There are some things you can only understand about a culture if you've lived there. Eastern Europe is no different – the post-Soviet experience is hard to describe, but it's something you would have to go through yourself. Around 285 million people live in the region and share that experience. And we've decided to share some of that experience with you, Pandas.
We collected the funniest and most relatable memes from the "Just Romanian & Eastern European Things" Facebook page and are presenting the best ones to you here. You'll see that you haven't really seen Eastern Europe until you've tasted a babushka's kompot, fermented pickles, and seen a horse-drawn carriage in the streets.
More info: Facebook
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What exactly is Eastern Europe? How European really is it, and where does that eastern part begin exactly? Is Romania in Eastern Europe or the Balkans? Do Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania belong to Eastern Europe, or are they the three Baltic countries?
To the Western world, there are two Europes, as Polish poet Czesław Miłosz once explained: Western Europe and 'The Other Europe.' To the Western mind, Europe always was (and still is) countries like France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Germany. And the rest? Almost always forgotten or completely nonexistent.
I remember watching Hollywood movies of the '90s and '80s and always finding it strange when characters would talk about "vacationing in Europe." To them, "Europe" meant something completely different from what it meant to me. It was exotic, but mostly insofar as it was different from America: beautiful coastlines, cafés in Paris, old castles, and some strange concept of "freedom," often embodied by nudist beaches in Germany.
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But as a person from a Baltic (to many a Western mind, still an Eastern European) state, I would wonder why countries like Poland, Slovakia, and Romania never made the desired vacation destination list. That's because to many Westerners (and not exclusively Americans), Eastern Europe is Other.
As literature scholar Eva Hoffman noted in her writings about Milosz, Eastern Europe was (and perhaps still is) "imagined as inferior, obscure and altogether insignificant by the inhabitants of what was considered Europe tout court: Europe, which stood for civilization itself."
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The perceived inferiority of Eastern Europe can sometimes be seen in the phenomenon that British writer and journalist Edward Lucas calls "Westsplaining." According to him, it has a lot to do with the history of communism in Europe.
"People from the 'old West' – the countries which never experienced communism – lecture people from the 'new West' – former captive nations – about history, geography, and other issues." Lucas goes on to say how "Westsplaining" often results in understating Russia's expansionism and failure to see Eastern European countries as individual sovereign states.
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The West's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is very telling as well. Britain's Stop the War Coalition, for example, refers to Ukraine as "the battleground for Russian and US imperialism." In actuality, scholars from the region would call that an oversimplification.
Ukraine and its people become passive and insignificant players in some game between two big dogs. As Joanna Rzepa from the University of Essex writes, it "frames Ukraine as a place of essential otherness. It denies the Ukrainian people both a voice and a right to self-determination."
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To distance themselves from the term "Eastern Europe," Polish, Czech, and Hungarian intellectuals revived the term "Central Europe" in the 1980s. It meant that the states previously under Soviet control wanted to establish their identities and cultural autonomy without being relegated to the disregarded Eastern Europe. The three formed the Visegrad Group together with Slovakia (after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia), a political alliance that is still alive today.
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We might try to answer the question "Where is Eastern Europe?" from a geographical perspective only. EuroVoc, for example, groups Central and Eastern Europe together. All the countries from Poland and the Czech Republic to Russia, Ukraine, the Balkan Peninsula countries minus Greece, and even Sakartvelo, Armenia, and Azerbaijan are considered Eastern Europe.
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The International Criminal Court groups countries according to the Rome Statute (a treaty giving the Court jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity) in a different way. In its classification, the Baltic States are part of Eastern Europe (EuroVoc classifies them as "Northern States"), and Azerbaijan and Russia are excluded.
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Perhaps now you see how difficult it is to define where and what exactly Eastern Europe is. Maybe there are just too many different cultures that get lumped into one. And while it's true that they share some similarities and a shared history, they are also all one of a kind.
Bored Panda has got more of the Eastern European experience for you, Pandas. Here you can learn all about how Kompot Is Life, what Slavic life is all about, and what is up with those Squatting Slavs in Tracksuits.
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