Welcome to Hidden Cities

Hidden Cities is a magazine about the world, from politics to literature.

It takes its name from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, inspired by the novel’s sense of wonder at the world. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his he did not know,” Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan in one of Calvino’s imagined conversations between the Venetian explorer and Mongol emperor. “The foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

Part travelogue, part global news brief, Hidden Cities is a magazine that illuminates the world at a time when too many are looking inward, away from it, fearful of foreign places and of “foreignness” itself. It is committed to publishing writers from around the world, in their own voice and on their own terms, in essays, reportage, and other writing, including poetry.

Founded and edited by Frederick Deknatel, Hidden Cities existed in an earlier form as a blog of stories from the Middle East, written mostly from Damascus and Cairo in the late 2000s. Freddy is a journalist, editor, and fellow at Century International, where he writes about Middle Eastern affairs. From 2021 to 2025, he was the founding executive editor of Democracy in Exile, the journal of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). He was also previously the managing editor of World Politics Review and a staff editor at Foreign Affairs.

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