Most travel guides will tell you where to find the best cathedral, castle, museum, or an overpriced cocktail bar. We want to build something different: a travel guide to the places in Europe that only libertarians would know are worth visiting.
Europe is full of forgotten places where the history of liberty can still be found. Some are grand and obvious. Others are hidden in plain sight.
Take Świetlica Wolności in Warsaw. To most people, it might simply look like a political bar, a meeting place, or a strange local curiosity. But for libertarians, it is exactly the kind of place that belongs in this guide. It is a spot where you can order cocktails with names like Tears of a Socialist, All Powerful State, or Strikebreaker, and suddenly the evening becomes a small act of political satire. It is not just a bar. It is a living example of libertarian subculture, a place where anti-statist humour, political debate, and nightlife meet.
Or take Lviv, the birthplace of Ludwig von Mises. A normal visitor might go there for the architecture, coffee houses or churches. A libertarian goes there knowing he walks through Lviv to see a part of the lost world that produced Mises: multilingual, imperial, commercial, Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian and Austrian.
We want to collect these places.
The idea is simple: if a libertarian is travelling through Europe, what places should they visit that a normal guidebook would never tell them about?
We are looking for short pieces on uniquely libertarian sites across Europe. They can be historical, political, cultural, intellectual, or just wonderfully strange. The key is that they should tell a story about freedom, coercion, markets, bureaucracy, censorship, resistance, decentralisation, private initiative, communism, liberal revolutions, free trade, religious toleration, civil liberties, or the lives of thinkers and activists who mattered to the cause of liberty.
A good piece should answer:
What is this place?
Where is it?
Why should a libertarian care?
What story does it tell?
What should someone look for if they visit?
We are especially interested in places that are not obvious: the bars, streets, cafés, universities, birthplaces, border crossings, museums, monuments, markets, printing presses, free cities, smuggling routes, tax revolts, dissident meeting rooms, and forgotten corners where liberty was argued for, fought for, crushed, betrayed, or quietly kept alive.
Submissions can be polished essays, short guide entries, or even pitches for places you think belong in the guide. The entries can be anywhere between 200 and 1200 words.
Send pitches or drafts to: submission@wespeakfreely.org
