You can leave your map on - EUSTORY History Campus

Among many other interesting – and before unexperienced – challenges, our participants also took the roles of geography/history lecturers, who presented shifts in the borders of their countries as well as the reasons, causes and the consequences created by changing the borders. Our national border experts contributed to our knowledge and awareness about the meaning and influence of state borders. We realised how third-party’s (usually the war-winners) decisions about the size and shape of the losing states can cause severe consequences for the people living in territories. Nationalities changed, homes were lost, families separated…

Once great and extensive multinational empires slowly shrank in the course of history and new nation states were created. People living on the very same territory sometimes changed their citizenships multiple times due to the often changing border-lines. Some decided to stay and accept their new citizenship, while others decided to migrate; to follow the sometimes very elusive border-line in order to once again live inside the borders of that country, which represents the fundamental part of their national identity.

What exactly happened with Poland, the Austro-Hungarian empire, focusing especially on the later established states of Austria and Slovakia and how Finland’s development into an independent state is presented by our participants in the following videos. Enjoy an interesting and original history lessons, as we did here in Ljubljana.

Poland between the 3 dragons: