Likes last Roman fort.

Transcript context

…We think about Eastern Europe more generally: We’re trying to figure out where various lines fall, where the Roman Empire stretched to or not. How much significance do you think that has for the current day? Or has that just been obliterated as a factor? I’ve actually gone to a lot of provincial museums on the old Limes, on the old frontier. You can go and see — I like going to the last Roman fort. You can go to Budapest and see the frontier of the frontier. You can go in Slovakia and see the last Roman camp. I don’t think it matters in a major way. I think the traces come later. It’s where the imprint of Byzantium is still around. The imprint of the East Roman Empire and its extensions, and the extensions of its church: that really matters. The world of Orthodoxy versus the world of Catholicism. Those lines — there was such an obliteration of the Roman Empire and its legacy, at least in Eastern Europe, between the 5th century and the 10th century — those old lines got obscured and new ones got put in in the 900s and the 1000s. The fact that so much of Croatia is Catholic rather than Orthodox: Should that make us more optimistic about economic growth for Croatia? Or it’s just not going to matter?…

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