Join us on the 230 km hiking trail in western Slovenia known as the Walk of Peace. It is a chance to revisit the scenes of terrible First World War battles along and around the Izonzo Front, where the armies of Austria-Hungary confronted Italian forces. Rudolf Abraham leads us through shrapnel-scarred terrain to discover landscapes of tantalizing beauty and rich historical poignancy.
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hidden europe
Slow travel to Europe's off-beat places
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Welcome to hidden europe. We promise a fresh perspective on well trodden trails, and a cool look at undiscovered corners.
01
Good travel writing
Our brief is Europe wide, and we criss-cross the continent to bring our readers some of Europe’s very best travel writing. We approach every topic with passion, insight, conviction and authority.
02
Offbeat places
We invite you to look beyond the usual tourist trails — or, if you prefer, stay at home, take out an atlas and enjoy our enthusiasm for the offbeat, the eclectic and the everyday.
03
Value driven
hidden europe is a curated collection of words in print and online that has, over two decades, celebrated European
lives and landscapes as part of the publishers’ wider commitment to promote liberal values and mindsets.
#EscapeTheHype
hidden europe aims at discovering the exotic in the everyday. The places we feature are unhyped and unsung yet full of interest. If you want to understand Europe's rich cultural diversity, this is the site for you.
#SlowTravel
hidden europe attends as much to the journey as to the destination. We take the train to Belarus and the ferry to Iceland. And the prose is as unhurried as the journeys it describes.
#StayCurious
We feature genuinely out-of-the-way places. Where we touch down on somewhere more mainstream, the perspective on the place is unconventional. And we never present places merely as points of consumption.
Explore hidden europe
Click on the sketch-map below to search for articles relating to your favourite country (on some devices you will see a list of country names instead). Yet no map is perfect, and for countries not shown on the interactive map — and to explore topics, regions or place names — just use the search box below the map.
- Albania
- Andorra
- Austria
- Belarus
- Belgium
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Bulgaria
- Croatia
- Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- France
- Finland
- Georgia
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Iceland
- Ireland
- San Marino
- Italy
- Kosovo
- Latvia
- Liechtenstein
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Macedonia
- Malta
- Moldova
- Monaco
- Montenegro
- Netherlands
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Russian Federation
- Serbia
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Turkey
- Ukraine
- United Kingdom
Latest full-length
additions
We regularly make the full version of texts available that were published in hidden europe magazine.
On average we'll add one article every two weeks. Other articles are available as an excerpt on this website.
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Is this perhaps the first time in publishing history that a well received and profitable magazine has carefully planned its own sunset? We always knew hidden europe would not be for ever. We saw it as a project with a start, a middle and an end. Now, with a strong sense of having said the things we wanted to say, we reflect on two decades of work celebrating European cultures and communities, and a remarkable mix of lives and landscapes.
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Paul Scraton reflects on the experience of reading hidden europe over the years, and then in turn becoming a regular contributor to the magazine.
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The 17th edition of Europe by Rail: The Definitive Guide is published in mid-April 2022. It includes new routes through the Alps and central Europe, a completely new journey along Italy’s Adriatic coast, new Baltic region coverage and much more.
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We suspect that slow travel may just be about to have its moment in the sun. We sense that the COVID interregnum has prompted a rethinking of travel priorities. Away with bucket lists and a culture of consumption, and let’s rediscover the appeal of the journey rather than just dashing to the destination.
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Slow travel is about making conscious choices, and not letting the anticipation of arrival undermine the pleasure of the journey. By choosing to travel slowly, we reshape our relationship with place and with the communities through which we pass on our journeys. In 2009 we launched our 'Manifesto for slow travel'. You can read the full text here.
Latest and popular
We have published 70 issues of hidden europe travel magazine and over 500 issues of our electronic newsletter called Letter from Europe. Enjoy a selection of articles and blog posts below.
The extraordinary sandstone pillars of north-east Bohemia create a mystical landscape; the appeal lies in both its grandeur and its intimacy. We visit the ‘rock city’ at Teplice in the Czech Republic.
Lipka Tatars settled in the rural region south of Vilnius in the 14th century, and their descendants still reside in villages in north-east Poland, western Belarus and southern Lithuania. They are a Muslim minority in a region of Europe which is often incorrectly perceived as being homogeneously Christian. We report on Baltic Islam.
As we reflect on two decades of researching and writing about unsung communities across Europe, we realize that we had a lot to learn about how to travel. It took courage in the early days of hidden europe to escape the tyranny of too much planning. Over time, we slowed down and came to value journeys in their own right.
The great heath at Lüneburg in northern Germany recalls a landscape that was once very common across many parts of Europe. Paul Scraton explores how the landscapes of the heath reflect land management practices developed over many centuries. The Lüneburger Heide still gives a welcome sense of wilderness not far from great German cities.
Not far from the Czech border, in the southernmost part of Polish Silesia, lies the monastery of Krzeszów (formerly known by its German name of Grüssau). It was to this quiet spot that manuscripts and books from Berlin were sent for safe keeping in the Second World War. These days, pilgrims make their way to the monastery as a place of prayer.