Ukraine: Dilove – Geographic Center of Europe
The geographic center of Europe is located in a tiny village of Dilove in the Carpathian Mountains just a few kilometers from the Romanian border. That is what Ukraine and the former Soviet Union and the Austro-Hungarian empire thought and believed in. In 1887, geographers from the court of the Austro-Hungarian empire measured geometrical middle point of the extreme longitude and latitude of Europe at the time and concluded this was the geographical center of Europe (conveniently it was within the empire). A memorial plaque was installed here. During the Soviet Union times, scientists recalculated everything again and came to the same conclusion, and installed another monument. Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia also claim to have the geographic center of Europe (depending on which northern arctic islands are included or not, or whether the mass of the mountain massifs is weighed in the calculations). But back here, in Ukraine – we stood at the very heart of European continent!
