Talk:Time in Europe

Section Request

Perhaps someone can add a section on WHY the timezones are the way they are... that is to say, WHY many countries in Europe are an hour or two ahead of the real time?

Yes, the article does mention "[D]ue to geographical and cultural factors it is not practical to divide the world so evenly and actual time zones may differ significantly from their theoretical borders"... but what exactly were the "cultural factors" that prevented the time zone from aligning up properly? Like, why did Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands choose to share the same time zone as the rest of most of Europe (Central European Time) rather than choose Western European Time? Was it because France wanted to be "ahead" of the UK, time wise? Or because they want to be more "aligned" with the rest of Europe?

None of the specific articles on the time zones seem to answer this, so if anyone can add a section to this article, that would be most appreciated! Thanks! -- 71.141.97.9 (talk) 22:35, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

isn't it something because of german occupation over these countries during of WWII? I have remember something about time zone imposed by nazi germany. 159.245.16.100 (talk) 09:29, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Good points. You can see some information about the change of time zones at Time in France and Time in Spain. Untill WWII they were in the western time zone, but France switched to "German time" under the occupation and never changed back, and Spain also changed under Franco. It should probably be expanded upon here. Peregrine981 (talk) 12:34, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Azores Time

Why not to include the Azores Time? It is part of an European country (Portugal) and 7 of its 9 islands are in the Eurasian Tectonic Plate. Mondolkiri1 (talk) 15:22, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

 Done. Rob984 (talk) 18:08, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Wrong map

The time zone map in the beginning is slightly wrong, some regions in Russia (Astrakhan, Saratov, Ulyanovsk) that use UTC+4 are marked as UTC+3 there. LICA98 (talk) 18:18, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

 Done. Maybe it's necessary to show some Ural regions in Russia, which used UTC+5 time (Perm Krai, Bashkortostan, Orenburg Oblast and Sverdlovsk Oblast). --Brateevsky (talk) 08:19, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

 Undone. I had to revert that edit to the map since the same edit also incorrectly changed the time zone for all of Ukraine. This is about the map File:Time zones of the Greater Europe.svg. It seems other parts of Wikipedia agrees with LICA98's claim, but I am not a map editor so I could not fix the map, just revert to the older version with correct time zone for Ukraine.

And regarding the time in Ukraine: Ukraine still has Eastern European Summer Time until 27th of October 2024. And the law to not have summer time in 2025 is in process but not finalised (might be repealed) according to the only detailed source I have seen: https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/ukraine-dst-vote-2024.html

--David Göthberg (talk) 15:57, 28 August 2024 (UTC)