The Balkans: A Short History (2 page)

INTRODUCTION: NAMES

The reputation, name and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary . . . all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and effective as such. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
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At the end of the twentieth century, people spoke as if the Balkans had existed forever. However, two hundred years earlier, they had not yet come into being. It was not the Balkans but “Rumeli” that the Ottomans ruled, the formerly “Roman” lands that they had conquered from Constantinople. The Sultan’s educated Christian Orthodox subjects referred to themselves as “Romans” (“Romaioi”), or more simply as “Christians.” To Westerners, familiar with classical regional terms such as Macedonia, Epirus, Dacia and Moesia, the term “Balkan” conveyed little. “My expectations were raised,” wrote one traveler in 1854, “by hearing that we were about to cross a
Balkan;
but I discovered ere long that this high-sounding title denotes only a ridge which divides the waters, or a mountain pass, without its being a necessary consequence that it offer grand or romantic scenery.”
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“Balkan” was initially a name applied to the mountain range better known to the classically trained Western traveler as ancient Haemus, passed en route from central Europe to Constantinople. In the early nineteenth century, army officers like the Earl of Albemarle explored its little-known slopes. “The interior of the Balcan,” wrote a Prussian diplomat who crossed it in 1833, “has been little explored, and but a few, accurate measurements of elevation have been undertaken.” Little had changed twenty years later, when Giacomo August Jochmus’s “Notes on a Journey into the Balkan, or Mount Haemus” was read to the Royal Geographical Society. It was across these mountains that the Russian army advanced on Constantinople in 1829 and again in 1877. “The crossing of the Balkans,” wrote the author of a popular history of the Russo-Turkish War of the latter year, “must be reckoned one of the most remarkable achievements of the war.”
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By this time, a handful of geographers had already stretched the word to refer to the entire region, mostly on the erroneous assumption that the Balkan range ran right across the peninsula of southeastern Europe, much as the Pyrenees demarcated the top of the Iberian. In the eighteenth century, geographical knowledge of the Turkish domains was very vague; as late as 1802, John Pinkerton noted that “recent maps of these regions are still very imperfect.” Most scholars, including the Greek authors of the earliest study from the area, used the much commoner term “European Turkey,” and references to “the Balkans” remained scarce long into the nineteenth century. They are, for instance, absent in the writings of the savant Ami Boué, whose minute exploration of the entire region
—La Turquie d’Europe
of 1840—set standards of accuracy and detail not matched for generations.
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Nor before the 1880s were there many references to “Balkan” peoples either. The world of Orthodoxy encompassed Greek and Slav alike, and it took time for ethnographic and political distinctions between the various Orthodox populations to emerge. In 1797, the revolutionary firebrand Rhigas Velestinlis, inspired by the French Revolution, predicted the downfall of the Sultan and proclaimed the need for a “Hellenic Republic” in which all the peoples of “Rumeli, Asia Minor, the Archipelago, Moldavia and Wallachia” would be recognized as citizens, despite their “different races and religions.” In Rhigas’s vast future republic, Greek was to be the language not only of learning but also of government. As late as the 1850s informed commentators were still scoffing at “superficial observers, who consider the Slavonic races as ‘Greek’ because the great majority of them are of the ‘Greek’ religion.” Even the German scholar Karl Ritter proposed calling the whole region south of the Danube the “Halbinsel Griechenland” (Greek peninsula). “Till quite lately,” wrote the British historian E. A. Freeman in 1877, “all the Orthodox subjects of the Turk were in most European eyes looked on alike as Greeks.”
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Well after the unmistakable rise of Slav nationalisms, it was hard to discern what pattern of states and peoples would succeed the Turks. Some commentators imagined a variety of self-governing Christian polities under overall Ottoman suzerainty, while others foresaw the partition of the region between a Greek state and a South Slav federation. Almost none anticipated the process of fragmentation that actually occurred. “Even in our days,” remarked a French writer in 1864, “how often have I heard people ask who the Christian populations of Turkey belong to—Russia, Austria, France? And when some dreamers replied: These populations belong to themselves—what amusement, what pity at such utopianism.”
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Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “Turkey in Europe” was the favored geographical coin of the day. But by the 1880s, the days of “Turkey in Europe” were evidently numbered. Successor states—Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Montenegro—had emerged during the nineteenth century as contenders to carve up what remained. Between 1878 and 1908, diplomatic conferences whittled away Ottoman territory, and subjected what remained to Great Power oversight. Western travelers, journalists and propagandists flocked to the region and popularized the new, broader use of the term “Balkans.” By the time of the outbreak of the First Balkan War in 1912—which ended Ottoman rule in Europe (outside the immediate hinterland of Constantinople)—it had become common currency. Purists were annoyed. One German geographer talked crossly of “the southeast European—or as people increasingly say, perpetuating the error of half a century—the
Balkan
peninsula.” A Bulgarian expert complained about “this region . . . [being] wrongly called the Balkan peninsula.” But the tide was against such pedantry. In less than half a century, largely as a result of sudden military and diplomatic changes, a new geographical concept rooted itself in everyday parlance. By 1917, a standard history of the Eastern Question talked about the “lands which the geographers of the last generation described as ‘Turkey in Europe’ but for which political changes have compelled us to seek a new name. The name generally given to that segment is ‘the Balkan Peninsula’ or simply, ‘the Balkans.’ ”
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From the very start the Balkans was more than a geographical concept. The term, unlike its predecessors, was loaded with negative connotations—of violence, savagery, primitivism—to an extent for which it is hard to find a parallel. “Why ‘savage Europe’?” asked the journalist Harry de Windt in his 1907 book of the same name. “Because . . . the term accurately describes the wild and lawless countries between the Adriatic and Black Seas.” Attuned to a history of revolt and revenge stretching back almost a century and climaxing after 1900 in the terrorist bombings of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, the Serbian regicide of 1903 and the widespread massacres carried out by all sides during the Balkan Wars, Europe quickly came to associate the region with violence and bloodshed. A decade of further fighting—ending in 1922 with the Greek defeat by the Turks in Asia Minor, and the forced population exchange of nearly two million refugees—did little to alter the picture. True, the Balkan peoples now ruled themselves, as so many Western advocates on their behalf had wished. But what was the result? A panoply of small, unviable, mutually antagonistic and internally intolerant states. This looked exactly like the
kleinstaaterei
that opponents of the unrestricted spread of national states had feared. Liberals found it hard to reconcile their happy ideal of national self-determination with the realities of a fragmented and destabilized world. In the case of new states such as Germany and Italy, nineteenth-century nationalism had welded together tiny antiquated statelets into larger and economically more rational units; in the Balkans the outcome had been the opposite.
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Between the wars, novelists and film directors turned the region into a stage set for exotic thrillers of corruption, quick killing and easy crime. For Eric Ambler, in
The Mask of Dimitrios,
the Balkans symbolized the moral decay of interwar Europe itself. For the less sophisticated Agatha Christie, in her 1925
The Secret of Chimneys,
it provided a home for the villainous Boris Anchoukoff, who came from “one of the Balkan states. . . . Principal rivers, unknown. Principal mountains, also unknown, but fairly numerous. Capital, Ekarest. Population, chiefly brigands. Hobby, assassinating kings and having revolutions.” As Rebecca West wrote at the start of her travelogue
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:
“Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans: all I knew of the South Slavs.” Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 film noir,
Cat People,
went even further and turned the Balkans—through the troubled persona of the film’s Serbian heroine—into the seedbed of an “ancient sin” that turned humans into lethal sexual predators who threatened to destroy the “normal, happy lives” of ordinary Americans.
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In the postwar era, some of these clichés became less powerful. The Balkans disappeared from Western consciousness during the Cold War, and the Iron Curtain ran through southeastern Europe, separating Greece from its Communist neighbors. Albania became virtually impenetrable. Tito’s Yugoslavia was idolized by American policymakers and by the New Left in Europe; the language of international non-alignment and of workers’ self-management at home fell on receptive ears abroad. Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule in Romania was known more for its pronounced anti-Sovietism in foreign policy than for its extreme repression of its own population. In general, Greece became a marginal part of “the West,” while the other Balkan states formed the least studied part of Communist Eastern Europe. Mass tourism brought millions to the region’s beaches and ski slopes, and turned peasant culture into after-dinner entertainment. The picturesque replaced the violent, and the worst problems most tourists anticipated were poor roads and unfamiliar toilets.

These were the benefits of the long peace that fell over Europe with the Cold War. To many today they appear not only distant but illusory, a hiatus in which the true character of the Balkans was temporarily obscured. Since the collapse of communism, it has become easier to see southeastern Europe again as a single entity, but its well-established derogatory connotations have also reemerged. Indeed, the fighting precipitated by the breakup of Yugoslavia has probably left these more entrenched in the popular imagination than ever: it is now not only Tito and communism that are blamed for mass violence, but ethnic diversity itself and long-standing historical cleavages between religions and cultures. It is hard to find people with anything good to say about the region, harder still to discuss it beyond good or evil. Whether it is possible to take a fresh look at the Balkans, without seeing them refracted through the prism of “the Balkans” we have lived with for so long, is the main challenge of this work.

If the intellectual history of Western stereotypes of the Balkans were no more than one century old, it would be hard to explain the grip they still have on us. But the term, though of relatively recent vintage, rests upon a foundation of other associations that reach more deeply into Western thought. One of these is the tension between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity that was crystallized by the Crusaders’ sacking of Byzantine Constantinople in 1204. But more important still is surely the deep rift of incomprehension that lies between the worlds of Christianity and Islam, which for more than a millennium—from the seventh century until at least the end of the seventeenth—were locked in a complex struggle for territory and minds in Europe.

To the first
jihad,
which swept Muslim culture into an area extending from Spain (and much of Africa) to the borders of India and China, Christendom responded with the Iberian
reconquista,
the recovery of lands in southern Italy and, most important, the Crusades. The “Holy Wars of the Mediterranean” may have been ultimately, in the words of Eric Christiansen “a sad waste of time, money and life.” But though two centuries of struggle against the Saracens failed to regain Jerusalem for Christianity, they contributed enormously to strengthening a tradition of martial intolerance in Christian Europe to heretics, pagans and above all to Muslims. While Muslim polities accepted non-Muslims as subjects—non-Muslims were always a majority of the population in the Ottoman Balkans—Christian states expelled Muslims (and strictly controlled the settlement of small communities of Jews from medieval times on) and regarded them as a threat.
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The second Islamic campaign against Christendom was spearheaded by a central Asian nomadic people, the Turks. Between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries, Turkic peoples gradually overran and defeated the Byzantine empire, conquering Christian outposts in the eastern Aegean, and round the rim of the Black Sea, eventually pushing up through Hungary to the Germanic heartlands of central Europe. Twice, Ottoman armies besieged Vienna. Christians interpreted the fall of Constantinople in 1453 as proof of the degeneracy of Orthodoxy, the ultimate failure of Byzantium as an imperial system, and a divine punishment for men’s sins. As Turkish ships cruised off the coast of Italy, pious Catholics were told to “pray for the undoing of Islam.” The Ottoman dynasty might have seen itself as the successor to the universal monarchies of Rome and Byzantium, “the shadow of God on earth.” But to many Christians, like the Elizabethan historian Richard Knolles, it was the latest incarnation of the Islamic peril and “the present terror of the world.”
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