Countries visited: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Macedonia (Greece)
The “Balkans”, taking its name from the Turkish word mountains, designates the mountainous region bordering the Adriatic, Mediterranean and Black seas, the Alpin and Carpathian Mountain ranges, Anatolia and the Danube region. Due to its position at the center of passages between Western Europe, Northern Europe, Anatolia, Northwest Asia and the Mediterranean, the region has been in constant evolution rhythmed by invasions and imperial conquests, shaping the culture of its stratified planes through the interlocking limits of imperial powers. The emergence of nationalists’ movements and nation-states during the 19th and 20th century leading to generations of ethnic conflicts and countless atrocities, scarifying families while fueling nationalists’ discourses of the 21st century, inspired the concept “Balkanization”: “The process by which ethnic groups fragmented due in part by compartmentalization brought about by mountainous relief”. While the history of the Balkans was in part shaped by Western Eurasian / Eastern Eurasian exchanges and movement of populations, thus relating to the a broaden use of what is understood as the “Silk Road”, the concept of balkanization and what it entails in terms of the fragmentation and colliding intensities is, above all, conceptually fascinating when reflecting on the conceptual implications of the “Silk road” such as connectivity, communication and the articulation of differences.
Bijela tabija – Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
A region shaped by centuries of human movement on the Western part of Eurasia
The region was first populated by Indo-European speaking ethnic groups: The Illyrians which descended from Yamnaya related populations originating from the northeast of the Black Sea (now southern Russia); and the Thracians of which the origine remains obscure due to the lack of historical writings available and who mixed with the Greeks giving them the Dionysian and Orphean cults. The Vinca culture in the northern part of the Balkans are credited for being the first to develop a form of proto writing, before the Sumerians and Minoans, known as the Old European script.
The Persian invasions of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE are credited as the cause for the unification of Thracian tribes which did not have any political cohesion until then. Similarly, the Celtic excursions into the Carpathian and the Danube regions, pushing into the Balkans of the 4th century BC, are said to have been the cause for the unification of the Illyrians. They are also credited for having introduced the pottery wheel, new types of fibulas and different bronze and iron belts into what is now Bosnia Herzegovina, although their cultural impact on the region is considered negligeable as the Balkans were only a point of passage to Greece.
The neolithic tribes of the Balkans were later integrated into the roman empire through the invasions of romans from the west. During that period, the region benefited culturally as well as economically, architecturally and scientifically from established trade routes with vibrant markets along the way, although mainly concentrated on the Adriatic coasts. The Via Egnatia was a particularly vibrant east to west land trade route that led from Dyrrhachium (modern Durrës, Albania) through Macedonia to Thessalonica (modern Thessaloníki, Greece) and on to Thrace. Some parts of the Balkans where therefore included into the silk road and benefited, as the rest of the roman empire, from the West / East exchanges of the time.
Rmoman column – Thessaloniki (Museum of Byzantine Civilization), Greece
Due to Rome’s decline in the second half of the 3rd century and the 4th century, the imperial capital was moved to Byzantium which meant that any tribe intending to attack the seat of roman power would thereof need to move through the Balkans. This shift of the roman center of power caused the region to become the theatre of barbaric incursions in the next centuries, contributing to its multicultural metamorphosis. At the end of the 4th century, Christianity became the official religion of the empire, which was divided in two with the dividing line running through the Balkans in what is now Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The west part went under Rome while the east was ruled by Byzantium, which took the name Constantinople in 330 during its refoundation under the roman emperor Constantine I.
Walls of Thessaloniki, constructed during the early byzantine era in the late 3rd century – Thessaloniki, Greece
In that period, the north and central Balkans became invaded by nomadic pastoral populations with some originating as far as the east Asian steppes such as the Huns and the Avars. While some of them retreated when pushed back by the two empires, others were assimilated. In the 6th century, Slavic populations from the north suffering from barbaric invasions of the Hun and later Avars and Bulgars, moved in great number to the Balkans and were separated into four main groups: Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgarians. Contrary to the celts and other pastoralists groups which had passed through or raided the region in the past, the Slavs settled in the Balkans as their way of life was centered around agriculture. Prior to their revelation to the Roman world, Slavic-speaking tribes formed part of successive multi-ethnic confederacies of Eurasia – such as the Sarmatian, Hun and Gothic empires. The expansion of the Magyars into the Carpathian Basin and the Germanization of Austria gradually separated the South Slavs from the West and East Slavs.
Slavic sculpture – Kalemegdan Parc in Belgrade, Serbia
Through time, the divisions and competition between Rome and Constantinople intensified leading to the permanent separation of the two communities in the 11th century. The dividing line of 395 was thus reinforced: the Croats and Slovenes became an integral part of Roman Catholic Europe, with its Latin script and culture, while the rest were bound to join the Greeks in their allegiance to Eastern Orthodoxy, either willingly or by force (Albania was divided in two between Catholics and Orthodox).
In 1362, while the Balkan states fought among themselves for domination in the area, the Ottoman Turks began their conquest of the Balkan Peninsula, a process that took more than a century. Serbia fell after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, Bulgaria in 1396, Constantinople in 1453, Bosnia in 1463, Herzegovina in 1482, and Montenegro in 1499. The conquest was made easier by divisions among the Orthodox peoples and by the even deeper rift between the Western and Eastern Christians. In these central areas, the Ottoman conquest brought complete social and political revolutions. The old aristocracy almost everywhere was removed from power and frequently destroyed, the main exceptions being Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania, where many nobles converted to Islam and retained their land.
Following the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, the Austrian empire growing weary of the Ottoman progression in Europe invited the Serbs, who had been their recent allies, to settle in the border areas of the Habsburg lands as frontier guards. In return, the Serbs were allowed religious freedom. The Austrian Militärgrenze, or “Military Frontier,” introduced in some instances Orthodox Serbs into Catholic Croatian and Hungarian territories. The Ottomans power declined during the 18th century, suffering defeats from the Christian front. In the last two decades of the 18th century, central governmental authority of the Ottoman Balkans collapsed. The decline of the Ottoman empire would be the dawn of a new age for the Balkans: the emergence of nationalist aspirations and of violent conflict between ethnicities.
Ottoman architecture in Sarajevo Bazar – Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
The Rich Religious Heritage of the Balkans
In the second half of the 9th century, Christianity was adopted by the Bulgarians and the Serbs. Both chose the Byzantine rather than Roman variant of the new religion. The Croats, together with most of the rest of what had been Rome’s section of the divided empire, became part of the western Christian community. The Albanians, isolated behind their mountain chains, were not much affected by either branch of Christianity.
Within the Orthodox world, an alphabet that enabled disciples to translate religious texts into Slavonic was developed leading to the establishment of a liturgical and literary language of the Balkans. The orthodox doctrine in the Balkans was more restrictive of free thinking within the church then the Catholic world, which hindered the development of intellectual exchange which was proved to be vital to the flowering of intellectual life in the West—Catholic Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia included. Nevertheless, the orthodox culture, as the catholic culture, was extremely rich in terms of artistic prowess, through its religious choirs, golden paintings, processions and extreme dedication to saints and martyrs, transcending its disciples to extreme levels of dedications through the captivating beauty of its religious spectacles. The transcending effect of its culture and the sense of belonging it provided, while cementing the bound of orthodox populations in the Balkans by promoting values such as solidarity and adversity, lightening the soul of its disciples in the coldest moments, would later be used in destructive ways transforming the warmth of love and dedication into hatred and obsession through nationalist story telling. This extreme ambivalence within the Christian doctrines is most clearly illustrated through the crusades, with the degree of architectural development and artistic production in that period having a direct causal relation with the number of pillages and destruction committed through campaigns in the East, the phenomenon consisting of two arbitrarily theoretically separated domains but materially existing on one plane: the holy interior domain transcended through its common beliefs and ways of being; and the other, exterior to the transcendental realm, positioned in the structural belief system, providing meaning to things, as a resource or a threat to the spiritual fire heating the holy interior domain.
Serbian Orthodox Church of St. Basil of Ostrog – Belgrade, Serbia
Painting in the Church of St. Basil of Ostrog – Belgrade, Serbia
Painting of an Orthodox Saint at the Museum of Byzantine Civilisation – Thessaloniki, Greece
Saint Mark’s Catholic Church – Zagreb, Croatia
Monument of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Catholic Art) – Zagreb, Croatia
Islam in the Balkans and its present heritage was introduced through the Ottoman conquest as it offered fiscal and legal benefits to converting communities. In Albania and Bosnia, this system and advantages was better accepted than in the rest of the Balkans, with many communities converting to Islam, leading to the transformation of their population’s way of life through its manifestation in architecture, literature, philological, oriental, and socio-ethnological sciences, creating new ways in which they understood themselves as a community. Uniqueness of Islam in the Balkans can be characterized like Ottoman regionalism where people are not primarily united by single national identity, cultural and historical progress, language and alphabet, but as single faith based on absolute respect of the Koran, which maintained an unequal concentration of power and wealth in the favour of Constantinople. The limits imposed on national identity radically shifted with the fall of the ottoman empire and the Islamic heritage, while preserved, was dissolved within nationalist structural understandings of belonging to a common people with sovereign political aspirations.
While the Ottoman regime relegated the Christian communities in the Balkans as second-class citizens through taxation, political underrepresentation and occasionally separated families by enlisting children in the ottoman army at an early age – early enough to erase any sense of regional belonging, monasteries and religious relics were almost never destroyed and Christian communities were allowed to practice their faith. This preservation of documentary, architectural and cultural heritage enabled continuity between pre- and prior- Ottoman rule in the Christian communities.
Mosque in Sarajevo – Bosnia-Herzegovina
Groblje Alifakovac Muslim Cemetery – Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
The Jewish communities of the Balkans, mainly concentrating in the port cities, were some of the oldest in Europe. Under byzantine rule, the safety of the Balkan Jews to practice their religion was set by local governments, with some cities being mostly Jewish (such as Salonika, now Thessaloniki) contributing to the rich architectural and cultural heritage of the cities. In western Balkans, European Jews were involved in the intellectual and cultural spheres of Medieval society, contributing to medicine, astrology, mathematics as well as to the arts, literature and music. After the Spanish inquisition, the Balkan Jewish communities grew exponentially due to the migration of Sephardi Jews. Under Ottoman rule, although being classified as second-class citizens, the Jews minorities were exempt from the “Child Tax” which conscripted young Christian boys. The Jewish communities of the Balkans, considered an Eastern Sephardic heartland, had a stronger sense of communal organization and unity than other Jewish groups in the world which helped maintain a sense of ethno-religious identity. Much of this heritage was completely erased in the 20th century through the atrocities committed by the national socialist regimes of the region. In Salonika, a historically vibrant city with a very strong Jewish identity, 90% of the Jewish community were deported.
Jewish Cemetery – Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Jewish Cemetery Memorial – Thessaloniki, Greece
The emergence of nationalist’s movements and the aspiration for self governance throughout 19th to the 21st century
The decline of the Ottoman empire created space for indigenous nationalists’ movement to arise based on the the grudges accumulated against the regional discriminatory treatment of the empire. Similarly, although not in the same intensity, the Slavic regions within the Austro-Hungarian empire where also pushing for further recognition of their differences and political power. The nationalist discourses emerging through these movements were based on the empire/ethnic groups opposition of the time, crystalizing their self representations through the empire/ethnic group context and transcending them into nationalist beliefs which would remain throughout the evolving contexts of the 20th century. In nationalist discourses, the empire/ethnic group context of medieval times became the starting point of the Balkans history, arbitrarily delimiting the origine of its people to a fixed point in time with a somewhat homogenous core, leaving into the background the centuries of movements of populations which progressively metamorphized the identity of ethnic groups entering the selected historical period of time. In other words, differences were captured from the constantly evolving magma of time and displayed above as a guiding star for the next generations in their journey to understanding themselves. While during the 19th century, nationalists’ movement emerged from an exploited/exploiter relationship thus leading to greater political freedom and self respect from minority ethnic groups, the nature of their effect would change radically through their becoming majority within delimited nation states.
Pobednik Statute commemorating Serbia’s victory over the Ottoman and Austro Hungarian during the Balkan Wars and First world War – Belgrade, Serbia
Following the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, most of its European-held territories were divided between Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Tensions between empires and nations in Europe where high, fueled by nationalist ambitions and different understanding of regional belonging. Serbia and many Balkan nationalist movements within the Austro-Hungarian empire (Slovenes, Croats and Bosnians) believed in the unification of south Slavic regions under one kingdom. These aspirations were supported by some western European nations and alliances started to take shape, dividing the European continent. On the 18th of June 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire was assassinated in Sarajevo, leading to the beginning of World War I. The war led to the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the making of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, later becoming Yougoslavia, including Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and North Macedonia.
The Yugoslavian period, unified under the magnifying stature of Tito, was a somewhat peaceful period in the Balkans. Nevertheless, although major infrastructural developments were achieved throughout the region, the union was dominated by Belgrade and some regions still suffered from ethnic discriminations. In Kosovo for instance, the first University was opened in 1969 after protests from Kosovar Albanians. In some respect, differences and aspirations were captivated and transcended through Tito, providing stability through the convergence of forces. But differences within the region were not articulated for themselves, in their individual ways. Their space of affirmation was still filled by the presence of a greater authority, suffocating their differentiations and pushing back the intensities of desires for autonomy, independence and self affirmation, waiting for their moment to burst and invade the stratified fields of the mountainous region. After Tito’s death in 1980, the unifying forces of the union diminished, ethnic desires for self affirmation increased and ethnic tensions were boiling up. In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence beginning the collapse of Yugoslavia and the 1990’s Balkan wars.
The “Latin Bridge” on which Franz Ferdinand (heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne) was assassinated – Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
As Ethnic regions in the Balkans were not homogenous due to the ottoman heritage which had separated at a micro level communities on Islamic and Christian lines, the intensities of ethnic belonging collided, building up in their inter-shocking and tearing apart the region. The nationalist government of Serbia, fueled by hatred for the secessionist communities and the preserved sadness evoked by historical Serbian martyrs and myths which the Serbian Orthodox church and national story telling had crystallized, launched invasions in Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, leading to ethnic cleansing, countless rapes, massacres and cultural destructions. The destructive forces which had contributed to the making of these historical martyrs and on which the nationalist discourses drew their mobilizing impact through the invocation of powerful emotions, a prerequisite to the possibility of military intervention, of the action of combat and the commitment of massacres, were unleashed against Albanians Kosovar, Croats and Bosnians. While the war finally ended with the independence of Kosovo, of Bosnia-Herzegovina and of Croatia in 1992, nationalist ambitions and resentment against the secessionist ethnicities never really disappeared, especially against Kosovo, which the objective of reclaiming the region remains a major gathering force for the nationalists in Serbia and a diversion for the government’s woes denounced by the population (accused of corruption and criticized for its oligarchic nature). Within the mountainous reliefs and the planes at its foot leading to the Danube, the destructive forces to be mobilized through the overflowing intensities of love for one’s own, twisted through nationalist discourses as one face of a coin, with the opposite face being the hate for the other, are hibernating, waiting for the destabilization of power dynamics to be unleashed. As long as the articulation of differences is spread out on this double-sided stratified plane, the forces of destructions will always poison the intensity of love and desire manifested in every instant of our being.
Bullet impacts dating from the Bosnian war of the 90s at the History Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina – Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Picture of the aftermath of a bombing by Serbian Troops of a school class during the 1,425 days siege of Sarajevo. The picture is displayed at the History Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina – Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Monument commemorating the important role of women in the Kosovar Albanian resistance and of the many victims of rape during the Serbian invasion – Pristina, Kosovo
Couple sitting on a bench at the Varrezat e Dëshmorëve monument, surrounded by the graves of important Albanian Kosovar military members of the resistance against Serbian troops – Pristina, Kosovo
