Balkans 101: An American Idiot’s Guide
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Brasov, Romania, which is in Transylvania *cue spooky laughter.* I’m reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Of course I am.
I wrote this a few weeks ago, while we were in Sarajevo.
Balkans 101: An American Idiot’s Guide
There’s a phrase that’s sometimes used in the news: Balkanization.
The countries that make up the former Yugoslavia total about 95,000 square miles. If you add in Albania’s 11,000 square miles (it wasn’t part of Yugoslavia, but Albanian people have definitely played a role in Balkan history), you wind up with an area of roughly 106,000 square miles—slightly larger than Colorado, and slightly smaller than Nevada.
It’s not a huge chunk of real estate—it’s not even the entire Balkan Peninsula—especially when you consider the outsized impact of the area on world events. When Yugoslavia broke up in the early 1990s, chaos swept through the Balkan Peninsula, and the ‘states’ that Tito had held together after the Second World War began to break apart. Yugoslavia became Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, North Macedonia, and eventually Kosovo. I think that process is what Balkanization means, and now, knowing what it looked like (still looks like), I know it’s a very ugly word.
I’ve spent the last month trying to understand how these countries fit together—who the people are and how they’re intertwined, as well why their history seems so troubled. In the 1990s, I had small children and an audio system that allowed me to play NPR in every room of my house. As I changed diapers and toddler-wrangled, Balkan place-names embedded themselves in my brain—Srebrenica, Banja Luka, Belgrade, Kosovo—and ever since, I’ve been curious whether the images in my head match up with the reality of this complicated peninsula.
In the last month, I’ve read three books about the break-up of Yugoslavia, and gone on explanatory tours in five countries. Do I understand it now? More or less, on the most basic level of what happened when and to whom. But the why of the thing—that still utterly eludes me.
If you take the small square mileage I mentioned above, divide it into little patches, then mix all the people up, give them different religions, and dump them out again in different spots, you get a melting pot, yes, but also a sticky, complicated, volatile pot that threatens to boil over at any given moment.
The various groups of people in the region—Albanians, Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, and more—all seem to identify with their ancestral heritage, rather than their current nationality, or even their religion. We had a tour guide yesterday who asked us where we were from. We replied, then I asked our standard follow-up icebreaker: “Where are you from?”
Now, in seven years of travel, I’ve gotten exactly two categories of response to that question. Most people laugh and say “Here!” A few laugh, and explain that they moved here (wherever here is) from such-and-such town not too far away, for work or family or whatever, and that’s that. The conversation moves on.
Yesterday, I got several paragraphs about Emir’s genealogy. He was born in a village outside of Sarajevo. His family have been there for five hundred years—they were Ottoman (but not religious—Bosniak Muslims are the least observant Muslims we’ve ever met). He was very clear that they were not in the group of Bosniaks who converted to Islam under Ottoman rule. I sensed a strong subtext: ‘I identify with these people, but less with these.’
Now, for the record, this young man (he’s just a couple of months younger than Toby, our eldest) is not entirely certain of his exact date of birth, because in early 1994, his mother had to give birth at home (the maternity hospital had been destroyed), and record-keeping was a pretty low priority. But the family history? That’s a tale that was kept alive through centuries of invasion and occupation and war. That’s identity.
Sound familiar? It does to me.
Where are you from? Who are your people? How long have you been here? Who are you?
Don’t these questions all, ultimately, reduce a person to a category or a label? They stem from curiosity, yes, but what is that curiosity rooted in? And what emotional response do the answers to those questions elicit in me, the asker? A sense of what we have in common, or how different we are?
Tribalism is the ultimate challenge to any ‘melting pot.’ I wonder if it’s even possible for humans to give up the labels that separate us, and embrace the labels that bind us to one another.
Buildings in Sarajevo are still riddled with bullet holes and the craters from mortar strikes—and not just a few buildings. There are lots of people missing limbs. There are graveyards and memorials dotted all over town. The stories of the siege (which lasted four long years) are harrowing, but the stories of what went on in the countryside are, frankly, worse. Banja Luka. Srebrenica. The war in Bosnia was horrific, and from what we’ve been able to understand, the whole area is still a tinderbox.
How does a divided people change course, to foster tolerance and understanding and unity, instead of the tribalism that leads to violence and death? How can humans learn to look beyond the differences that divide us, and focus on the commonalities that unite us? I don’t know the answers, but over and over again, I’ve seen what happens if we can’t figure it out, and it’s not pretty.
Take care,
Lisa
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