alt Hacker NewsThe history of Eastern Europe is very interesting, in how that came to be. A combination of pure immigration and settlement of peoples from the more populous low countries and Rhine valley to Eastern Europe. There was expulsion of Jews from central and western Europe, leading them to migrate to Eastern europe for the comparative religious tolerance. Then there was the hanseatic league, which created German cities, settlements and districts throughout the East to bring goods west as part of a vast trade network. Then German miners and engineers being brought east to exploit mineral wealth. This isn't taught much in the western schools, but its fascinating confluence of factors that lasted hundreds of years in early modern europe that created this total lack of homogenous populations in eastern europe.
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It really is. I didn't much like history as a kid, but I like it a lot more as an adult. Last summer we toured through the Baltics as I've wanted to go for decades, and then this summer we toured Poland as my partner had never been. Every place I go to, museum I visit, plaque I read, is another puzzle piece in the migration of people across the whole region. By comparison migration in western europe seems like it was far less fluid.
I'm Slovak, and when I was a kid, I was really wondering what is the thing that makes people Slovak, what is the unifying thing. And only later in life I realized, that there is not much to it. It's just people that happened to be living in this area and stayed throughout the different times. Many cultures came and left. All the slavic languages we kind of fluid for a very long time, the standardization is recent, if you look at it from global point of view. The sad part is, this is not really even taught in local schools. And I also find it fascinating, that it's such a wild blend of cultures and yet the country/nature where the people lived formed them to something unique.