Curated playlist
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 state out of thin air. He did it because he was afraid: Napoleon had just…
- 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 prince as its first king. That prince, Karl Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig von…
- 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…
- 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 itself into a larger state that would shape the twentieth century. When Milan I had…
- Austria-HungaryAustria-Hungary was, for roughly half a century, the second-largest country in Europe by area, surpassed only by Russia. From 1867 to 1918, it held together a patchwork of a dozen or more distinct peoples under a single emperor who wore…
- 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. After a disastrous defeat in 680, the Emperor Constantine IV was compelled to sign a…
- 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 Eastern Roman emperors had sat for centuries, wearing the regalia of a civilization…
- 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…
- 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. From that obscure frontier holding, his successors built a state that stretched…
- YugoslaviaYugoslavia was a country that held together, for seven decades, peoples who had spent centuries under the rule of rival empires. Its name meant simply "Land of the South Slavs." It was born from the wreckage of World War I, collapsed in…