Many railways across Europe were built to satisfy military ambition. In the hinterland of Berlin there is a railway line which was constructed quite explicitly as a military plaything. In the Nazi period, the very existence of this railway ...

The last pulses of the wave of Quaternary glaciations in Europe left some distinct glacial spillways across the North European Plain. These short-lived channels were important for meltwater from a decaying ice sheet. Three of the spillways can be ...

There are some small populated islands off the coast of Sicily which have never recorded a single COVID infection. And, by comparison with many European countries, Iceland has consistently shown low incidence ...

It was never really efficient that wide-bodied jets would take to the sky in Dublin, and then make a brief stop at Shannon Airport near Ireland’s west coast, where Aer Lingus aircraft would share space on the tarmac with planes in Aeroflot or ...

Fifty years ago adventurous travellers were heading off from Europe to ride the Taurus Express or to explore a desert bus route which linked three capital ...

Do you know your Sylvaner from your Muscat? Your Pinot Gris from your Pinot Blanc? Here’s a quick and easy guide to the nine main varieties of grapes used in the production of various Alsace wines. We would wager that there may be one or two ...

There are islands which never lose their island status. And then there are islands which come and go with every tide. Such fragments of land, which are only proper islands at low tide, are called drying islands or tidal islands. We look at some ...

Pull off the main highway just west of Ekaterinburg and you'll find a fairly new monument that purports to mark the border between Asia and Europe. The design recalls the Eiffel Tower in Paris, a nice reminder that Ekaterinburg iron was used to ...

The steep topography around the Hungarian capital, especially on the west bank of the Danube, meant that great ingenuity was needed in developing public transport. Examples are the famous funicular up to Buda Castle and a cog railway, both dating ...

The privacy of a cosy compartment is part of the appeal of the overnight train. The pandemic has changed attitudes and travellers are now mightily aware of the importance of space and privacy. So it is no wonder that demand for night sleeper ...

The downturn in travel is being felt in Europe’s ferry industry as service frequencies are trimmed on some routes and other links are axed entirely. We take a look at how services to Norway and Sweden have fared during the ...

The German city of Wuppertal marks the bicentenary of the birth of Friedrich Engels this autumn. He was born in the Barmen district of Wuppertal on 28 November ...

A new series of guidebooks from Vertebrate Publishing invites readers to explore some of Europe’s great long walks. We review the debut title which focuses on western Europe and the ...

Mishar Tatars and Lipka Tatars have been quick to assimilate into the communities to which they migrated. We discover how they moved through the Baltic region, settling in Lithuania and Finland, with some moving on to Sweden and the United States ...

Who was Dr Esperanto (Dr Hope)? He was an ophthalmologist by profession, but he is most remembered for his love of languages. The good doctor’s real name was Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof and he is best remembered as the creator of Esperanto. He came from ...

Sometimes the name of a mountain range or a region may endure for centuries, only then to be corrupted by politics. This is how it was with the Sudety Mountains which in the 1930s became conflated with the ...

From the withy boats of the Somerset Levels to the gunboats used on the Essex coast, wetlands have often fostered ingenuity among boatbuilders. Navigating shallow waters takes skill and a special kind of vessel. We survey a range of boats from the ...

Travelling around Luxembourg, one is ever aware of the influence of the Cape Verde islands. Conversely, in Cape Verde one notices the influence of Luxembourg. We explore the reciprocal relationship between the Grand Duchy and the island archipelago ...

Jakob Fugger the Rich was indeed very rich. But his approach to business presciently anticipated many practices which are now commonplace. We look at the life of a man who challenged business cartels and had a canny appreciation of the importance ...

The prospect of an overnight train journey should be something to savour. But Paul Scraton’s thought upon boarding his train in Aachen is to ask “Where, oh where are the beds?” Paul endures a memorable, though not very comfortable, overnight ride ...

Had you noticed that humble Staines, a riverside town south-west of London, has changed its name? It is now called Staines-upon-Thames. Moving upmarket one might say. But the Canadian village of Swastika is resolutely resisting suggestions that a ...

Bus route 23A in Wiltshire (England) is a rarity. Buses on this route, serving the village of Imber on Salisbury Plain, run on just one day each year. This year your chance to ride the Imberbus is on Saturday 15 ...

We delve into the high theology of rail fares, noting the phenomenon of the extra-territorial tariff point. So Aachen in Germany features in the Belgian domestic tariff, and Schaffhausen in Switzerland is a German tariff point (as well as being a ...

So you thought the idea of a discount railcard was something new? Think again - the Swiss Halbtax card was introduced in the 19th ...

In October 2003, there was an unlikely standoff between Russia and Ukraine in the Kerch Strait. The status of Tuzla Island had been the subject of discussions between the presidents of the two countries just five weeks ...

How would you react if you definitively knew that each flight you took would shorten your life by three ...

In a field near the village of Urbès in eastern France, a stretch of graceful railway viaduct stands alone in a valley. It has never been connected to any railway line. It's a poignant reminder of what might have ...

Mussolini's draining of the Pontine Marshes was a landmark piece of colonisation politics. There have been many similar schemes around Europe – one earlier example was King Carlos III's new town programme in Andalucía in the 1760s. To accompany our ...

Some of the best academic minds in Britain spent the Second World War writing guidebooks about far-flung places. We explore a clandestine area of professional geographical endeavour which resulted in the Naval Intelligence Guides – often called the ...

From Slovenia to Chile, from Malta to Turkey, bee-related tourism is suddenly in vogue. Honeyed travel opportunities aplenty as tourist boards and travellers realise that bees mean ...

How did America get its name? Amerigo Vespucci, of course. But the Florentine merchant never himself suggested that the continent be named after him. It's all down to a cartographer in the ...

2019 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the launch of the Eurail pass. Rail Europe Inc sold the first passes in North America in 1959. We look at how Eurail helped shape perceptions of Europe for overseas visitors and see how the Eurail scheme ...

Southern Scotland has had more than its fair share of poets, along them Rabbie Burns, Robert Davidson and James Hogg. But one Borders poet, Thomas Pringle, is far better known in South Africa than he is in his native Scotland. Born just south of ...

Germany makes much of its highest mountain, the mighty Zugspitze. The frontier between Austria and Germany bisects the mountain. But in Austria, the Zugspitze hardly counts as a significant peak. We look at the phenomenon of shared ...

Direct trains from the Lithuanian capital Vilnius to such far flung destinations as Sochi and Adler (both on the Russia's Back Sea Riviera) and to Anapa and Chelyabinsk recall the days of Soviet travel. We scan the departure boards for a few ...

Train fares are getting cheaper. As retailer Loco2 launches split tickets in the British market, travellers on longer journeys across the continent are discovering that judicious use of an Interrail pass can undercut the cost of a regular return ...

There once was a time when passengers would smuggle butter on trains running from the Republic of Ireland into Northern Ireland. And more recently in Germany, budget-conscious shoppers would go one a boat trip to buy cheap butter. We take a look at ...

Canals which breach great drainage divides are always interesting. There's one, opened in 1992, which links the River Danube with the River Main, the latter a tributary of the Rhine. So today it's possible to travel on a ship through the very heart ...

You could opt for Ryanair when flying from Edinburgh to Dublin, but - if you must fly for such a short hop - why not choose a more interesting option and book with the Chinese carrier Hainan Airlines? We explore the range of fifth-freedom flights ...

With new routes from Toulon to Menorca and Sicily, there's much ado in the Mediterranean ferry scene this summer. Further north, there are new year-round services between Germany and a Danish island in the Baltic and good news for foot passengers ...

The Old Believers fled from the tsarist heartland into the remotest corners of the Russian Empire. Some went to Manchuria, moving on to South America and then to Oregon and Alaska. Others found refuge back in Moscow, practising their faith in the ...

Here's a hidden europe briefing for first-time visitors to the Czech spa towns. Often referred to as the spa triangle, north-west Bohemia actually has more than just three spa ...

Where would the spa towns of Bohemia be without the patronage from the great and good? The Romanov family's enthusiasm for taking the water has encouraged generations of Russians to visit the ...

New rail timetables kick in across Europe on 9 December 2018. There are new direct daytime links from Bratislava to Innsbruck and Zürich, and from the Austria city of Linz to both Halle and Berlin. But the showpiece innovation is a new direct night ...

Great sand seas seem at home in the Sahara or Namib deserts - or even perhaps on Mars. But in southern Lithuania is a striking sandy landscape shaped largely by the winds. Dzukija National Park is a region of fossil ...

A whistle-stop tour of some of Europe's trans-boundary water bodies, from Lake Peipus to Lake Prespa and ...

Discover a special rail tariff which offers cheap deals for travels from Slovakia to destinations in the Alps, eastern Europe and the ...

Few sounds quite match that of the carillon in giving a sense of harmony to a townscape. We listen to a trinity of carillons in the Belgian city of ...

From the Bodensee in the north to Lago Maggiore in the south, Swiss lakes are blessed with a wide range of scheduled boat services. We take a look at services which ply the waters of Lake Geneva, serving over two dozen ports across the ...

News that a new night train, aimed largely at travellers from Ukraine, will link Przemyśl with Berlin from later this year is a sure sign that Ukrainians are making the most of visa-free access to the Schengen group of nations. The new demand for ...

Are the Faroe Islands perhaps thinking of emulating Iceland's success in attracting North Atlantic stopover traffic? Might travellers a few years hence stop off in the Faroe Islands en route from North America to the European mainland? We take a ...

Russian Railways (RZD) have launched their Library for Young Travellers programme with a selection of books for kids on trains to holiday destinations across Russia. Hop aboard for fairy tales, classic novels and a wide choice of poetry by Russian ...

The thrills and spills of top-class soccer are just part of the appeal of the FIFA World Cup. Sport aside, it's been a chance for visitors to feel the warmth of Russian hospitality. An amiable wolf called Zabivaka has been doing his bit to make ...

In the future it may not be so easy to take the slow train from Sospel to Tende. Or from Clermont-Ferrand to Nîmes. Jean-Cyril Spinetta's February 2018 report to President Macron is not good news for regional rail routes in France. It may be ...

Route 45 in our Europe by Rail book links Sofia with Zagreb via Belgrade and Brod. That's just the route once followed by the Orient Express. It features in both the 1974 and 2017 versions of the film Murder on the Orient Express. But neither film ...

To walk in solitude in the company of stars is indeed something special. It's a chance to attend to the beauty of the heavens. In the Austrian village of Großmugl, the 1500-metre long Sternenweg is a gift to ...

Lozenge-shaped graves, fashioned in the form of a ship, are a distinctive element of Bronze Age visual culture on the Baltic island of Gotland. Do these unusual graves, known as 'ship settings' have a deeper cosmological ...

A number of fishing stations around the coasts of the Baltic islands of Fårö and Gotland recall the heyday of the herring trade, when farmers would become fishermen for a few ...

Laurence Mitchell has written a number of Bradt Guides, including titles on Norfolk (where he lives), central Asia and the Balkan region. We have been thumbing through Laurence's latest Bradt book, the 5th edition of his 'Bradt Guide to Serbia', ...

The renaming of towns to honour an individual is commonplace. Nizhny Novgorod became Gorky, in honour of the Russian writer Maxim Gorki who was born there. The town later switched back to its original name. In eastern Germany, towns have been ...

Two new high speed rail routes in France, extra trains through the Alps and new services to Ukraine are the headline stories in the summer 2017 rail timetables. We review what's new and what's ...

The smock mill is a distinctive element of the Dutch cultural landscape. The functionality and simplicity of these simple mills has made them popular exports, and migrants from the Netherlands built smock mills in New England, South Africa and ...

The legacy of Leonid Markelov, who in April this year stood down from the position of President of the Mari El Republic, lies in the oddball architecture of the republic's capital city of Yoshkar ...

The Gatliff Hebridean Hostels Trust gives a chance for travellers to stay a while in some of the remotest communities in the Outer Hebrides. Through the work of the Trust, many casual visitors come to love these island communities. The Trust ...

With the success of the Schengen region, local transport links are being extended over international borders. In the coming months, new international tram routes from France to both Germany and Switzerland are due to ...

Take the back-door route from Sarandë in Albania to Igoumenitsa in Greece to discover a little-visited region of the southern ...

Shoppers in the Czech border village of Petrovice are inclined to board a Tupolev 104 airplane when they want a coffee or a snack. Find out why this 60-year-old jet aircraft is a good spot to ...

Władysław Szpilman’s remarkable book The Pianist (made into a film by Roman Polanski) reveals the devastation of Jewish life in Warsaw in 1945. To accompany our feature on Jewish Warsaw we look at the city's Jewish community in the ...

December 2016 marks the 200th anniversary of John Henry Newman's admittance to Trinity College, Oxford. Almost 30 years later (in 1845), Newman was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church. We take a look at Catholic ...

A chance to visit Belarus without a visa, and a tweak to the visa regulations in the Russian port of Murmansk are just two of the latest changes to visa regimes in ...

Peter May's novels set in the Outer Hebrides communicate a strong sense of Hebridean landscapes. May is the latest in a long line of writers who have helped inscribe the islands on the public imagination. We take a look at a number of Hebridean ...

The network of car ferries operated by Caledonian MacBrayne is part of the fabric of island life in Scotland's Western Isles. No trip to the Hebrides is complete without a journey or two on a CalMac ferry. The company has just secured a new ...

The Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) offer excellent possibilities for hiking, cycling and cross-country skiing. But even less energetic visitors can reach remote communities in the region by local bus and train ...

In Tito's Yugoslavia, architects offered an ideological space between East and West - aligned neither to Soviet-style communism nor to the capitalist tradition. The result was some assertively different architecture, not all of it memorably ...

The Czech energy group EPH has taken over the lignite mining operations in eastern Germany previously managed by Swedish company Vattenfall. What does this mean for the village of Haidemühl, now abandoned for almost a decade, which sits in a area ...

Europe's most accomplished dredgers and drainers are the Dutch. Settlers from the Netherlands have industriously drained wetlands and coastal meadows across the continent from Bordeaux to the Baltic. We look at some of the continent's ...

Bouvet Island, at the southern end of the mid-Atlantic ridge, is 1,800 kilometres away from the nearest landmass (Antarctica) and is thus one of the remotest places on earth. The normal jumping off point for expeditions to this fragment of ...

Had the Balkan region narrow-gauge rail network survived, it would surely today be a cherished asset in promoting tourism over a wide region - in much the same way as the narrow-gauge Rhaetian Railway network has been important in attracting ...

From Skopje to Moscow, from Sarajevo to New Delhi, the names of roads and squares recall Josep Broz Tito, who was President of Yugoslavia from 1953 until his death in 1980. But what happened to all the Tito towns in former Yugoslavia? Titograd ...

On a lake to the east of Berlin is Europe's sole surviving example of a ferry which relies on an overhead cable to pick up electricity. The Straussee ferry is an unusual transport ...

What do Wünsdorf-Waldstadt in eastern Germany, Bellprat in Catalonia and Hay-on-Wye in Wales all have in common? They all style themselves as 'book towns'. Across Europe and beyond, small towns are discovering the appeal of 'the Hay model' as they ...

It's perfectly sensible to travel from Budapest to Thessaloniki through Kosovo. But it's unwise to attempt the journey in the reverse direction. Find out why in our notes on travelling through ...

So where is the Trafalgar which gave its name to the Battle of Trafalgar? And where is the Blenheim after which Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire is supposedly named? We look at a few European place names which feature larger-than-life in the ...

Scottish publisher Findhorn has always had an eye on the offbeat and alternative. Many travellers place great stock on their Camino pilgrimage guides. Now Findhorn has launched a new guide to France. We dip into the pages of Mystical ...

The ferry operator Caledonian MacBrayne has always had a dash of Scottish spirit. But this spring CalMac is facing a challenge with a rival company bidding to take control of the lifeline ferry routes in the Hebrides and Clyde ...

The notion of privation as conductive to more virtuous travel seems alien to the modern mind. Today's travellers search for five-star luxury and often look for a higher level of food, lodging and service that they experience at home. Travel has ...

Over 100,000 migrants left Kyrgyzstan in the 1990s, a good number moving to Germany. Many of them were descended from Mennonites who over a century earlier had walked from the steppes of southern Russia to ...

It is that time of year when Europe prepares to introduce new train timetables. The 2016 schedules come into effect on Sunday 13 December 2015. As usual, there are winners and losers. We look at some new ...

The tit-for-tat posturing between Ukraine and Russia benefits no-one trying to travel to and from Crimea - or for that matter anywhere in the border regions between the two countries. In late October 2015, air links between Russia and Ukraine were ...

A new ferry powered by liquefied natural gas will make its first journey from the island of Helgoland to the port of Hamburg this month. It'll be a rare chance to cruise in comfort up the River Elbe to the German port ...

Literary ghosts haunt the pages of mid and late 19th-century fiction - from Henry James The Turn of the Screw to Charles Dickens' The Haunted House. One of the spookiest tales of all is Dickens' The Signalman, a fine short story which may have been ...

There is a certain tyranny of the horizon in the flatlands of East Anglia. The spirit of those landscapes is captured in the debut volume from Dunlin Press which is titled 'Est: Collected Reports from East ...

The Gare Saint-Lazare attracted the artists. Yet Paris Gare du Nord has a grittier atmosphere. This busiest of Paris' railway termini is ultimately a station in the shadows. And therein lies its enduring ...

Faith has evidently replaced politics as the motivation for some of the world's tallest sculptures. In Europe, the largest such structure is the massive statue of Jesus Christ at Swiebodzin in western ...

Slovakia follows Hungary's example in offering free travel on many rail services for senior ...

Nigel Roberts, author of the Bradt Guide to Belarus, gives us a preview of the upcoming new edition of his guidebook with his account of crossing into Belarus on ...

Anna Walentynowicz died five years ago this spring in the plane crash that also claimed the lives of many in the Polish leadership. We recall the woman who was a welder, crane driver and political activist - a woman who quietly helped shape modern ...

The 17th-century witchcraft trials in Finnmark are recalled in a striking new memorial on the shores of the Barents Sea. hidden europe visited the memorial which is pictured on the front cover of this issue of hidden ...

They have fiddled with the clocks in Moscow. Not just in Moscow, but right across the Russian Federation. Russia has decided to move to perpetual winter – at least when it comes to time. For the clocks shall stay henceforth on winter ...

The story of the Talgo trains of Bosnia reveals a quite stunning waste of money. This is a country which invested in a new fleet of trains which are simply incompatible with its antiquated rail ...

Martinmas is a day for a fresh start, a chance to turn over a new leaf. A good day for an armistice. And a good day to kick off the Carnival ...

The Ukrainian railway administration may still be advertising trains to Crimea, but not a lot of Ukrainians will be heading to the region for their summer holidays. Hoteliers in Crimea are having a lean season, but Moscow has plans to ensure that ...

Several European countries are split on ethnic lines. We see the dramas being out in Ukraine just now. Belgium is even more decisively split, but happily the results are not as fractious. Shift to Bosnia and Herzegovina and we see the great game of ...

The funicular railway to the Café Diana on the hills above the spa town of Karlovy Vary marks a birthday this summer: it was opened to the public in 1914. It remains the easy way to get a bird's-eye view of Karlovy Vary (the town often referred in ...

Visitors to the Riviera are often surprised to find the striking Orthodox churches along the coast. From the red headlands of the Esterel Massif to Sanremo in Liguria, there is a hint of the east in the ecclesiastical landscape - a legacy of the ...

'Grey gold' is the term used by Ærø councillor Carl Heide to describe the talented and still-very-active migrants whom he feels can help sustain community life on the Danish island of Ærø. For an island where deaths greatly outnumber births, and ...

The renaissance of the European Rail Timetable (ERT) is good news for rail travellers across the continent. The decision last year by Thomas Cook to scrap the title was a bitter blow. But, thanks to a new company set up by the team that compiled ...

The Curzon Line, which for so long marked the approximate western border of the Soviet Union is named after Lord Curzon. His Lordship has strong ideas on borders, seeing them very much as zones of demarcation. But ideas have changed since Curzon's ...

Three of the 406 municipalities that comprise the Netherlands use a currency other than the euro. Yes, there really are three municipalities where you buy Dutch pancakes with US ...

The jewel in the crown of Mallorca's railways is the delightfully antiquated Ferrocarril de Sóller. Last year, it celebrated 100 years of service. It is just one of three separate railways to serve the Mediterranean ...

Do they have meerkats in Russia? Or in Market Harborough? And where exactly is Meerkovo? We go in search of Russia's most famous non-existent ...

What new European airport welcomed its inaugural flight in April this year and has since closed its doors for a long winter break? The answer is Kassel in Germany, which gets the hidden europe wooden spoon for the biggest transport flop of the ...

Georgians have high hopes for the Lithuanian Presidency of the European Union - a six-month term that started this month. Georgia, like Lithuania, slipped out of the Soviet Union in 1991. The hopes in Tbilisi are that Lithania will open European ...

Does the European Rail Timetable, published by Thomas Cook since 1873, have a future with a new publisher? Plans are afoot for the relaunch of a book that has defined horizons for generations of ...

Virtu Ferries have until recently enjoyed a monopoly in the market from Malta to Italy, but a new ferry route launched this summer brings some ...

Many abandoned station buildings in rural Poland are finding new life as private entrepreneurs restore them to their former glory. This spring the Polish authorities are selling off a further tranche of buildings, most of them remarkable pieces of ...

We start with a dubious attribution, a few words allegedly uttered by the Austrian diplomat and politician Count Metternich. And we end with the Ukrainian poet and dramatist Lesya Ukrainka in Georgia. In between, we discover that Asia is a state of ...

The number of Russians making cross-border journeys into northern Scandinavia to go shopping leapt by over a third last year. They head for small towns in northern Finland and some even continue into Sweden to visit the world's northernmost branch ...

The parish of Hartland in the north-west corner of Devon is served by no railway lines, and the endless onslaught of winds and waves have destroyed its port. Only the name, Hartland Quay, survives on maps as a reminder of the commerce and trade ...

Given our interests, you might have thought that we'd have pounced on The Smell of the Continent the moment it was published in 2009. The book is a witty and well-researched account of how the English discovered continental Europe in a decades ...

The second weekend in December sees new rail timetables introduced across Europe. The new schedules see a significant recasting on long distance services in the northern Balkans. Two new international night trains will link Italy with France and ...

We fear that the slow travel tag has been appropriated by writers and publishers who see slow travel as the latest marketing opportunity. Seven years after the launch of hidden europe and three years after the publication of our Manifesto for Slow ...

Nicely multi-ethnic, assertively multi-confessional, the cemetery at Maragoj is a fine spot to fire the imagination of the living. The cemetery in Zagreb's northern suburbs is one of Europe's most evocative burial ...

A new crop of European heritage has just been added to UNESCO's celebrated list of notable heritage. The newcomers to the World Heritage List include remarkable industrial villages in Flanders and Wallonie, a German opera house and a clutch of ...

San Marino may no longer have a passenger railway. It does however still have a train, thus marking out San Marino as one of two countries in Europe that have a train but no railway. The surviving train in San Marino is a graceful addition to the ...

We remember Agar Town, an area of London that simply disappeared from the maps when in 1866 the Midland Railway edged south towards St ...

Prompted by Diego Vivanco's report from San Vicente de la Sonsierra, hidden europe sets out to detect the origins of the religious practice of self-flagellation in ...

Today, the steeply sloping streets behind Boulogne's Quai Gambetta no longer have the character of a closely-knit fishing community. hidden europe visits a little museum that recalls the former life of this distinctive part of the French port ...

There is a remarkable vividness about pieces of art whose days are numbered. Artists like Richard Shilling and Andy Goldsworthy have been keen advocats of what is sometimes called land art. We search for the remnants of last year's sand sculpture ...

Whatever happened to the massive five-pointed red star that for many years topped the communist party headquarters in Sofia? For years, it was hidden away in a cellar, but now it greets visitors to a new museum of socialist art in the Bulgarian ...

We explore the prospects for new ferry services in the Mediterranean linking Europe with ...

During the 1960s and 70s, trains full of guest workers (or Gastarbeiter as the migrant workers were called in Germany) were a common site arriving in German cities. This autumn marks the fiftieth anniversary of the accord between Turkey and Germany ...

We revisit a surreal moment at a tiny café tucked away in the forests of eastern ...

Kalmykia is the only political unit in Europe where Buddhism is the dominant religion. You think we jest! But it is true. We take a look at some of the lesser known republics within the European part of the Russian ...

The clean lines that we think divide religions often become very blurred in the Balkan region. Thus shrines may be claimed as sacred by adherents of more than one religion. We look at the phenomenon of syncretic ...

They call it progress. In early July, Malta’s splendid fleet of heritage yellow buses was replaced by modern vehicles run by transport conglomerate ...

Did you know you can take the train to Brathlavstan or fly to MaastrAachen? The portmanteau title of Daniela-Carmen Crasnaru’s 1998 poetry anthology Austerloo prompts us to reflect on portmanteau terms in European ...

Ildar Khanov lives in a temple of his own creation. It boasts a splendid array of minarets and domes that recall many of the world’s principal religions. Not quite what you might expect to find in the suburb of a city in the Russian Federation. But ...

The Stettiner Haff or Szczecin Lagoon is one of Europe's unsung water bodies, a vast area of shallow saline water that is home to many birds. Seasonal ferry services cross the lagoon in the summer months, allowing travellers to explore this remote ...

A line of red and green Russian border-posts skirt the Norwegian Parliament building in Oslo. Politicians turn and look, as do casual passers-by. It is a quiet reminder that Norway really does share a common land border with ...

There is one very good reason for travelling by ferry to the Russian city of St Petersburg. For a short stay, ferry travellers are generally exempt from Russia's otherwise strict visa rules. So no surprise perhaps that St Peter Line, which already ...

If you happen to know a good source of peewit's hearts, please let us know. We explore some of the zanier superstitions that we have run across on our travels across ...

'There's nothing to see in Nuoro,' wrote DH Lawrence when he and his wife Frieda visited Sardinia in January 1921. 'Happy is the town that has nothing to show,' opined the English writer. We follow the Lawrences on their winter journey by sea to ...

A quick review of recent and upcoming changes to Polish train services, as a new rural rail route linking Poland with the Czech Republic opens for ...

Catamarans compete for space with whales and dolphins in the crowded sea lanes off the south coast of Spain. Space is tight in some European waters as more travellers embrace ferry travel and an efficient and relaxing way of getting ...

Alan Sillitoe's first publications, written during the brief spell that he lived in Menton in France, were travel essays. Sillitoe died in April, having achieved a formidable reputation as a novelist. We take a look at the lesser known side of ...

Full marks to the Ragower Mühle, a mill in the beautiful Schlaube valley near Berlin, for having created what we think is the first maze in Europe explicitly designed with wheelchair users in mind. Would only that the access route through the ...

The brass band is alive and well in the Faroe Islands and is just one aspect of the varied musical life of the remote North Atlantic archipelago. hidden europe presents a pot pourri of musical notes from the ...

Two towns, neither of them well known beyond their local regions. Herten in Germany and Dudley in England. Both are so very similar, that they seem to be places made for each other. Indulge us, while we engage in a little ...

The UNESCO World Heritage List features many ornately decorated churches across Europe. The List includes the painted monasteries of southern Bukovina (described elsewhere in this issue), as well as murals on churches in Switzerland, Bulgaria and ...

The Imperial Russian Standard, with the double-headed eagle so intimately associated with the Romanovs, still hangs in the living room of a wooden lodge on the bank of a river in southern Finland. We visit the former holiday home of the Russian ...

World Cup year! Again! We shall be eagerly following the 2010 Viva World Cup as teams from Padania, Gozo, Lapland, Monaco and other small territories compete for football ...

It is a little known fact that the entire course of European history has been shaped by mortars and pestles. We unravel a little tale from Venice that highlights why the mortar deserves pride of place in any good culinary ...

The news that the Orient Express will be withdrawn from mid-December 2009 brings to an end the 126 year history of Europe's most celebrated scheduled train ...

Cross-border confidence is the Barents Sea region has this year prompted a raft of new initiatives fascillitating contact between Norway and Russia. hidden europe reports from the town of Kirkenes in northeast ...

How many time zones in mainland Europe? The answer is six. All a matter of astronomy, you might think. And to some extent that is true. But the way we set our clocks is often as much a matter of politics as a respect for ...

A range of new shipping links now gives Cyprus new status as a stepping stone to ports in the eastern Mediterranean. We report on new services from Cyprus to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and ...

Investments in cross-border roads in remote and rural areas of the European Union are much to be welcomed. But where are the bus services that should be plying those routes to connect communities across ...

The complex story of the Belarusian language and its flexible deployment of three different alphabets deserves to the better known. Early Belarusian texts in the Arabic script (called kitabs) are a remarkable part of Europe's cultural ...

Pluto must be very small and very far away. And so it is in Davor Preis' ingenious model of the solar system that invisibly orbits Zagreb and its ...

A nineteenth-century nature reserve on the dry steppes of southern Ukraine was a pioneering example of early nature conservation in Europe. The feathery grasses still dance to the local winds at ...

The Norwegian Depression is not a state of mind. It is actually a submarine valley off the coast of Norway. We explain more in this short ...

We take a look at one of Europe's remotest outposts. The island of Gavdos is south of Crete in the Libyan Sea. The fact that George Bush and Colin Powell have both visited is a measure of the strategic importance of ...

A small Norwegian airline called Widerøe operates flights into some of Europe's remotest communities. The company's Explore Norway Ticket allows travellers to hop from one small airport to ...

hidden europe suggests you can never have too many pieces of official looking ...

As we report in railscan, many overnight trains have been axed, but, especially within the CIS countries, there remain a few hidden gems. Ukraine is a good place to ...

is London really wetter than Nice or Rome - an interesting cognitive ...

a new Russian national ...

beyond the boulevard périphérique: the language of Parisian ...

tidal crossings in England from the Scilly Isles to Holy ...

It is difficult to go to Reykjavík without getting a big dose of Icelandic history. Icelanders will proudly tell you the tale of Ingólfur Arnarson who gets a lot of credit all over Iceland for putting the country on the map in the late ninth ...

hidden europe remembers Latvian poet Vizma ...

A while back we were contacted by one of those property companies that trade on the internet. Most unusually, it had Slovenian islands for ...

Jewish sites in western Ukraine and southeast Poland: Hasidic ...

a monument that commemorates a meeting that never took ...

the towns of the so-called Spis confederation in Slovakia - a vivid reminder of a Saxon ...

Arriving at Lviv airport recently, the hidden europe team was pleasantly surprised to find that trolleybuses are still a regular sight on the streets of the Ukrainian city. This prompted us to track down Europe's longest trolleybus ...

ferry operators Smyril Line and Fjord Line merge - and one of the most historic North Sea crossings ...

street iconography that is more than commercial ...

Bratislava's suburbs - with Austria and Hungary both just a stone's throw ...

Latin is dead? By no means! News in Latin are still broadcast in Europe on a regular ...

in search of the road over Cakor Pass that leaves Montenegro's Lim valley and heads east to Péc in ...

a special glance at gendered space - places where males and females dare not ...

a wee dram worth waiting for, from the island of Islay in the Scottish ...

the road signs warn of a gradient of forty per cent. We track down an improbably steep hill on the Welsh ...

"taxes, fees and charges extra" say the airline advertisements in tiny print, as they hawk low price flights across Europe. But what is included in taxes, fees and charges? And who levies these ...

one flag: blue background with twelve stars. It flutters above buildings in over forty European capitals. hidden europe looks at the Council of Europe ...

It is World Cup year. Football is everywhere. Even at the very end of Europe, in Azerbaijan, where we run across the tale of a great Azeri football ...

Philadelphia is decidedly un-American! Because this Philadelphia is not the great city on the Delaware river; instead, it lies in a very rural part of eastern Germany, close by the Turkish Mountains and just a stone's throw from New ...

The Bailiwick of Jersey, in the Channel Islands, has long played host to many migrant communities. hidden europe explores the growing Polish influences in the ...

An essay inspired by the Pope's telephone number! The politics of dialling codes that somehow contrive to associate Greenland with ...

A fine collection of lawnmowers attests to the collective obsession of the English to secure the perfect ...

Migrant communities are often some of the most intriguing in Europe. We look at Senegalese settlers in Lombardy and Vietnamese entrepreneurs in ...

Karlos Zurutuza reports on a summer day in Ulcinj, a coastal town in southern ...

Nineteenth century poets often nurtured the flower of national consciousness; today they are rewarded with pride of place on many European ...

hidden europe celebrates the life and work of a pioneering Russian ...

regular hidden europe correspondent Karlos Zurutuza files a report from Nagorno ...

Until now there has been just a single bridge crossing the Danube to link Romania with Bulgaria. That now looks set to ...

We sample a few of Europe's late summer harvest ...

Never heard of a fosterito? Then you have probably never been to Bilbao! hidden europe explores some unusual street ...

For those who tire of trying to get staff at their local station to reveal the train fare to Istanbul, hidden europe has the perfect solution: a website with a reliable railway fare ...

Venice's most populous corner turns out to be an unlikely haven of ...

Quirky overnight stays - from tree houses to caves and ...

A onetime showpiece hotel of the Soviet era, the Iveria in Tbilisi, was transformed into a vertical refugee camp. We find out ...

Motorways come and motorways go! Yes, some routes really do disappear - like the A862 in Germany. And there are rumours that the days of the M10 in southern England are ...

There is a part of Russia that finds itself curiously isolated from the Motherland. hidden europe reflects on the Kaliningrad ...

The Maiden Tower in Baku is a powerful national symbol for all Azeris. But remarkably little is known about this enigmatic ...

Les Marolles is a place of smoky bars, tiny shops and rich dialects. hidden europe alights from the train at Brussels' Gare La Chapelle to explore the city's most intriguing ...

More on turtles! We like turtles. This time, we report from the Karpas peninsula of northern Cyprus. The waters around the peninsula are home to both green turtles and loggerhead ...

Do you speak Europanto? It's not so hard to learn. To speakare Europanto, tu basta mixare alles wat tu know in extranges linguas. We take a look at one of Europe's lesser known ...

A note on the territories where foreigners may not tread: the closed cities and proscribed zones of the Russian ...

Latvia's eastern borders mark the outer edge of the European Union. We look at a couple of frontier oddities in the areas where Latvia borders on to Belarus and ...

Plans for a new rail link between Turkey and Georgia offer the prospect of some tantalising new journeys by train into the Caucasus ...

A new edition of a map published by the European Union prompts us to reflect on what might make a good map of ...

A round-up of Estonian connections: planes, boats, trains and buses. We focus on what's new for the current spring ...

International peace parks that seek to promote conservation across national boundaries while also encouraging cooperation across borders, are becoming increasingly common. Bringing projects like the current plan for a Balkans Peace Park to fruition ...

Most of Europe has red squirrels. But there are exceptions. In England, squirrels are generally grey - and just occasionally black. We report on the black squirrels of ...

Yes, flying between major airports may have become boring, but there are still interesting ways to fly in some parts of Europe. We check out a few scheduled flights by helicopter and ...

Pilgrimages to national shrines often catch the pulse of a nation. hidden europe highlights a few summer ...

Most visitors look to Prague for a feast of Gothic and baroque. But what of the city's modern architecture? Prague boasts what is probably the finest cubist interior anywhere in the world. We visit the Grand Café ...

For travellers with their ice axes and crampons at the ready, Svalbard (Spitsbergen) is about to come a whole lot closer, with a Norwegian budget airlines offering flights in 2008 to the Arctic ...

R BOT 101 is a robot. He never loses his cool, nor can he be bribed. But otherwise he is much the same as the human police officers who pound the beat in the Russian city of Perm. Meet a Russian electronic ...

Until May this year, it was perfectly possible to buy a through ticket from continental train stations to London using cross-channel ferries. No more, but a new initative from Railteam offers the prospect of a new generation of through ...

We stop off at an unusual Turkish port, a place where Melkites and Maronites once lived alongside Jews, Chaldeans and Anglicans. It is as cosmopolitan as ever ...

The Grand Place in Brussels seem the epitome of peace. But does it house some hidden messages? Some say that a great cosmic tussle finds expression in the architecture. A Masonic tale from the Belgian ...

Surely the most bizarrely eccentric article we have ever published. We take a look at European communities with palindromic place names. From Eye to Eze and Sarras to ...

What about the most northerly railway route across the Ural Mountains? Way up north in the Nenets regions, the train to Labytnangi makes the Trans-Siberian route over the Urals seem rather ...

Karlos Zurutuza, a regular contributor to hidden europe, tracks down an intriguing church in the heart of Yerevan, capital of ...

Supernatural revelation or mere stunt? The small town of Medugorje in western Herzegovina is the focus for some extraordinary devotional antics, as Catholics flock to the mountain valley where the Virgin Mary is said to have ...

There are about two dozen remaining fine examples of Norwegian stave churches. Most are in Norway. But one of the best is, somewhat improbably, in the mountains on the Polish-Czech ...

A good train timetable is a book to cherish. So when the British authorities decided that printing a national train timetable was a waste of time and money, we were distraught. Fortunately, a latter-day Bradshaw has stepped in to fill the ...

Yet more on palindromes! Yes, we really like palindromes. This time one from ...

Regular hidden europe contributor Laurence Mitchell introduces us to the museum of Easter eggs at Kolomiya in eastern ...

We take a moment to map out what must surely be the two most obscure international ferry links in the North Sea ...

Malta may boast a fabulously complicated history, but the island's rich range of links with Russia is often ...

Lonely Planet and Rough Guides may be mainstays in the guidebook market, but for more offbeat destinations in Europe, look to Bradt Guides for coverage of places that other publishers just do not ...

Okay, there is the Latin or Roman Church in western Europe and the Orthodox Church in eastern Europe. Easy to remember! But what happens at the ...

some lesser known pilgrim routes to Santiago de Compostella - and the path to ...

by catamaran across the Straits of Gibraltar to North ...

Molvania, Slaka and more! We recall a tradition of writing guidebooks to non existant ...

hidden europe casts an eye on Hrodna in northwest ...

links to North Cyprus, the Faroe islands, the Azores and ...

One travel guide claims that Finisterre is the most westerly point on the European mainland. This is in fact wrong, just as other points that lay claim to special status as geographical extremities are often spurious. We map Europe's ...

Ukraine relaxes its visa ...

Hun nostalgia makes its mark in modern ...

hidden europe tracks down some curious cases of European border crossings which are not open to ...

great rail rip-off: how US travel agents make a tidy profit in selling European rail ...

mapping the special appeal that remote island communities have held for filmmakers: Whisky Galore!, Stromboli and ...

cruising on an icebreaker to Franz Josef Land and the North ...

a travelling Orthodox church in Russia: religion on ...

rail links to ...

a navigational dilemma in the Albanian capital ...

Many classic guide book publishers, going back to nineteenth century, have used star ratings to grade sights. But is Antibes really only "interesting" and not "worth a ...

What were once back streets of iniquity in the English city of York are now important elements in the cityscape - little lanes and alleys that, for those in the know, provide valuable short ...

"We may no longer be officially the centre of England" says a lady in Meriden in the English Midlands. "But we are undoubtedly at the heart of the country." Join us as we ponder on the heart of ...

Chtenia: Readings from Russia is a new themed literary journal that features good Russian writing, old and new, in translation. If it lives up to the promise of its first issue, which focuses on canine tales from Russia, it will be a huge ...

The best chicken soup this side of the Volga? Look to a Kazakh restaurant in Vilnius! The Baltic States are not just meat and potato country. You'll find exotic restaurants aplenty from Uzbek to Armenian, Georgian to ...

Route indexing services seem to be all the rage with many new websites offering advice on who flies where, and each claiming to be better than its rivals. Harefares invited us to cast an eye over their website, which they claim is the most complete ...

We are great fans of quirky museums. The Museum of Plagiarism in the German town of Solingen is definitely worth a ...

We look inside one of the traditional Andalucian restaurants that does a roaring lunchtime trade in ...

A note from the remote border region on the Barents Sea coast where Russia and Norway share a common ...

Pause and listen, in the rustles of a late summer breeze stirring the majestic birch, for an echo of the Russian soul. Russians have a very special relationship with the birch tree. Find out ...

The rituals of religion take a strange turn in the Savoie village of Bramans in the French Alps. We report on the significance of the pain bénit (blessed bread) festival that is held in Bramans on 15 August each ...

This autumn the population of Greenland has a referendum that could usher in full self-government for the island nation. Greenland is confidently asserting its very distinctive identity - and a new set of banknotes are just part of the ...

If the demeanour and bearing of folk waiting at the bus stop in Velika Gorica looks that little bit more distinguished than in other towns in Croatia, it is merely that there is more blue blood in Velika Gorica than anywhere else in the region. ...

To fly to the Scottish island of Fair Isle (midway between the Shetlands and the Orkney Islands) is to have one of the most extraordinary flying experiences on offer in ...

The name of a tiny island off the coast of Nordaustlandet in Spitzbergen is a tribute to an extraordinary series of expeditions conducted in 1928 by members of the Alpini, the elite mountain brigade of the Italian army. A report from ...

Filfla is Malta's forgotten island. It is a place reserved for lizards and storm ...

The best cafés have the knack of allowing you simultaneously to feel alone and yet in company. The Caffè San Marco in Trieste is one of the ...

Fact and fiction blur in modern Liège. One city square has been renamed after Georges Simenon's fictional detective Inspector ...

Victor Hugo was an acclaimed writer, to be sure, but he was also a European visionary. We look at Hugo's connections with ...

Do you think Latin is a dead language? We present the case to the ...

Slovakia adopts the euro and along the way reshapes its identity. Icons of western and secular modernity replace a more eastern ...

Snow gathered on Etna on the first of January makes wonderful granita - the perfect antidote to any New Year Day's ...

To walk through the door of the church is to leave modern Poland and enter a space suffused with exotic incense and the rich iconography of European Orthodoxy. A note on the Polish Orthodox church in Jelenia ...

A short tribute to Brigitte Hasselblatt, the spiritual mother of both the Shetland and the Estonian Baha'i ...

A remote coastal area of northern Latvia is at the heart of a modest revival of Liv culture. The Liv community of Latvia have their own language and way of life and are one the Baltic region's most distinctive cultural ...

Way up north near the Barents Sea, Norway borders onto Russia. The Norwegian port of Kirkenes depends heavily on good links with its Russian hinterland. But all is not well in this Arctic ...

Scourie Lodge in northwest Scotland may claim to have the most northerly palm trees in the world, but we think they are wrong. We travel north up the Norwegian coast in search of palm trees that seemingly defy ...

Inter-municipal tram routes still survives here and there in Europe. We survey examples from the Ruhr region of Germany, Bohemia, the Isle of Man and ...

As long as the radishes grown on Hesselø remain red and white, so shall the island be forever Danish. At least that is the perspective of one of the island's last remaining residents. Hesselø is a little remnant of Denmark that is coveted by Sweden ...

There are new shipping routes aplenty for the 2009 summer season. We take a look at what's new in the world of European ferries, with many developments in the North Sea, Baltic and Mediterranean ...

Nicolai Gogol's Ukrainian connections come under the spotlight as we stop off at the spa town of Saky in the Crimea ...

A forgotten incident in the history of the Polish Tatra Mountains invites us to consider whether public access really can be reconciled with conservation objectives in European wilderness ...