Journey to the heart...

the Eastern bloc.

But defining Central Europe has been a big, rather sensitive issue and the nations between east of Germany and west of Russia have been marking themselves the very heart of Europe.

There are many things that bind the nations – culturally diverse, multi-ethnic, and speaking a Babel of languages – roughly between the Baltic and the Adriatic together.

If the basis for the gap between Europe’s East and West were religious, Austria, Czech Republic, and Hungary, along with Poland and Slovakia, would unmistakably belong to the west, dominated as they are by Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, while the other side, meaning Belarus, Bulgaria, Greece, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine are predominantly – or at least architecturally and culturally – Byzantine or Eastern Orthodox.

But there is more to it than geography. There is also history, the Ottoman conquest, for instance, or the Habsburg Empire, half a century of communism, and then the revolutions of 1989.

Now there is the US-allied North Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as the European Union.

If you are a tourist, does any of these even matter to you? It does, if only because some locals resent it when you call them Eastern Europeans. As some pundits say, the center has moved eastward since 1989 so that, in some definitions, even Belarus, which only has Russia between it and the very eastern edge of Europe on the Asian side of Russia, now claims to be in Central Europe too.

Scan the QR code or turn to page E1 to journey to the very heart of Europe.