The Balkans

Few European regions are argued over as fiercely as this one, and the argument starts with the map. The Balkans take their name from a Bulgarian mountain range, and in the strictest geographic reading the peninsula ends at the Danube and the Sava, which places Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, and Greece inside it. Slovenes and Croats frequently reject the label outright, preferring Central Europe or the Mediterranean. Greeks, whose classical inheritance the world files under Europe rather than the Balkans, tend to do the same. Romania sits on the line by geography and off it by self-image. The word carries baggage, and the region has spent a century trying to shed it.

Physically the peninsula is a knot of mountains dropped between three seas. The Dinaric Alps run southeast from the Julian Alps along the Adriatic in a wall of grey limestone riddled with caves, sinkholes, and underground rivers; the karst landscape that geologists study everywhere takes its name from a plateau above Trieste. Inland rise the Balkan and Rhodope ranges and the Pindus of Greece, and the highest summit, Musala in Bulgaria, reaches 2,925 meters. The Danube marks the northern edge, gathering the Sava and the Morava before cutting the Iron Gates gorge between Serbia and Romania. Coasts open onto the Adriatic, the Ionian, the Aegean, and the Black Sea, and the climate splits between Mediterranean along the shore and sharply continental behind the mountains.

Mountains fragment the region into valleys, and the valleys have long kept their own languages, churches, and loyalties: Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim communities have lived side by side and, at intervals, catastrophically apart. Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Habsburg rule left overlapping layers here, and the Ottoman retreat in the nineteenth century produced the small, quarrelsome nation-states that gave English the verb to balkanize. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s revived every dark association attached to the name. The everyday reality is now quieter and more European: Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and Slovenia sit inside the European Union, most of the rest are candidates, and the region trades on its coastline, its food, and a booming tourist economy rather than on its reputation.