Furthermore, the area also includes the Uralic-Altaic peoples, the Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, Turks and many less developed peoples. These can hardly all be treated as offshoots of Slavic. The Uralic peoples, especially those who are most highly developed, have shared the influences of the Slavs, and have been closely connected with Western Europe. The Finns and Estonians have had strong Scandinavian contacts and the Hungarians have been closely associated with the Empire, the Poles and the Czechs. The Altaic peoples, largely Mohammedan, have become an inherent part of Islamic culture and yet, despite their distinct linguistic and cultural heritage, their fate has been closely linked with that of the Slavs. In addition, there are the modern Greeks, direct heirs of the Byzantine tradition with their own sharply defined culture; the Romanians, who are proud of their Latin traditions; and the Albanians, who form a distinct Indo-European linguistic group crowded between the Southern Slavs and the Greeks. Neither can there be excluded such peoples of the Caucasus as the Georgians, the Armenians and the Azerbaijanians, nor other Christian and Mohammedan peoples formerly included in the Russian Empire. The time is long past when all of these national groups can be studied only in terms of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Their history and their struggles for liberation create many cultural subsections which cut across linguistic boundaries and, in part, natural geographical subdivisions. It is difficult to name satisfactorily these cultural subsections, for they vary in the different periods of history. Yet, the definition of courses of detailed study or area programs, which have become so popular at the present time, demands it. There is another difficulty which arises. The events of World War II and the creeping Soviet imperialism have succeeded in dominating all of the states which were established, or attempted after World War I. In the western extension of the Iron Curtain, only Finland in the north and Greece and Turkey in the south have succeeded in maintaining a precarious independence. As a result, all of the programs of instruction that have been arbitrarily set up exclude these three countries. Whatever value such a division may have at present, it is certainly no guide to the past, for at times Finland was under Swedish rule, which extended south of the Gulf of Finland. Likewise, for centuries Greece, the Southern Slavs and Romania (then divided between Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania), together with Ukraine, formed another definite cultural block, which to a large degree shared the same political fate.