11 articles found
Portugal's Oldest Places: A Guide to the Ancient Sites Every Visitor Should See
Portugal is one of the oldest nation-states in Europe — its borders have remained essentially unchanged since 1139 AD — and its physical landscape tells a much longer story. Here are the ancient and historic sites that every visitor seriously interes...
Why Is It Called Budapest? The History Behind the Name of Hungary's Capital
The name Budapest is one of the most immediately logical city names in Europe — and one of the least known in terms of its actual history. The short answer: Budapest was formed in 1873 by the administrative merger of three separate cities: Buda, Óbud...
The Odessa Catacombs: Ukraine's Vast Underground World
Every great port city has its secrets. In Ukraine's largest Black Sea city, Odessa, the secrets are buried — literally. Beneath the limestone bluffs and wide boulevards of this famous city lies the largest catacomb network in the world: an estimated ...
The Underground Tunnels of Provins: A Medieval World Beneath France
About 77 kilometres southeast of Paris, the medieval market town of Provins rises from the plains of Seine-et-Marne like a perfectly preserved feudal postcard. Its fortified walls, round towers, and timber-framed high streets earned it a place on the...
Bryggen: Bergen's UNESCO World Heritage Hanseatic Waterfront
The row of pointed gables lining Bergen's eastern harbour — red, yellow, ochre, and weathered brown — is one of the most recognised skylines in Scandinavia. Bryggen (simply "the wharf" in Norwegian) was for four centuries the most important node in n...
Oslo's Viking Ship Museum: The World's Best-Preserved Viking Vessels
On the Bygdøy peninsula — Oslo's museum quarter — stands a cross-shaped building of modest exterior and extraordinary interior. The Viking Ship Museum (Vikingskipshuset) holds what is beyond reasonable argument the finest collection of original Vikin...
Viking Age Norway: History, Myths, and Where to Experience It Today
The Viking Age — broadly defined as the period from the first recorded Norse raid (Lindisfarne Monastery, 793 AD) to the Battle of Hastings (1066 AD) — transformed medieval Europe and established Norse seafarers as the most wide-ranging explorers of ...
Who Are the Greek People? Ancient Roots and the Question of Continuity
The question "Are modern Greeks the same people as the ancient Greeks?" has been asked — and answered differently — by Byzantine theologians, Ottoman administrators, 19th-century European Romantics, German philologists, Greek nationalists, and modern...
Why Is Greece Called Greece? The Story Behind the Name
If you ask a Greek person what they call their country, they will say Hellas (Ελλάς or Ελλάδα). They call themselves Hellenes (Έλληνες). The Greek language is Helleniki. Greece, in the eyes of the Greeks, has always been and remains Hellas. So where...
Gdańsk: Where World War II Started — and One of Poland's Greatest Cities
At 4:45am on 1 September 1939, the German warship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte, on the outskirts of Gdańsk. The 182 Polish defenders held for seven days against overwhelming German force. It was ...
Warsaw: The City That Refused to Die — History and What to See
No major European capital suffered more in the Second World War than Warsaw. By January 1945, when Soviet troops entered the city, it was a sea of rubble — 85% of its buildings destroyed, its entire pre-war population of 1.3 million expelled or kille...