The Balkan Wars
-
- 10,99 €
-
- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
When it comes to the Balkans, most people quickly become lost in the quagmire of struggle and intractable hatred that consumes that ancient land today. Many assume that the genesis of the past ten years of atrocity in the region might have had something to do with Tito and his repressive Yugoslav regime, or perhaps with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914. The seeds were really planted much, much earlier, on a desolate plain in Kosovo in 1389, when the Serbian Prince Lazar and his army clashed with and were defeated by the Ottoman forces of Sultan Murad I. In this riveting new history of the Balkan peoples, Andréerolymatos explores how ancient events engendered cultural myths that evolved over time, gaining psychic strength in the collective consciousnesses of Orthodox Christians and Muslims alike. In colorful detail, we meet the key figures that instigated and perpetuated these myths-including the assassin/heroes Milos Obolic and Gavrilo Princip and the warlord Ali Pasha. This lively survey of centuries of strife finally puts the modern conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo into historical context, and provides a long overdue account of the origins of ethnic hatred and warmongering in this turbulent land.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an emotional history-cum-polemic, Gerolymatos, a Hellenic studies professor of Balkan descent, attempts to explain why "these small countries are hostages to the past and seem so willing to fight the same battles all over again" by contextualizing present conflicts within a survey of the "Balkan legacy" of centuries of wars and their accompanying mythologies of heroes, villains and martyrs. Gerolymatos devotes more than half his volume to an often bewildering back-and-forth narrative that lurches across the eras, detailing misdeeds by or the mistreatment of Soliots, Phanariots, Janissaries, Bashi-Bazouks, Ghazis, Turkmens and Osmanlis, as well as the more recognizable Serbs, Albanians and other Balkan peoples. Oppression and barbarism inflicted upon inconvenient minorities in the name of race, religion and nationalism seems an unending fact of life and death, from what is now Romania to Greece and Turkey. As Gerolymatos reaches recent centuries, his narrative becomes more chronological, and he observes that the West has attempted, usually in vain, to keep Balkan ethnic groups from destabilizing not only their own region but all of Europe in their interminable conflicts. "Regions where history, religion and nationalism overlap in limited territorial space" may, the author says, be fated to cycles of violence, but today "the barbarians at the gate are not the Turks but the forces of globalization and assimilation." He sees continuing cycles of "blood" until instability "undermines the interests of the United States, Europe, and Russia." Only general prosperity will interrupt the inevitable, Gerolymatos predicts, and he offers little hope for that. 28 pages of photos not seen by PW.
