Exploring cultures and communities – the slow way

hidden europe 28

Here is an extended table of contents for hidden europe 28 with brief summaries and excerpts of every article published in this issue of the magazine. Of course you can read the full version of all articles in the print edition of hidden europe 28, which is still available for sale. It was published in September 2009. So much of what features in hidden europe is timeless - as relevant and thought provoking today as it was on the day it was published.

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House of Culture in Vitebsk, Belarus (photo © hidden europe).

Welcome to hidden europe 28. The issue contains articles on the Belarusian city of Vitebsk, Zagreb's literary ghosts, the Italian port city of Genoa, the Luxembourg village of Schengen and the small French town of ...
The spot in Hinterschellenberg where the Russian National Army experienced its first taste of Liechtenstein hospitality: the ‘Wirtschaft zum Löwen’ (The Lion) (photo © hidden europe).

Liechtenstein is one of Europe's unsung territories: a tiny Alpine principality by-passed by most travellers. We follow the route of an army of Russian soldiers that sought sanctuary in Liechtenstein in May ...
Statue of Vladimir Nazor, near Tuškanac, Zagreb (photo by Rudolf Abraham).

While many European cities decorate their squares and boulevards with statues of kings and generals in heroic poses, Zagreb takes a different tack. The Croatian capital gives its prime spots to poets, philosophers and novelists. Rudolf Abraham ...
Three generations on the Pushkin bridge in the heart of Vitebsk, Belarus (photo © hidden europe).

Tumbling off the train and riding the trolleybus over to the other side of the river is a fine introduction to Vitebsk. The Belarusian city is precise and orderly: Swiss efficiency colliding with Soviet style. And at the annual Slavianski Bazaar, ...
View from the Stroumberg, with the village of Schengen (Luxembourg) on the left, and the German village of Perl on the far bank of the Moselle river (photo © hidden europe).

Schengen gave its name to two important European accords that paved the way for passport-free travel across much of Europe. Yet the Luxembourg village that gave its name to those treaties remains curiously ...
One of the branches of the River Lauter running through the heart of Wissembourg (photo © hidden europe).

Fountains and flowers, neatly swept alleys, French sentences flowing into Alsatian German and back again, plus the inevitable choucroute, all combine to make Wissembourg one of Europe's most appealing small ...
The exhibition in the Karl-Marx-Haus in Trier very successfully brings alive a potentially rather dry topic (photo © hidden europe).

The birthplace of Karl Marx is, a little improbably it might seem, in the Moselle city of Trier. It is a place that nowadays seems irredeemably bourgeois. Yet Marx' legacy is superbly documented in Trier's ...

Is the Baltic the new Med? Or Bridlington the new St Tropez? Come now, we don't write about that sort of thing in hidden europe. But we do like to keep in touch with mainstream travel writing. And we find that in Britain the travel pages are full ...
The Bigo is an architectural installation that now dominates the Porto Antico area of Genoa’s waterfront (photo © hidden europe).

The port city of Genoa commanded huge influence on account of its mercantile acumen and its early schemes for the management of public debt, which paved the way for modern banking. Today the city of St George still has the face of ...
Wild horses at Askania-Nova nature reserve in Ukraine (photo © Ivan Tykhyi / dreamstime.com).

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 ...
photo © Ewa Wysocka / istockphoto.com

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...