A guidebook in twenty-four volumes  ·  All available

The countries
that are no longer there.

A reading room and travel guide for kingdoms, empires, and states that have been erased from the map — and the places you can still go to find them.

VolumesTwenty-four available
ChaptersNow expanding
Span2,817 years
ContinentsSix
↓ Scroll to enter

A note from the editor

Countries are stranger than they look.

They are born and they die. They expand and contract. They are renamed by their conquerors and forgotten by their own children. And yet — if you know where to stand — the ground still remembers them.

This is a guidebook, but it is unlike the guidebooks on the shelves. The places it describes cannot be flown to, because they no longer exist. You cannot apply for a visa to Prussia. There is no embassy of the Ottoman Empire. The currency of East Germany is a curiosity in a coin shop. And yet these places ran the lives of hundreds of millions of people for centuries — and shaped, in ways we only half-notice, the world we now live in.

The Lost Lands project is an attempt to give these vanished countries the treatment they deserve. Each volume is a long, readable history written for the curious traveller — not the specialist — followed by a practical guide to the cities, ruins, palaces, battlefields, monasteries, and small towns where these former countries can still be felt. Where the borders were. Where the kings are buried. Where the languages persist. Where the architecture gives the game away.

You can read this book without leaving your chair. You can also use it to plan a trip. Both are intended.

The Globe — twelve disappearances

Find a country
where it used to be.

A slow rotating globe. Each marker is the rough centre of a country that no longer exists. Click one to open its volume. Drag to rotate. Scroll to zoom.

The lost lands — click to focus

Drag to rotate · Scroll to zoom · Click marker to read

The Atlas — twenty-two volumes

Choose a country
that is gone.

Flag of the Kingdom of Prussia, 1803–1892

Vol. I · Available now

Prussia 1525 — 1947

A kingdom of sand and discipline that built modern Germany and then was deliberately erased from the map by Allied decree. Fourteen chapters; one travel guide; four driving routes; the myths laid to rest.

 Flag of the Ottoman Empire, 1844–1922

Vol. II · Available now

The Ottoman Empire 1299 — 1922

Six hundred and twenty-three years across three continents. The empire that ruled Mecca, Athens, Algiers, and Belgrade — and gave way to twenty-eight successor states.

 Flag of the German Democratic Republic, 1959–1990

Vol. III · Available now

East Germany 1949 — 1990

The German Democratic Republic existed for forty-one years and produced its own cars, films, sportswear, and shortages. The Wall is gone; the country is not, quite.

 Flag of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Vol. IV · Available now

Yugoslavia 1918 — 2003

Brotherhood and unity, then seven successor states. Tito's monuments still rise from forests across the Balkans like science fiction.

 Flag of Imperial Iran with the Lion and Sun, 1925–1979

Vol. V · Available now

Persia 550 BC — 1979 AD

Two and a half millennia of empire, from Cyrus the Great to the last Shah. Three writing systems, two state religions, one continuous civilisation under twenty different names.

 Flag of the Soviet Union

Vol. VI · Available now

The Soviet Union 1922 — 1991

Eleven time zones; fifteen republics; one ideology. The closed cities, the metro stations, the borderlands where Soviet still hangs in the air.

 The Suntur Paucar, ceremonial banner of the Sapa Inca

Vol. VII · Available now

The Inca Empire 1438 — 1572

The largest pre-Columbian state in the Americas, run without writing, wheels, or money. Tahuantinsuyu — "the four parts together" — fell to fewer than two hundred Spaniards.

 Flag of the Congo Free State, 1885–1908

Vol. VIII · Available now

The Congo Free State 1885 — 1908

A country the size of western Europe, held as personal property by one European monarch. Twenty-three years; rubber; the most catastrophic colonial regime on record.

 Vexilloid of the Roman Empire bearing SPQR

Vol. IX · Available now

The Roman Empire 27 BC — 1453 AD

From Augustus to the fall of Constantinople — fifteen hundred years under one name. Two capitals; two state churches; a road network that outlived the empire itself.

 The Estandarte de Abderramán III — banner of the Caliph of Córdoba

Vol. X · Available now

The Caliphate of Córdoba 929 — 1031

For one century, the most populous city west of Constantinople and the brightest seat of learning in Europe. A library of four hundred thousand books, then civil war.

 Proposed flag of Green Ukraine, 1917–1922

Vol. XI · Available now

Green Ukraine 1917 — 1922

An almost-country. A Ukrainian settler republic on the Pacific, declared three times in the chaos of the Russian Civil War, swallowed by the Soviets before it could be mapped.

 Royal banner of the Kingdom of Jerusalem with the Jerusalem Cross

Vol. XII · Available now

The Kingdom of Jerusalem 1099 — 1291

A crusader state of French-speaking knights and Arabic-speaking peasants, ended at Acre with the last Frankish ship to Cyprus. Two centuries; nine kings; one Jerusalem.

 The lion-of-St-Mark banner of the Most Serene Republic of Venice

Vol. XIII · Available now

The Republic of Venice 697 — 1797

The longest-lived republic in European history. Eleven hundred years of independent existence, a Stato da Mar that included Crete and Cyprus, and a constitution that defeated dynastic ambition for five centuries.

 Royal banner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, white eagle and Vytis

Vol. XIV · Available now

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569 — 1795

Two crowns, four languages, and Europe's largest country by area for most of the seventeenth century. A noble republic with an elected king — dismantled by its three imperial neighbours in three slices.

 Flag of Rhodesia, 1968–1979

Vol. XV · Available now

Rhodesia 1965 — 1979

A self-governing British colony declared its own independence in 1965, ran for fourteen years under United Nations sanctions, and ended at the Lancaster House table to produce the country now called Zimbabwe.

 Flag of the German Reich, 1935–1945

Vol. XVI · Available now

Nazi Germany 1933 — 1945

Twelve years of dictatorship. The Weimar collapse, the Gleichschaltung, the camps, the war that killed sixty million people, the Berlin bunker, the trial at Nuremberg and the country that emerged in two pieces afterward.

 Banner of the Holy Roman Emperor with haloes, 1430–1806

Vol. XVII · Available now

The Holy Roman Empire 962 — 1806

Eight hundred and forty-four years of elective monarchy, three hundred sovereign principalities, the longest-lasting state in central European history — neither holy, nor Roman, nor really an empire, and yet none of those criticisms ever quite stuck.

 The Stars and Bars, first national flag of the Confederate States, 1861–1863

Vol. XVIII · Available now

The Confederate States of America 1861 — 1865

Four years; eleven states; a slaveholders' republic that wrote its commitment to human bondage into its founding constitution and was destroyed by the deadliest war in American history. Six hundred thousand dead. Then Reconstruction, then segregation, then now.

 Flag of Gran Colombia, 1819–1820

Vol. XIX · Available now

Gran Colombia 1819 — 1831

Bolívar's republic. From the Caribbean to the Amazon, from Panama to Guayaquil — twelve years of liberation-era political unity that produced modern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama as separate states.

 Flag of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam)

Vol. XX · Available now

South Vietnam 1955 — 1975

The Republic of Vietnam — the Cold War's most expensive American commitment. Twenty years; six presidents; one million combatants killed; the last helicopters off the embassy roof on the 30th of April 1975; and the long postwar.

 Flag of Tibet, 1916–1951 — the snow lions, the sun, the snow mountain

Vol. XXI · Available now

Tibet 1913 — 1951

The Ganden Phodrang's de facto independence — proclaimed by the 13th Dalai Lama on his return from exile, sustained for thirty-eight years between the collapse of the Qing and the entry of the People's Liberation Army into Lhasa. Lhasa, the Potala, the 14th Dalai Lama's childhood, and the 17-Point Agreement of May 1951.

 Imperial flag of the late Byzantine Empire (Palaiologan dynasty)

Vol. XXII · Available now

The Byzantine Empire 330 — 1453

The empire the Roman Empire became. Eleven hundred and twenty-three years from Constantine's foundation of Constantinople to the day the walls finally fell to Mehmed II. Greek-speaking, Orthodox, scholarly — the longest-lived state of late antiquity and the medieval Mediterranean.

 The Black Standard of the Abbasid Caliphate

Vol. XXIII · Available now

The Abbasid Caliphate 750 — 1258

The capital of the medieval Islamic world, ruling from Baghdad — the Round City built in 762, the House of Wisdom, the translation movement that preserved the Greek inheritance, and a five-century arc from the Hashimite revolution against the Umayyads to the Mongol sack of February 1258.

 The Sign of Tanit — the Punic religious symbol most associated with Carthage

Vol. XXIV · Available now

The Carthaginian Empire 814 BC — 146 BC

The Phoenician trading colony that became the dominant western-Mediterranean power. Founded by Tyrian settlers in 814 BC, ruling a thalassocracy from Iberia to Cyrenaica, defeated in three Punic wars by an upstart Roman republic, and finally destroyed — house by house, with the ground sown — in the spring of 146 BC.

How to read

Two ways to use this guidebook.

As a book. Each volume is divided into chapters. Read them straight through, in order, like a long-form magazine piece you cannot put down. The voice is editorial — closer to a feature in The Atlantic than to a textbook — and you will not need any prior knowledge to follow it.

As a travel guide. Each volume also contains a travel section with stops, driving routes, and practical notes. The routes are real and drivable. The stops are real and visitable. The point is to give you the historical eyes you need to see what is otherwise just another castle, another statue, another small town with a confusing name. Two hundred and twenty-six destinations across the library.

And in every volume there is a section called Mythbusters, where we deal — politely but firmly — with the things people get wrong about each country.