Can a country disappear?
We've all heard the myth of Atlantis
the old Empire that sank and got lost in the sea
But there are other ways for countries to stop existing
let's take a look
Siam is an exonym
a name that outsiders gave to a place where an ethnic group lives
heir to the kingdom of Ayutthaya, its people called their country Mueang Thai
this is the only country in Southeast Asia never colonized by a European power
that's right, since 1949 it's been officially known as Thailand
But Siam still holds some mysteries
Beautiful, aged, old Bangkok, capital of Siam and scene of a mystery
regarding the gunshot death of its young monarch King Ananda
Barely five minutes after landing on French soil
Alexander of Yugoslavia was dead
The union of the slavs of southern Europe existed from 1918 to 2003
Yugoslavia started off as a kingdom across two world wars
however after the stoic resistance against the Nazis and fascists
Josip Broz Tito became the first ever elected president
and the Kingdom became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Tito held the republic together until his death in 1980
communism was followed by nationalism and the abolition of the autonomy of its states
this led to a series of tragic ethnic wars
that lasted over ten years
finally after the gradual independence of its national states
Yugoslavia stopped existing in 2003
You may know that the big island in the South of India is called Sri Lanka
Since it was first colonized by the Portuguese in the 16th century
and later by the Dutch in the British, Europeans called it Ceylon
It gained its independence in 1948
however it remained at the British dominion in the Commonwealth
On a goodwill visit to Ceylon, the cruise of Norfolk joins in the crown colony's independence celebration
The Duchess watches the Duke accompanied by the Prime Minister and the governor-general
raise the flag for the new dominion.
Ceylon stopped existing in 1979
when its government repudiated its dominion status and became
the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka
the Soviet Union was born in 1922
and it stopped existing in 1991
it was a country that shaped the history the 20th century
for better or worse because it was not just another country
but one built under one ideology: communism, a system that had no
precedent in modern history
with peristroika in the eighties the Soviet Union started reforming process
they would end with its dissolution on the 26 the December 1991.
Heir of the Tibetan Empire that emerged in the seventh century
Tibet has always been in tension with its neighboring China
in 1913 Tibet declared its independence
and functioned as a country until 1951
when it was incorporated into the People's Republic of China
From remote mysterious Tibet, news of an uprising against Chinese communist rule
the young Dalai Lama revered by his people as a living Buda
was reported under arrest by the Reds
The flags of Egypt and Syria fly side by side in Cairo as the two Arab nations merge
Seen by many as a first step towards a pan-arab state the UAR was created
in 1958 due to increasing worries that Syria would become a communist country
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser became the first and ever
only president of the new republic
He combined nationalization and social justice measures
with the growing centralization
and his government ended up in a coup d'etat
the declared Syria's independence just three years after it was born
the UAR had a very short life disappearing in 1961
Existing between 1918 in 1992
Czechoslovakia was invaded first by Nazi Germany
and later by the soviet tanks,
Democracy blossomed in between world wars
but its central position in the middle of Europe and its ethnic diversity
made it very complicated for this country to endure the 20th century
However 2 remarkable facts write its history
First, in 1989 the famous Velvet Revolution
turned the communist regime into a parliamentary republic
through purely peaceful means
And second, in 1992, the government solved the growing nationalist tensions with
a peaceful dissolution of the country into two:
The Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic
The rest of Berlin remains sharply divided
with no contact at all between russians and their world war allies
across wall and wire, east germans glare at the troops of the West
and nobody seems to be any nearer to a solution of the Berlin problem
At the end of WW2, the allies split Germany in four
but soon in 1949, two sovereign countries were formed
commonly known as West and East Germany
For forty years, the Berlin Wall drew an artificial division
that became a focus point for the cold war
It wasn't until 1990, with the unification of Germany,
that these two countries stopped existing
Can you think of any more countries that no longer exist?
Leave us a comment below