Central Europe

For most of the last thousand years, today's borders did not exist. The Holy Roman Empire covered the German lands, Bohemia, Austria and Slovenia's Carniola; the Kingdom of Hungary held Slovakia and much of the Danube basin; Poland was joined with Lithuania in one of Europe's largest states. The Habsburgs gathered Austria, Bohemia and Hungary under one crown from the 16th century, and their capital, Vienna, became the hub of the region's politics and culture.

Poland disappeared from the map entirely between 1795 and 1918, partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Kraków and Galicia came under Vienna, Warsaw under St Petersburg, Poznań and Gdańsk under Berlin. That split still shows in architecture, railways and even voting patterns within Poland. Prussia's rise in the 19th century produced a unified Germany in 1871 that left Austria outside.

The First World War ended the empires. In 1918 Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Hungary and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were created or recreated. Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory at Trianon, a grievance still visible in maps sold in Budapest. Cities changed names and languages with the borders: Pressburg, Pozsony and Bratislava are the same place; so are Breslau and Wrocław, Laibach and Ljubljana.

The region was the main stage of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Before 1939, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were home to Europe's largest Jewish communities; most were murdered, many in camps the Nazis built on occupied Polish soil, including Auschwitz-Birkenau near Kraków. Warsaw was systematically destroyed after the 1944 uprising, and German cities were bombed to ruins. Millions of Germans were expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia after 1945.

The Iron Curtain then ran through the middle of the region, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, with Berlin divided inside the Soviet zone. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany became Soviet-bloc states. Uprisings were crushed in East Berlin (1953), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). Austria stayed neutral and Western; Yugoslav Slovenia sat in between; Switzerland remained apart.

In 1989 the bloc unravelled in a chain reaction. Poland's Solidarity movement won partly free elections in June; Hungary opened its border fence with Austria; East Germans fled through Hungary and Prague's West German embassy; the Berlin Wall opened on 9 November; and Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution followed within days. The old border strip is now the European Green Belt, and memorials at Bernauer Strasse, Checkpoint Charlie and the Hungarian–Austrian border tell the story.

Geography explains how the region moves. The Danube runs from the Black Forest through Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest, historically the great trade route east. The Elbe links Prague, Dresden and Hamburg; the Rhine carries traffic from Switzerland to the North Sea; the Vistula runs through Kraków and Warsaw. Capitals grew on these rivers, which is why the classic city trips follow river valleys.

Railways arrived in the 1830s and 1840s and bound the Habsburg lands to Vienna and the German states to Berlin. The Semmering railway south of Vienna (1854) was the first true mountain railway, and the Gotthard (1882) and Arlberg (1884) lines carried trains through the Alps. The legacy is a dense rail network where Berlin to Prague, Prague to Vienna and Vienna to Budapest take hours, not days, and where Austria's and Switzerland's trains remain among Europe's best.

The Alps divide the region in a different way. North of them lie the plains and uplands of Germany, Poland and Bohemia; to the south, Slovenia and Ticino open towards the Mediterranean. Alpine valleys developed their own cultures — Walser settlers, Tyrolean farmers, Swiss cantons — and the high passes were once the only routes to Italy. Today tunnels such as the Gotthard Base Tunnel carry trains under them in minutes.

A shared café culture ties the old Habsburg cities together. The Viennese coffee house model — marble tables, newspapers, one coffee for hours — spread to Prague, Budapest, Kraków, Ljubljana and Trieste. Budapest's New York Café and Prague's Café Louvre are the grand survivors. Cake is part of the ritual: strudel, Sachertorte, Dobos torte and Kremšnita appear under different names across borders.

Beer marks the northern half. Czechia drinks more beer per person than any other country, and Pilsen gave the world the pale lager in 1842. Bavaria, Franconia and Poland have their own traditions, and beer halls, beer gardens and village breweries are part of daily life. Further south, wine takes over: Austria's Grüner Veltliner, Hungary's Tokaji and Egri Bikavér, Slovenia's orange wines from Goriška Brda, Riesling on the Rhine.

Thermal baths are the region's other ritual. Hungary sits on hundreds of hot springs, and Budapest's Széchenyi and Gellért baths date from the Ottoman and Habsburg eras. Karlovy Vary in Czechia, Baden-Baden in Germany and Bad Ischl in Austria were the spa towns of the 19th-century elite, and are now UNESCO-listed as the Great Spa Towns of Europe.

Since 2004, when Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia joined the EU, the old East–West divide has narrowed fast. Poland has been one of Europe's fastest-growing economies; Czech and Slovak car factories supply Germany; Slovenia and Slovakia use the euro. All nine countries are in the Schengen area, so the Berlin–Budapest rail line crosses four borders with no passport control.

Differences remain. Wages and prices in Poland, Hungary and Czechia are still well below Germany's, Austria's and Switzerland's, which makes the region's east much cheaper to travel. Politics diverge too: Hungary under Viktor Orbán has clashed with the EU over the rule of law, Poland changed government in 2023, and migration debates have brought back temporary checks at many internal borders.

The war in Ukraine since 2022 has reshaped the region's east. Poland, Slovakia and Hungary border Ukraine, host large numbers of refugees and have raised defence spending; Poland's border with Belarus is heavily fortified. For travellers the practical effects are limited to the eastern borders — the capitals are safe and busy — but they explain the politics you will read about while you are there.