The Third Dimension

A three-dimensional map of the region tells a compelling story: Central Europe is less a geographic entity and more a community formed by a shared history. 

Central Europe is more than an !imagined space”. In Britain, you can see it in the satellite photo of Europe at night, broadcast every evening at the beginning of the television news. It shows up in the west as a swathe of light running down the edge of what was once the Carolingian Middle Kingdom, illuminating the landscape from the estuary of the Rhine to the Alps. East of this line, the patchwork is still bright, clustered around the Ruhr and the River Main, Hamburg, Berlin, and Vienna. A dark hunk of space marks the Carpathians, but the light show leaps the mountains to illuminate Budapest and Zagreb. Then it peters out. It is the same on the other side of the Carpathians. Once past Wrocław and Warsaw, the darkness presses in. Except for the pinprick of Minsk, it is black all the way to Moscow.