Gods at the Margins: How European Paganism Survived
By the 14th century Christianity had swept many of Europe’s indigenous religions aside, but not all. At the continent’s peripheries paganism survived and, in some cases, thrived.
Eastern Europe
Stalin’s Man in Belgrade
Teodoro Castro or Iosif Grigulevich? Costa Rica’s ambassador to Yugoslavia was a Soviet spy sent to kill Tito.
Habsburg Prague, Capital of the Renaissance
Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning flourished.
How Do Europe’s Cold War Divisions Persist?
East was East and West was West – until 1989. The Wall is gone, but are its Cold War demarcations still there?
Inventing Cyrillic
The Cyrillic alphabet is celebrated across the Slavonic-speaking world, but not only as an appreciation of literacy – it has a political dimension too.
The Birth of Ovid
Writing from exile, the Roman poet Ovid revealed his birth date as 24 March 43 BC. But on the cause of said exile, he was unusually reticent.
The Livonian Knights Battle on the Baltic
On 16 February 1270, the Livonian Knights were defeated at the Battle of Karuse.
Goodbye Eastern Europe by Jacob Mikanowski review
Is it time to say goodbye to Eastern Europe, a world remade so frequently by empires, war and political ideologies that it scarcely stays the same for two generations in a row?
Everyday Misery
Returning to the communist ‘cage’ of a childhood in Albania.
Belarus Remembers
Belarusian memory of the Second World War once helped legitimise the Lukashenka regime. Now it is undermining it.