Yugoslavia.
Brotherhood and unity, then seven countries.

The south Slavs are a group of peoples — Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and others — who, by the nineteenth century, spoke closely related but distinct languages, professed three different religions (Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim), used three different alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic, and, for older texts, Glagolitic and Arabic), and had lived for several centuries divided between two empires: the Habsburg monarchy to the north and west, the Ottoman Empire to the south and east. The idea that they were one people, separated by historical accident and waiting to be reunited, was a romantic invention of nineteenth-century intellectuals, particularly the Croatian bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer and the Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. They called the idea Yugoslavism. They could not, then or later, agree on what it actually meant in practice.

The country that took the name was born from the collapse of the two empires at the end of the First World War. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was proclaimed in Belgrade on the 1st of December 1918, eleven days after the formal abdication of the Habsburgs. It was renamed Yugoslavia in 1929 by royal decree. It was invaded and dismembered by the Axis in April 1941. It was reconstituted as a Communist federation under Josip Broz Tito in 1945. It survived in that form, with extraordinary internal tensions managed by an unusually skilful authoritarian leader, until Tito's death in 1980. It began to disintegrate in the late 1980s. It went to war with itself between 1991 and 1995, and again in 1998-99. It formally ceased to exist on the 4th of February 2003, when the rump federation of Serbia and Montenegro renamed itself Serbia and Montenegro. Three years later, even that was over.

What remains is seven independent countries, several million traumatised people, a small set of widely loved films from the 1970s, an extraordinary inheritance of modernist architecture and concrete monuments from the partisan era, and the most beautiful coastline in southern Europe. The Lost Lands volume on Yugoslavia is an attempt to tell the country's story without taking sides between its successors.