If ever you find yourself kicking your heels in Glasgow at lunchtime, why not take the once-daily direct train to Malta? The journey only takes an hour. Find out more as we check out a few unlikely place ...

From 1960, an unusual clutch of Parisian writers - known as the Oulipo group - played ingenious games with language. We take a look at the work of Georges Perec who once wrote an entire novel without using the fifth letter of the alphabet. Later he ...

We pay tribute to Paul Hadfield who died on 26 January 2018. Paul was an educator and a poet, a good friend and a deeply thoughtful man. He contributed to hidden europe on three occasions and as part of the tribute, we include a fourth poem by Paul ...

Did Prince Grigor Potemkin really try to fool Catherine the Great into thinking that life in Russia's Black Sea region was rosier than it really was? We think the idea of Potemkin villages is probably a myth, and that Prince Potemkin was guilty of ...

two poems - one Polish and one Maltese - that probe the boundaries of an enlarging European ...

Prose and poetry evoke echoes of the past on the shores of Loch Fyne in western Scotland. hidden europe walks the loch shore to the ruins of the old powdermills at Furnace, while Paul Hadfield weaves a web of family ...

The notion of a world language is an intriguing one. Welcome to Bialystock in Poland, the home of ...

Marin Sorescu died ten years ago. He was a poet who laughed in the face of adversity. It is something that Romanians do rather ...

The Vojvodina region of northern Serbia is one of the most culturally complex regions of Europe. We investigate the patchwork quilt of peoples and languages that make up Vojvodina - an area the size of Wales with no less than six official ...

Travel around Europe and you will come across runic texts in Scandinavia and Scotland's Orkney islands, Glagolitic inscriptions in Croatia and Hebrew texts on synagogues across the continent. We explore how alphabets often become an emblem of ...

Lesbians don't necessarily come from Lesbos, not everyone from Bohemia is bohemian, and Alsatians are generally dogs. A letter to the editors from a hidden europe reader prompts a few thoughts on the knotty issue of ...

A new edition of Helen Martin's book on the Lot region of southwest France is much to be welcomed. Textured prose that nicely evokes a sense of the region's limestone landscapes. Get a flavour of this new ...

In County Leitrim, Ireland's blind bard found inspiration. Turlough O'Carolan was a composer, poet and harpist. And O'Carolan's work and life fired Paul Hadfield to weave some words about Lough Scur in ...

Three Swiss-born women travel writers slipped from our shared literary consciousness until they were rediscovered by feminist critics. hidden europe editor Nicky Gardner finds in the writing of Isabelle Eberhardt, Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella ...

Yes, you can go to Iceland in search of glaciers and geysers, but you can also travel north, just as William Morris did, in search of heroes and gods. These are landscapes full of eddic myth and powerful sagas. Iceland is a country that has kept ...