"The relationship between language and identity is a complex topic everywhere in the world, but maybe it is even more crucial for those people living in the Balkans who speak a Romance variety. This volume is the result of a project started by the Balkan History Association, and brings together scholars trained in social sciences and humanities to offer the reader a thorough sociolinguistic and anthropological account of this region. It constitutes a contribution to a reformulation of methodological and analytical issues, providing a better insight in the linguistic and geopolitical processes taking place in the area. Contributors are Michael Studemund-Halévy, Cătălin Mamali, Anna-Christine Weirich, Ewa Nowicka, Daniela-Carmen Stoica, Mircea Măran, Zvjezdana Vrzić, and Monica Huțanu"--

This volume investigates the complex relationship between language and identity of the peoples speaking Romance languages in the Balkans, offering a thorough sociolinguistic and anthropological account on this crossroads region.

A newly revised and updated edition of an award-winning BBC correspondent's magisterial history of the Balkan region This unique and lively history of Balkan geopolitics since the early nineteenth century gives readers the essential historical background to more than one hundred years of events in this war-torn area. No other book covers the entire region, or offers such profound insights into the roots of Balkan violence, or explains so vividly the origins of modern Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. Now updated to include the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, the capture of all indicted war criminals from the Yugoslav wars, and each state's quest for legitimacy in the European Union, The Balkans explores the often catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and the Great Powers, raising some disturbing questions about Western intervention.

57 bittersweet stories offering a unique glimpse of this irresistible and enthralling country, where locals say, "Ca la noi, la nimeni. There's nobody quite like us." Ormsby's colourful characters will entertain, educate and enrage. It usually depends on who is reading. Close your guide book, meet the people.

Throughout history, the Balkans have been a crossroads, a zone of endless military, cultural and economic mixing and clashing between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Subject to violent shifts of borders, rulers and belief systems at the hands of the world's great empires--from the Byzantine to the Habsburg and Ottoman--the Balkans are often called Europe's tinderbox and a seething cauldron of ethnic and religious resentments. Much has been made of the Balkans' deeply rooted enmities. The recent destruction of the former Yugoslavia was widely ascribed to millennial hatreds frozen by the Cold War and unleashed with the fall of communism. In this brilliant account, acclaimed historian Mark Mazower argues that such a view is a dangerously unbalanced fantasy. A landmark reassessment, The Balkans rescues the region's history from the various ideological camps that have held it hostage for their own ends, not least the need to justify nonintervention. The heart of the book deals with events from the emergence of the nation-state onward. With searing eloquence, Mazower demonstrates that of all the gifts bequeathed to the region by modernity, the most dubious has been the ideological weapon of romantic nationalism that has been used again and again by the power hungry as an acid to dissolve the bonds of centuries of peaceful coexistence. The Balkans is a magnificent depiction of a vitally important region, its history and its prospects.

There's trouble in the Balkans, the Powder Keg of Europe. Prolific Bulgarian-American author Vladimir Chernozemsky takes us back to the bloody Balkan War in his most personal novel yet. The Ottoman Turks occupied and oppressed the Balkans for five centuries until Bulgaria and its neighbors drove them out, only then to fight over the liberated territories. It was a devastating war that still reverberates today.

Greece, 1940. In the port city of Salonika, with its wharves and brothels, dark alleys and Turkish mansions, a tense political drama is being played out. As Adolf Hitler plans to invade the Balkans, spies begin to circle—and Costa Zannis, a senior police official, must deal with them all. He is soon in the game, working to secure an escape route for fugitives from Nazi Berlin that is protected by German lawyers, Balkan detectives, and Hungarian gangsters—and hunted by the Gestapo. Meanwhile, as war threatens, the erotic life of the city grows passionate. For Zannis, that means a British expatriate who owns the local ballet academy, a woman from the dark side of Salonika society, and the wife of a shipping magnate. With extraordinary historical detail and a superb cast of characters, Spies of the Balkans is a stunning novel about a man who risks everything to fight back against the world’s evil.

The tragedies of Bosnia and Kosovo are often explained away as the unchangeable legacy of 'centuries-old hatreds'. In this richly detailed, expertly balanced chronicle of the Balkans across fifteen centuries, Hupchick sets a complicated record straight. Organized around the three great civilizations of the region - Western European, Orthodox Christian and Muslim - this is a much-needed guide to the political, social, cultural and religious threads of Balkan history, with a clear, convincing account of the reasons for nationalist violence and terror.

"In a survey of Balkan history since the early nineteenth century, Misha Glenny provides the essential background to recent events in this war-torn area. No other book covers the entire region and offers such profound insights into the roots of Balkan violence or explains so vividly the origins of modern Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania. Many readers will welcome the author's insights into the final century of Ottoman rule, a complex and colorful period essential for understanding today's conflicts." "Glenny's account of each national group in the Balkans and its struggle for statehood is lucid and fair-minded, and he brings the culture of different nationalisms to life. The narrative is permeated with sharply observed set pieces and portraits of kings, guerrillas, bandits, generals and politicians. He interweaves a narrative of key events with the story of international affairs - the relations between states in the Balkans and between them and the great powers."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved