austria, creating an entirely new…
- Kingdom of RomaniaThe Kingdom of Romania was born on the 15th of March 1881, when the Romanian parliament raised the country to the status of a kingdom and crowned a German…
- 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.
- Kingdom of SerbiaThe Kingdom of Serbia lasted only thirty-six years, from 1882 to 1918, yet in that brief span it fought four wars, doubled its population, and dissolved…
- Austria-HungaryAustria-Hungary was, for roughly half a century, the second-largest country in Europe by area, surpassed only by Russia.
- First Bulgarian EmpireThe First Bulgarian Empire was born from a humiliation so complete that the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor could barely write it down.
- Latin EmpireThe Latin Empire began with a coronation inside the Hagia Sophia on the 16th of May 1204. Baldwin IX of Flanders, a Crusader from western Europe, sat where…
- Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi.
- Ottoman EmpireThe Ottoman Empire began as a single beylik, a small principality founded around 1299 in northwestern Anatolia by a Turkoman tribal leader named Osman I.
- YugoslaviaYugoslavia was a country that held together, for seven decades, peoples who had spent centuries under the rule of rival empires.