The Balkans: A Short History, by Mark Mazower
Introduction: Names
- At the end of the twentieth century, people spoke as if the Balkans had existed forever. However, two hundred years earlier, they had not yet come into being. It was not the Balkans but "Rumeli" that the Ottomans ruled, the formerly "Roman" lands that they had conquered from Constantinople. The Sultan's educated Christian Orthodox subjects referred to themselves as "Romans" ("Romaioi"), or more simply as "Christians." To Westerners, familiar with classical regional names such as Macedonia, Epirus, Dacia and Moesia, the term "Balkan" conveyed little. "My expectations were raised," wrote one traveler in 1854, "by hearing that we were about to cross a Balkan; but I discovered ere long that this high-sounding title denotes only a ridge which divides the waters, or a mountain pass, without its being a necessary consequence that it offer grand or romantic scenery."
- Most scholars, including the Greek authors of the earliest study from the area, used the much commoner term "European Turkey," and references to "the Balkans" remained scarce long into the nineteenth century. They are, for instance, absent in the writings of the savant Ami Boue, whose minute exploration of the entire region - La Turquie d'Europe of 1840 - set standards of accuracy and detail not matched for generations.
- As late as the 1850s informed commentators were still scoffing at "superficial observers, who consider the Slavonic races as 'Greek' because the great majority of them are of the 'Greek' religion." Even the German scholar Karl Ritter proposed calling the whole region south of the Danube the "Halbinsel Griechenland" (Greek peninsula). "Till quite lately," wrote the British historian E. A. Freeman in 1877, "all the Orthodox subjects of the Turk were in most European eyes looked on alike as Greeks."