Brits are of course now labouring under a diet of cold turkey. Christmas generates its own extraordinary traditions across Europe, which differ greatly from country to country. There is no such thing as a standard-issue European Christmas. The English certainly like their turkey on the Christmas table, but elsewhere across the continent firm Christmas favourites include baked carp, goose, spicy hams, and roast lamb.

Christmas may have come and gone in western Europe, but we shouldn’t forget that as we move east across the continent, things change. The Orthodox Churches still organise their affairs according to the old Julian calendar, and Christmas is not celebrated in most of eastern Europe until early January. By the time Russians sit down to have their Christmas meal (on the evening of 6 January), most western and central European households have already taken down their Christmas decorations.

The festive season brings its own cast of secular characters. So in Russia and other eastern European countries, Ded Moroz, also known as Father Frost, rewards children with gifts. Ded Moroz lives in northern Russia (click here to read more), an unkempt spot on the Sukhona river that is attempting to cash in on Ded Moroz in much the same way that Rovaniemi in northern Finland has proclaimed its credentials as the unbelievably tacky and ultra-commercial hometown of Santa Claus. While Santa relies on a bunch of elves for assistance, Ded Moroz lucks out in having secured the services of the beautiful Snegurochka to help distribute gifts.

Globalisation may have inflected many aspects of our lives, but Christmas still throws up its own culturally-encoded customs and characters.

This is the last in a series of eight postings by Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries, a Berlin-based duo who edit hidden europe magazine. They will return with more contributions to EuroCheapo in Spring 2008.

Photograph courtesy of Yuki-a-Gogo!

Italian semi-low-cost carrier AlpiEagles now offers flights to a wide range of destinations across Eastern Europe. Forget the now standard destinations in Poland, the Baltics, Slovakia, and Croatia—AlpiEagles flies to even less well-served markets across Eastern Europe. Among its destinations are Bucharest, Club-Napoca, and Timisoara in Romania, Chisinau (Moldova), Kiev (Ukraine), and Moscow.

When push comes to shove, however, we don’t find the AlpiEagles fares to be all that cheap. We eyed a July roundtrip between Venice and Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. We came up with a €362.50 fare, leaving Thursday and returning Sunday. To offer a point of comparison, the cheapest equivalent fare we found on Expedia was an Austrian Airlines flight via Vienna, for €454 roundtrip. Against this fare, AlpiEagles clearly offers a better deal.

Nonetheless, €360 or so is not exactly Cheapo-friendly. We’ve been keen to visit Moldova (one gritty view of which can be seen above) for quite some time. If the AlpiEagles fare is the cheapest way to fly, however, we’ll be traveling overland by bus or train to Chisinau.

photograph courtesy of Koreland!

Despite the fact that a final political status for Kosovo is not yet in sight, travel to the territory appears to be picking up. One low-cost carrier and several other standard airlines now fly to Prishtina, Kosovo’s capital.

We checked with four competitors to see how much it would cost to fly to Prishtina from various points in Europe during the last week of April, returning the first week of May.

Germanwings has flights ranging from €99 to €139 each way from Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Cologne-Bonn to Prishtina. With taxes (€25 to €35 per journey leg), the Germanwings round-trip fare is between €280 and €295.

We found the Club Air Web site to be completely user-unfriendly. The airline claimed to offer flights to Prishtina on Saturdays, yet we could not find one Saturday in April or May with an available flight.

Air Prishtina offers flights between Prishtina and more cities than any of the other three carriers (namely Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Geneva, Munich, and Zurich). Flight frequency is low, however, and despite advance booking each leg began at €109, sailing up to €340. Verdict: A bit steep for our Cheapo tastes.

The big fare surprise was delivered by British Airways, an airline hardly known as a low-cost carrier. But we found round-trip tickets between London and Prishtina for around €200 Euros, taxes included! This fare makes British Airways the least expensive option to Prishtina.

While researching new listings for the upcoming EuropeanHostels.com relaunch, we found our jaws dropping at the concentration of cheap hotels in several cities in Eastern Europe. Here, a brief digest of three cities particularly well suited to cheap sleepers.

Exhibit A: Budapest, which is just about neck and neck with Amsterdam in terms of cheap hotel numbers. We’ve identified 150 cheap sleeps in the Hungarian capital with nightly rates between €6 and €75. Perhaps it’s the city’s steamy baths that are fueling the demand for cheap beds. Whatever the explanation, it’s a budget traveler’s town, and it’s also a cheap city to reach from within Europe. We found some one-way fares on Wizzair from Frankfurt Hahn for fares as low as €33, including taxes and fees.

Dubrovnik, Croatia’s Dalmatian jewel, boasts 60 hostels and hotels with rates between €10 and €45. With rates like these, you should have plenty of dough left over to try Croatian specialities like girice and kamenice. Low-fare carriers flying to Dubrovnik include SkyEurope, Germanwings, Norwegian Air Shuttle, clickair, and flybe.

Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, clocked in with about 40 budget accommodations, which puts it in the same league as Vienna and Frankfurt. Rates at these 40 hotels fall between €7 (!) and €65 throughout the spring, when you can stroll down the shop-lined bulevard Vitosha and rest your feet (and wallet) in Yuzhen Park. Low-fare airlines flying to Sofia include SkyEurope, Wizz Air, Germanwings, and MyAir.

photograph of Pula courtesy of Sphinx06

A quick round-up of things we’re digging this Thursday morn.

1. Azerbaijan. After collecting a ton of Azerbaijan brochures at last week’s New York Times Travel Expo, we’re more excited than ever about the ex-Soviet republic. Now if we could just find it in the budget to make it to the 6th Azerbaijan International Travel and Tourism Fair, to be held in Baku April 18-20.

2. Czech Easter. Among the places in the Czech Republic with amazing Easter Fairs: Telč on March 31 and April 1, Kroměříž on March 31, and Uherské Hradiště on April 7. That’s in addition to the longish fests in Prague (on Old Town and Wenceslas Squares) from March 24 through April 15.

3. Jet2’s Accidental Star. Following the February 12 broadcast of a Jet2 commercial featuring “Dreamers’ Club,” a song by unsigned Leeds artist Micky P Kerr, the low-fare UK airline has been besieged by requests for the “ad song.” Now Jet2 has made the song available online.

4. Istria. We’re detecting an increase in attention to Istria, the Croatian/Slovenian peninsula at the top of the Adriatic. We’re gung-ho, having long felt that the region shouldn’t be sidelined by Dalmatia. We were happy to see Time Out’s special Istrian cuisine feature in last summer’s European Breaks guide. With Pula (see photo above) now served by Ryanair and nearby Rijeka handled by easyJet, it’s time to plan a cheap break to the region.

5. Saxony. The eastern German state is home to Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz. We’re not huge fans of the Saxony Tourism site, but think that the region is ready to be discovered by a broader range of visitors. Think castles, mountain ranges, exciting cities, and reasonable nightly hotel rates.

photograph courtesy of mhodges

The Balkans stretch from Croatia’s Adriatic coast to Bulgaria’s booming Black Sea resorts, and include cities from hip and brooding Belgrade to creative, chic Thessaloniki. The tourist infrastructure in the region is famously uneven, with Greece and Croatia among the easiest to navigate, and Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia among the most difficult.

For a number of reasons, tourism is exploding in the region. From the increasing popularity of the Montenegrin coast and Macedonia’s Lake Ohrid (pictured above) to waves of second home real estate sweeping Croatia and Bulgaria, there seems to be no stopping the tourist euro in the Balkans.

Here’s a Balkan region roll call: Albania; Bosnia-Herzegovina; Bulgaria; Croatia; Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM); Greece; Montenegro; Romania; Serbia; Slovenia; and Turkey.

Surrounded on three sides by the Black Sea and branches of the Mediterranean Sea, with extensive mountain ranges traversing the region, the Balkans feature a wide range of warm weather and cold weather delights.

And with their low price index—and with low-cost routes winging to destinations all over the region—the Balkan region has become the place to go for city breaks and affordable extended holidays. And given the European Union’s commitment to enlarge to eventually include the entire region, it is also a good bet that long-term stability is in the region’s future.

During our time on the ground in Lithuania, we found ourselves enjoying the Vilnius edition of In Your Pocket. The guide’s listings are animated and hilarious, offering snappy overviews of restaurants, hotels, sights, and nightclubs. We found their review of one restaurant’s cepelinai as “a limbless teddybear drowned in snail slime” breathtaking. (Incidentally, at their fattening best, cepelinai are a heavenly Lithuanian version of the potato dumpling.)

What’s so interesting about In Your Pocket is the range of cities it covers. Quite incredibly, the series includes guides to not one but two cities in Albania: capital Tirana and the northern city of Shkodra. The series does a good job of covering secondary cities in eastern Europe. Among the standout coverage for off-the-beaten track travelers: Pärnu and Tartu in Estonia and upcoming hotspot Podgorica in Montenegro.

But IYP is no one-track beast. The series also has great coverage of German cities (namely, Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Kaiserslautern, Munich, Ruhrgebiet, and Stuttgart) and surprisingly also extends to Belfast, and, soon, the Isle of Man.