Balkans

Defining the Balkan region is a continuous project of contemporary geographers, anthropologists, political entities ranging from the United Nations to local nongovernmental organizations, economists, literary figures, historians, and others both inside and outside the ill-defined region. For example, Hungary is occasionally included in the region, due to the country's 150 years of Ottoman domination, while contemporary Turkey, but not Ottoman Turkey, is often left out due to its greater affinity with the Muslim countries of the Middle East. The most common countries included in the Balkans are Albania, Bulgaria,Greece, Romania, the countries of the former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia), and the European portion of Turkey.

The peoples of this area speak a large number of different languages from a variety of different language families. Serbian, Croatian,Montenegrin, Macedonian, Bosnian (a dialect of Serbo-Croatian),Slovenian, and Bulgarian are all Slavic languages and are partially to largely mutually intelligible, while Romanian is a romance language,Turkish is a Turkic [Page 330]language, and Greek and Albanian are the sole remaining languages in their own subbranches of the Indo-European language family. Religiously, as well, the peoples of this region differ widely, including great diversity within some countries. For example, contemporary Albania includes a majority Muslim population but also includes a large Roman Catholic minority (Mother Theresa was Albanian) and a smaller Orthodox community. Similarly, Macedonia (Former Yugoslavian Republic of) and Bosnia and Herzegovina are both largely Orthodox, but also have large Muslim minorities. Croats are predominantly Roman Catholic, while Serbs largely follow the Serbian Orthodox church. Romanians, Montenegrins, Greeks, and Bulgarians are likewise Orthodox, each with their own patriarchate, while Turks are overwhelmingly Muslim. A third area of diversity in the region is the large numbers of ethnic and national minorities; Hungarians, Germans,Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Roma, Vlachs, and a small number of Jews can be found in scattered communities in many Balkan countries even to this day.

Historically, all of the contemporary Balkan countries shared domination by the Ottoman Turks, beginning in the 14th century. Nonetheless, this domination was considerably longer in some areas than in others. For example, the Serbs lost their hegemony in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo and the Greeks in 1393, while it took another 64 years for the Ottomans to conquer the last Byzantine emperor in Constantinople (Istanbul), and yet another hundred years to expand beyond Romania. The end of Ottoman rule also came over a long period, with Greece gaining its independence in 1832 after an 11-year nationalist war of independence, while Romania,Serbia, Montenegro, and parts of Bulgaria were not independent until the treaty of San Stefano ended the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. The states of Albania, Montenegro, and the remainder of Bulgaria finally gained independence following the Balkan league's victory over the Ottomans in the first Balkan War, 1912 to 1913, while Macedonia remained divided between Greece and Serbia after their defeat of Bulgaria in the second Balkan War, in August 1913.

As has been the case since at least the end of World War II, the term Balkan is most associated with a political process known as balkanization, referring to nationalist fragmentation, usually through violent confrontation. This connotation has gained strength only in the past decade and a half, since the wars that emerged during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. From the relatively quick war between the Yugoslav federal army and Slovenia (June 25–July 7, 1991) to the extensive battles betweens Bosnians and both Bosnian and Serbian Serbs that lasted for 42 months beginning in April 1992—and brought “ethnic cleansing” into the global vocabulary—these events have done nothing to alleviate the image of the Balkans as a violently nationalist, brutal backwater on the periphery of Europe.

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