Luxembourg, which shares borders with Belgium, Germany and France, has always been both small in land mass and large in European strategic importance. At Luexombourg’s heart is a fortress around which a town developed at the turn of the first millennium. The Luxembourg family (the House of Luxembourg) dominated the fortress for a few hundred years until the mid-1400s when the Luxembourgs experienced a financial crisis and sold the land. A succession of families and countries, such as France, owned Luxembourg, and it generally found a way to remain independent. Today it’s a representative democracy with a constitutional monarchy attached; Luxembourg’s monarch is known as the Grand Duke.
Luxembourg’s culture mixes customs from France and Germany and its food is a mix of French and German and Belgian food. Luxembourg is trilingual, with French, German, and the German-related Luxembourgish as its main languages. Luxembourg also boasts a diverse array of modern musicians–indie rockers, jazz pianists, rappers, and even, as we see in this video, the uncategorizable Serge Tonnar.
