Europe's Thirty Years' War runs from a window in Prague Castle to the town halls of Münster and Osnabrück. This route follows it through the battlefields of White Mountain, Magdeburg, Breitenfeld, Lützen and Nördlingen — from the defenestration of 1618 to the peace of 1648.
The stops are in the order the war happened: the castle window in Prague, the hill where Frederick V's army broke, the square where 27 rebel leaders were executed, then the sacked city of Magdeburg, Gustavus Adolphus's victories at Breitenfeld and Lützen, the Swedish collapse at Nördlingen, and the two Westphalian town halls where the treaties were finally signed. Nine places, thirty years, one continuous story.
In 1989 communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe came apart in a few months — through round-table talks in Poland, a picnic on the Hungarian border, candlelit marches in Leipzig, a muddled press conference in Berlin, students in Prague and a bloody uprising in Romania. Each country had its own causes, but every crack made the next one easier.
The route visits the exact places where it happened, most of them marked today by a memorial, a museum or a plaque: the shipyard gate where Solidarity was born, the palace of the Round Table, the old border road near Sopron, the church in Leipzig, the bridge at Bornholmer Straße, a street corner in Prague, a pastor's flat in Timișoara and the balcony in Bucharest.
