The first capital of modern Greece: Venetian fortresses, a Bourtzi island castle and neoclassical lanes.
The old royal capital in a mountain valley, with former embassies and the monastery of St Peter.
Hungary's largest church on a hill above the Danube bend, the old royal and religious capital.
Two castles face each other across the river โ Estonian Hermann and Russian Ivangorod โ on the EU border.
Where the 1989 revolution began; Secession squares and the first European city lit by electric street lamps.
Rumi's tomb and the whirling dervishes, the Seljuk capital in the middle of Anatolia.
The Black Sea port of the Byzantine Comnenes, the Hagia Sophia of Trabzon and the Sumela monastery on a cliff.
Honey-coloured stone houses stepping down a hill above the Mesopotamian plain, with Syriac monasteries.
Constantine the Great's birthplace, the Ottoman Skull Tower and Serbia's capital of grilled meat.
The oldest city in Western Europe, founded by Phoenicians, with Carnival, beaches and the Atlantic on three sides.
Early Christian tombs, a mosque turned church on the main square and Zsolnay ceramics.
The Sedlec Ossuary decorated with 40,000 skeletons and the silver-mining cathedral of St Barbara.
The 16th-century Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic bridge of Ivo Andric's Nobel novel, over the Drina.
Alfred the Great's capital: the longest Gothic nave in Europe and the Round Table hanging in the Great Hall.
Ireland's oldest city, founded by Vikings in 914 and still cutting the crystal that carries its name.
Red wooden riverside warehouses and cobbled lanes, the second-oldest town in Finland.
Bach's church, the peaceful revolution of 1989 and the artists' halls of the old Spinnerei cotton mill.
A castle on a crag above the battlefields of Wallace and Bruce โ Scotland's history in one town.
Monet's cathedral, the square where Joan of Arc was burned and the Gros-Horloge astronomical clock.
The home of golf and Scotland's oldest university, with a ruined cathedral above the sea.
Five original Viking ships in the museum and the cathedral where Danish monarchs have been buried since 1400.
Three medieval towers guard the old port; the Ile de Re is a bridge away.
Scandinavia's tallest cathedral, Linnaeus's garden and the Viking royal mounds at Gamla Uppsala.
The Kaiserburg above a rebuilt medieval city, the Nazi rally grounds and the Nuremberg trials courtroom.
The oldest Dutch city, on the Meuse between Belgium and Germany, where the EU treaty was signed in 1992.
The capital of the Highlands, ten minutes from Loch Ness and the Culloden battlefield.
Denmark's oldest town, a Viking market from about 700 with crooked timber houses and storks on the roofs.
A 12th-century Romanesque cathedral with an astronomical clock and a university town of cobbles and bicycles.
Shakespeare's birthplace, his grave in Holy Trinity, and the Royal Shakespeare Company on the riverbank.
Rembrandt's birthplace and the oldest university in the Netherlands, with canals quieter than Amsterdam's.
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