Forum | Europe Travel Guide | Ecology | Facts & Trivia | Genetics | History | Linguistics |
Austria | France | Germany | Ireland | Italy | Portugal | Spain | Switzerland |
![]() |
I agree, outdated terminology form USSR, DDR, and Warsaw pact days.
I think that if you draw a line halfway between the western edge of Europe and the eastern edge of Europe, you'll find that whatever is to the right of that line within Europe is Eastern Europe. Just a suggestion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Europe
mmmmmmmmm dooouuughhhnuuuutz
You are funny DaveF.
^^ thanks, I do have a great sense of humor :)
Culturally, Eastern Europe refers to the Slavic Orthodox countries that use Cyrillic script (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, etc.).
Politically it's any country east of the Iron Curtain (including Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovenia).
Depends what you mean by "Eastern":
Politically/economically: Any country formerly east of the Iron Curtain.
Culturally/historically: Any country that is Orthodox Christian and uses a non-Latin script. In this case, I would place all Catholic Slavs plus Hungarians as Central Europeans. Exception is Romania, which is Orthodox but is Romanized due to language family. Albania and Bosnia are Muslim putting them closer to the Orient.
Central Europe for the most part just means semi-Western countries that haven't economically caught up with their Western peers. Prague as a city for example feels very Western to me, just slightly poorer (though nothing like its neighbors to the east). They are in the transition zone. The real Eastern cities are in countries like Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Macedonia, Bulgaria, etc. who all have Oriental cultures. Greece I would also consider Oriental despite being part of the Western bloc due to culture. They also inspired the Cyrillic script after all.
Russia is its own beast and can't be really compared to anywhere in Europe IMO.
Central Europe as a region does exist culturally, but not politically. People are too caught up with the Iron Curtain division and fail to connect the previous hundreds of years of history that tied these regions together. Look at the Ottoman conquests. Central Europe was very Western at that time.
"Eastern Europe" is a term that refers to a geopolitical region covering the eastern part of the European continent.
The term was well defined during the Cold War, being used as a synonym for the Eastern Bloc or the Second World, and is still used today.
Eastern Europe is a name used after the Second World War for the communist countries in Europe that fell into the sphere of influence of the USSR. That is why Finland, Greece and Turkey have never been considered part of Eastern Europe, although they are purely geographical in the east. of Europe.