Balkans

• 1. Introduction

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  The Balkans sit at the hinge of Europe, a region so contested in its very definition that the philosopher Slavoj Zizek once observed it always lies "somewhere else, always a little bit more to the southeast." For Serbs, the Balkans begin in Kosovo or Bosnia. For Croats, they begin with Orthodox Serbia. For Slovenes, they begin with Croatia. For Italians and Austrians, with Slovenia. The boundary keeps retreating, and yet, Zizek noted, when you finally reach the very bottom of the peninsula, Greece "magically escapes" and becomes the cradle of Western civilization instead. This is a region that has carried the weight of its own name as both geography and accusation, a word that once simply meant a chain of wooded mountains but has come to stand for fragmentation, conflict, and the anxious edges of Europe. How did a mountain range in Bulgaria lend its name to all of southeastern Europe? Why do modern geographers reject the very idea of a Balkan Peninsula? And how did a region that gave Europe its oldest known writing system also spark the first world war?

• 2. A Name From the Mountains

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  The Balkan Mountains stretch throughout the whole of Bulgaria, but the word itself has murkier origins. It may descend from the Turkish word balk, meaning mud, linked to a Proto-Turkic root for thick or gluey substance. It might alternatively trace to Persian bala-khana, meaning big high house. In Ottoman Turkish and in modern Turkish, balkan simply means a chain of wooded mountains. The earliest known appearance of the name on a map is in an Arab document from the early 14th century, where the old Haemus range is labeled Balkan. The name reached Western European writing in 1490, when Filippo Buonaccorsi, an Italian humanist and diplomat, used it in a letter to Pope Innocent VIII to describe the mountain range in Bulgaria. The Ottomans themselves first recorded the word in an official document dated 1565. The English traveler John Bacon Sawrey Morritt then carried the term into English literature at the end of the 18th century, and other writers began stretching it to mean the wider territory between the Adriatic and the Black Sea. Before that, the range had been called Haemus for centuries, a name the local Thracians used and which Greek mythology explained as the punishment of a Thracian king: Zeus turned King Haemus into a mountain, and the range kept his name. A competing Greek explanation held that Haemus derived from haima, the Greek word for blood, referring to Typhon's blood falling on the mountains after Zeus struck the monster with a thunderbolt.

• 3. A Geographer's Mistake

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  August Zeune, a German geographer, created the concept of the Balkan Peninsula in 1808. He mistakenly believed the Balkan Mountains were the dominant spine of southeastern Europe, a chain running continuously from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea. Zeune built a geographical concept on that error, and the name stuck even after the mistake was identified. By the mid-19th century, scholars like Carl Ritter were already arguing that only the land south of the Balkan Mountains could logically be called a peninsula, and that the region should perhaps be renamed the Greek peninsula. Hermann Wagner, Theobald Fischer, Marion Newbigin, and Albrecht Penck all disputed Zeune's framing. Austrian diplomat Johann Georg von Hahn proposed calling the same territory the Southeastern European Peninsula in 1869. The technical objection is precise: a true peninsula requires a sea border longer than its land border. For the Balkans, the sea distances from Odesa to Cape Matapan and from Trieste to Cape Matapan each measure roughly 1,230-1,350 km and 1,270-1,285 km respectively, while the land boundary from Trieste to Odesa runs approximately 1,330-1,365 km. The land side is too long. John Lampe and Marvin Jackman stated plainly in their 1971 Balkan Economic History that modern geographers seemed agreed in rejecting the old idea of a Balkan Peninsula. The geopolitical need for the term, rather than any geographical logic, was what kept it alive. After the Congress of Berlin in 1878, a new label was needed to describe what had been Ottoman-held European territory, and the Balkans gradually filled that gap.

• 4. The Oldest Crossroads

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  Long before any European power drew borders here, the Balkans were the entry point for farming into Europe. During the 7th millennium BC, practices of growing grain and raising livestock spread from the Fertile Crescent through Anatolia and into the Balkans, then continued west and north through Pannonia into the rest of the continent. The first known Neolithic culture of Old Europe, the Kakanj culture, appeared in the central Bosnian town of Kakanj and covered periods dated from 6795 to 4900 BC. Two early culture-complexes, the Starcevo and Vinca cultures, developed here. Vinca culture produced a form of proto-writing before the Sumerians and Minoans, a system called the Old European script. The bulk of its symbols had been created between 4500 and 4000 BC, with examples on the Tartaria clay tablets dating back to around 5300 BC. The Balkans also served as the juncture between the Latin and Greek halves of the Roman Empire, the destination for waves of Bulgars and Slavs, and the fault line where Orthodox and Catholic Christianity met, and later where Islam and Christianity encountered each other. The Achaemenid Persian Empire incorporated parts of the Balkans, including Macedonia, Thrace, and the Black Sea coastal region of Romania, beginning in 512 BC. Following the Persian defeat in the Greco-Persian Wars in 479 BC, those territories regained their independence. During the reign of Philip II of Macedon from 359 to 336 BC, Macedonia rose to become the most powerful state in the region. The Romans then conquered the area in the 2nd century BC, spreading Latin culture while significant portions remained under classical Greek influence.

• 5. Ottomans, Resistance, and Folk Heroes

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  Ottoman expansion into the Balkans began in the second half of the 14th century. In 1362, Ottoman forces took Adrianople, the city now known as Edirne, which then became the Ottoman capital. The Serbian Empire, already beginning to fracture, was gradually absorbed following the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and was finally extinguished with the Siege of Smederevo in 1459. Bulgaria fell in 1396 with the conquest of Vidin. The Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, Bosnia in 1463, Herzegovina in 1482, and Montenegro in 1496. The Albanian leader Skanderbeg and his forces resisted the Ottomans between 1443 and 1468, using guerrilla warfare. His victories, including the Battle of Albulena and the First Siege of Kruje, brought him fame across Europe. The small Adriatic trading city of Ragusa, the place now known as Dubrovnik, retained its independence both in practice and by formal recognition throughout this period. Across the Balkans, folk memory of the Ottoman era became the furnace in which national heroes were forged. For Greeks, that meant Constantine XI Palaiologos and Kolokotronis. For Serbs, Milos Obilic, Tsar Lazar, and Karadjordje. For Albanians, George Kastrioti Skanderbeg. For ethnic Macedonians, Nikola Karev and Goce Delcev. For Bulgarians, Vasil Levski, Georgi Sava Rakovski, and Hristo Botev. For Croats, Nikola Subic Zrinjski. Halil Inalcik, drawing on Ottoman documentary evidence, described a population that may have fallen from a high of eight million in the late 16th century to only three million by the mid-18th century, a consequence of the wars, instability, and economic isolation that marked the Ottoman centuries in the Balkans.

• 6. Wars That Reshaped the Map

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  In 1912-1913, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro formed an alliance and launched the First Balkan War against the Ottoman Empire. Almost all remaining European Ottoman territories were captured and divided among the allies. Bulgaria then attacked its former partners, beginning the Second Balkan War, and collapsed when the Greek army invaded Bulgaria while Romania intervened from the north. The Ottoman Empire used the moment to recapture Eastern Thrace, establishing the western border that still defines Turkey's European territory today. The next spark came in Sarajevo. Members of Young Bosnia, a revolutionary organization with predominantly Serb and pro-Yugoslav members, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the Austro-Hungarian heir, in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1914. The chain of alliances that followed pulled nearly all of Europe into World War I. At the start of World War II, all Balkan countries except Greece were aligned with Nazi Germany, either through bilateral military agreements or the Axis Pact. Fascist Italy used its protectorate Albania to invade Greece. After Greece repelled the attack and counterattacked into Italian-held Albania, Nazi Germany intervened directly. Yugoslavia collapsed immediately upon invasion, and Greece held out for two months before falling. The countries were then partitioned among Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, and the puppet Independent State of Croatia. According to the source, the German invasion also caused a significant delay in the timetable for the planned invasion of Russia, with consequences that proved major during the course of the war.

• 7. Cold War Divisions and Dissolution

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  After World War II, most Balkan states came under communist governments. Greece became the first battleground of the emerging Cold War, with a civil war raging from 1944 to 1949. The Truman Doctrine was the American response, directing massive assistance to the non-communist Greek government against partisans backed by communist volunteers from Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Despite being communist-governed, Yugoslavia under Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who lived from 1892 to 1980, broke with the Soviet Union in 1948 and later helped found the Non-Aligned Movement together with India and Egypt. Albania broke with Moscow in 1961 and turned toward Communist China before adopting an isolationist position. Greece and Turkey, as the only non-communist Balkan states, joined NATO and remain part of its southeastern wing. On the 25th of June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, triggering the Croatian War of Independence and the Ten-Day War in Slovenia. Yugoslav forces withdrew from Slovenia that year but the war in Croatia continued until late 1995. Bosnia and Herzegovina became the most heavily affected by the fighting. NATO ground and air forces eventually took action against Serbian forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic, who served as elected president between 1989 and 2000, was overthrown after the wars, handed to the International Criminal Tribunal, and died of a heart attack in 2006 before a verdict could be reached. Kosovo declared independence in 2008 while under UN administration; in July 2010, the International Court of Justice ruled that declaration legal. The most recent Balkan country to join NATO was North Macedonia, admitted on the 27th of March 2020.

• 8. A Region Still Defining Itself

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  The term Balkans has carried its stigma long enough that a rival label has been gaining ground. The European Union launched an initiative in 1999 called the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, and the online newspaper Balkan Times renamed itself Southeast European Times in 2003. In 2018, Croatia's President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic publicly called for the term Western Balkans to be abandoned, arguing it carried negative connotations and that the region should simply be called Southeast Europe. The linguistic diversity of the region reflects its layered history: Slavic, Romance, and other languages all coexist, and Romani is spoken by a large portion of the Roma population throughout the Balkan countries. In Sarajevo, the small Sephardic Jewish community, roughly 90% Sephardic in composition, still has elderly members who speak Ladino, and the Sephardi cemetery there holds tombstones of a unique shape inscribed in ancient Ladino. By 1900, the city of Thessaloniki had some 80,000 Jewish residents, more than half its population at the time. The Holocaust destroyed those communities. An exception to the pattern was Bulgaria, where Boris III sent Bulgarian Jews to forced labor camps rather than Nazi extermination camps. The Balkan Mountains for which the whole region is named still stand mostly in Northern Bulgaria, and geographers note that those mountains do not even dominate the region's landscape; the Dinaric Alps cover a far greater area. If the peninsula were renamed for its actual dominant range, as some have suggested, it might be called the Greek-Albanian Peninsula instead.