Curated playlist
Regions of Europe
- Eastern EuropeEastern Europe has almost as many definitions as scholars who study it. Its western edge is the hard part.
- Western EuropeAsk three experts to map Western Europe and you get three answers.
- ScandinaviaScandinavia's name may have once meant 'dangerous island.' It may point to sandbanks off southern Sweden.
- Central EuropeA picnic on the Austria-Hungary border in 1989 opened the Iron Curtain.
- East PrussiaEast Prussia held 2.49 million people in 1939, but only 193,000 survivors by spring 1945.
- SudetenlandThe name Sudetenland did not exist until the early 20th century. It later became the flashpoint of a crisis over Munich.
- South CaucasusThe South Caucasus sits on the edge of Iran, Russia and Turkey, which explains why empires kept fighting over it.
- Baltic regionNorway and Iceland sit in the Baltic region without touching the Baltic Sea.
- Italian PeninsulaThe Italian Peninsula strictly leaves out northern Italy. Geographers start it south of the Po Valley.
- Iberian PeninsulaThe name Iberian Peninsula is only about 200 years old. A French geographer coined it in 1823.
- Baltic statesOn the 23rd of August 1989, two million people formed a human chain across the Baltics.
- Continental EuropeIn 1994, Britain was joined to continental Europe for the first time in roughly 8,000 years.
- BalkansThe Balkans got their name from a mountain range in Bulgaria. Those mountains do not even dominate the region.
- BoeotiaBoeotia, a regional unit of Greece with Livadeia as its capital and Thebes as its largest city, was once the target of Athenian mockery. Athenians called its people Hog-Boeotians, and they claimed Boeotian ears were incapable of…
- Nordic countriesThe Nordic countries stretch across five time zones. In September 2021 just over 27 million people lived there.