1. Karadeniz is the Turkish name for the Black Sea; Chorne More, the Ukrainian name; chernozyom means “black earth” in Russian; ochi chorniye means “black eyes” in Ukrainian, but is often translated “dark eyes” or “brown eyes” so it doesn’t sound like the result of a fistfight.
2. A verst is an ancient Russian measure of length, equivalent to 0.66 miles.
3. A dazibao is a large-character, handwritten Chinese wall poster, frequently associated with the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
4. The Schengen Agreement, first signed by five countries in 1985 and later adopted by the European Union, allows for residents of its now twenty-eight member countries to cross borders freely, away from fixed checkpoints.
5. The original expression is “non guadagnerà un becco di un quattrino.” A quattrino was a coin minted in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the 1300s. As the name indicates, its value was four denari or four cents. Becco, “beak,” is the term used in numismatics to describe a pointed imperfection that sticks out on the circumference of the coin. The expression un becco di un quattrino—“the beak of a quattrine”—is roughly the equivalent of a “red cent,” referring to a copper penny.
6. The exile and deportation of ethnic Germans then living in eastern Poland and Czechoslovakia began in 1944 as Germans fled to the west to escape the advancing Red Army. This flight of refugees became official deportation after the Potsdam Conference in 1945, when the Allies agreed to deport Germans from the East to the Allied occupied areas of Austria and Germany. By 1950 a total of twelve million Germans had fled or been expelled from Eastern and Central Europe.
7. Pannonia is the name of a province of the Roman Empire bounded on the north and east by the Danube and occupying the territory of present-day western Hungary, eastern Austria, northern Croatia, northwestern Serbia, Slovenia, western Slovakia, and northern Bosnia and Herzegovina.