The Balkans are adjoined by water on three sides: the Black Sea to the east and branches of the Mediterranean Sea to the south and west (including the Adriatic, Ionian, Aegean and Marmara seas).
The Balkans
The identity of the Balkans is dominated by its geographical position; historically the area was known as a crossroads of various cultures. It has been a juncture between the Latin and Greek bodies of the Roman Empire, the destination of a massive influx of pagan Slavs, an area where Orthodox and Catholic Christianity met, as well as the meeting point between Islam and Christianity. It was also a destination for Jewish refugees of Inquisition.
The Balkans today is a very diverse ethno-linguistic region, being home to multiple Slavic, Romance, and Turkic languages, as well as Greek, Albanian, and others. Through its history many other ethnic groups with own their languages lived in the area, among them Celts, Illyrians, Romans, Avars, Vlachs, Germans and various Germanic tribes.
As such, the Balkans have a rich history. Possibly the historical event that left the biggest mark on the collective memories of the peoples of the Balkans was the expansion and later fall of the Ottoman Empire. There is not a people in the Balkans that doesn't place its greatest folk heroes in the era of either the onslaught or the retreat of the Ottoman Empire. For Croats it is Nikola Zrinski, for Serbs Miloš Obilić, for Albanians Skanderbeg for Bulgarians Vasil Levski and Gotse Delchev.
In the 20th century, the Balkan nations—except Greece and Yugoslavia—were made part of the Warsaw pact (as a result of Soviet hegemony after the ending of World War II). Following the pact's collapse and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Balkan states have acceded to the European Union, or are in the process of doing so.
In recent times, Balkan is believed to have negative connotations in the West (perhaps due to the emphatic and slanted use of the word 'balkanise' in English), and is often associated with fragmentation, violence, strife, and clannishness. Although such characterization of the Balkans is common today, it is also widely exaggerated, and misrepresents the totality of the history of the area.
Etymology and evolving meaning
The region takes its name from the "Balkan" mountain range in Bulgaria (from the Turkish balkan meaning "a chain of wooded mountains").[1] The name is still preserved in Central Asia where there exist the Balkhan Mountains[2] and the Balkan Province of Turkmenistan.
The region, however, takes its name from the "Balkan" mountain range, a name brought into the area by the Turks. On a larger scale, one long continuous chain of mountains crosses the region in the form of a reversed letter S, from the Carpathians south to the Balkan range proper, before it marches away east into Anatolian Turkey. On the west coast, an offshoot of the Dinaric Alps follows the coast south through Dalmatia and Albania, crosses Greece and continues into the sea in the form of various islands. The word was based on Turkish balakan 'stone, cliff', which confirms the pure 'technical' meaning of the term. The mountain range that runs across Bulgaria from west to east (Stara Planina) is still commonly known as the Balkan Mountains.
The first time the name "Balkan" was used in the West for the mountain range in Bulgaria was in a letter by Buonaccorsi Callimarco, an Italian humanist, writer and diplomat in 1490. An English traveler, John Morritt, introduced this term into the English literature at the end of the 18th century, and other authors started applying the name to the wider area between the Adriatic and the Black Sea. The concept of the “Balkan peninsula” was created by the German geographer August Zeune in 1808 [1]. As time passed, the term gradually obtained political connotations far from its initial geographic meaning, arising from political changes from the late 1800s to the creation of post-World War I Yugoslavia (initially the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes). Zeune's goal was to have a geographical parallel term to the Italic and Iberian Peninsula, and seemingly nothing more. The gradually acquired political connotations are newer, and, to a large extent, due to oscillating political circumstances. The term Balkans includes areas that remained under Turkish rule after 1699., namely: Bulgaria, Serbia (except for Vojvodina), Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro (except for the Boka Bay and Budva), Kosovo, and continental Greece. Croatia, Vojvodina and Transilvania (in Romania) do not belong to Balkans. After the split of Yugoslavia beginning in June 1991, the term 'Balkans' again received a negative meaning, even in casual usage. Over the last decade, in the wake of the former Yugoslav split, Croatians and especially Slovenians have rejected their former label as 'Balkan nations'. This is in part due to the pejorative connotation of the term 'Balkans' in the 1990s, and continuation of this meaning until now. Today, the term 'Southeast Europe' is preferred or, in the case of Slovenia and sometimes Croatia, 'Central Europe'.
Southeastern Europe
Due to the aforementioned connotations of the term 'Balkan', many people prefer the term Southeastern Europe instead. The use of this term is slowly growing; a European Union initiative of 1999 is called the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, and the online newspaper Balkan Times renamed itself Southeast European Times in 2003.
The use of this term to mean the Balkan peninsula (and only that) technically ignores the geographical presence of northern Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, and Ciscaucasus, which are also located in the southeastern part of the European continent.
Ambiguities and controversies
The northern border of the Balkan peninsula is usually considered to be the line formed by the Danube, Sava and Kupa rivers and a segment connecting the spring of the Kupa with the Kvarner Bay.
Some other definitions of the northern border of the Balkans have been proposed:
the line Danube - Sava - Krka River - Postojnska Vrata - Vipava River - Soča)
the line Danube - Sava - Ljubljansko polje - Idrijca - Soča
the line Dniester - Timişoara - Zagreb - Triglav
the line Trieste - Odessa (Trieste-Odessa line) [2]
the line Bay of Trieste - Ljubljana - Sava - Danube ([3])
