Name origin: The Hanseatic League, a northern continental European commercial and defensive confederation of cities. The word ‘hansa’ or ‘hanse’ means ‘convoy’ in Old German, and refers to the merchants travelling between points in the League. While the area was not generally independent, it was influential and had diplomatic privileges. Some of the Gothic architecture remains.
Name origin: Roman personification of prudence. Prudentia, whose attributes are a mirror and a snake, is frequently depicted as a pair with Justitia, the Roman goddess of Justice. The word “prudence” derives from the Latin prudentia meaning “foresight, sagacity”.
Name origin: Learning, or mathematics, from the Greek term, to honour the Mathematische Gesellschaft in Hamburg, Germany, which was founded in 1690 and is the oldest still-active mathematical society in the world, and the second-oldest scientific society in Germany.
Name origin: Greek god of love. In the earliest account, Eros is a primordial god, while later he is described as one of the children of Aphrodite and Ares and, with some of his siblings, was one of the Erotes, a group of winged love gods.
The Pythia was the high priestess and oracle of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Established by the 8th century BCE (though some sources date the shrine’s beginnings around 600 years farther back), the Pythia became pre-eminent by the 7th century BCE. Widely respected, the priestess continued to be consulted until the late 4th century CE.
Name origin: Ancient Greek goddess of the underworld. Persephone as a vegetation goddess and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiated a happy afterlife.
Name origin: Greek sea-monster, daughter of Pontos and Gaia. Kharybdis presided over a whirlpool guarding the Strait of Messina and was likely the cause of the tides with her thrice-daily intake and expulsion of large amounts of water.
Siegen is a university city in the Arnsberg region of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It lies in the basin of the river Sieg, and is surrounded by mountains, which where uninhabited are covered in coppice. Siegen lies on the German-Dutch holiday road called the Orange Route, joining towns, cities and regions associated with the House of Orange.
Name origin: Campania, a region of south-west Italy. Occupied by several Italic tribes since the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. The Etruscans and Greeks established colonies in the Campanian Plains and in Naples respectively, before it became part of the Roman republic by the end of the 4th century BCE.
Name origin: The branch of mathematics (lit. ‘measuring the Earth’), which has greatly expanded since the late 19th century after the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries and the growth of symmetry as a concept.
