Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History Review
Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts is more than a travel book for most of his experiences in the Balkan's were far from tourism. Rather, like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, his book explores time and place with the precision of an anthropologist.
Kaplan points out that this area of the world seems to have a talent for starting wars and once was called `ethnic trash' by Karl Marx. Serbia is the area where Habsburg Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated, an event that sparked World War I. From here come the 20th century's first terrorists. Kaplan points out that the Balkans are not just the area where Communism meets capitalism. It is also the place where Roman Catholic meets Eastern Orthodox, where Christian meets Islam, where Rome meets Constantinople, where Habsburg Austria-Hungarian empire meets the Ottoman empire. Kaplan identifies the principal illness of Balkans which he sees as conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that its borders expand to the point at which their empire reached its heights in ancient or medieval times.
Croatia's unique history is explored, its alliance with Hapsburg Austria, and its history of conflict between Catholic and Orthodox Serbs. A fascinating part of the book is the rise of Croatia as a small nation only to become a puppet of the German Nazis. During this time murders against both Orthodox Serbs and Jews occurred. The figure of Catholic Cardinal Stepinac remains controversial to this day, for he appeared to support the fascist nationalists until their murder of Jews and Orthodox Serbs reached terrible proportions. He chastised the fascist around the fall of Nazism in World War II but was later tried as a war criminal by the communist Tito. Tensions remain to this day between Catholic Croatia and the mixed ethnic state of Bosnia where Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims all live in suspicion of each other.
Kaplan repeatedly praises the work of Dame Rebecca West in her Black Lamb Grey Falcon. West indicates that the Turks ruined the Balkans so greatly that it has never been repaired.
Albanians descended from Illyrian tribes and their language bears no similarity to other languages. Kosovo has gone back and forth between Serbian and Albanian control. Enver Hoxha was a young Communist freedom fighter against the Nazis. At the end of World War II, Albania had lost more than 7% of their population.
Macedonia is a mix of ethnic groups. Turks, Albanians, Serbs, Rumanians, Greeks, and Bulgarians live there side by side since the days of St. Paul. Czar Alexander II's war to liberate Bulgaria from Turkey in 1877 was the first spark of modern Great Power conflict. Russians occupied the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and dictated to the defeated Turks the Treaty of San Stefano. The union of Macedonia and Bulgaria created a pro-Russian state. Germany's Bismarck set out to revise the Treaty in the Congress of Berlin. Macedonia was returned to Turkish rule upon pressure by Germany and Great Britain on the Russians. To balance the powers, Turkey got Macedonia, Austria got Bosnia, an arrangement leading to World War I. The Russian forces in Bulgaria drove the Muslims into Macedonia whereas the Austrian advance into Bosnia also drove the Muslims south into Macedonia, where the enraged Turks began terrorizing the Orthodox Christians. The relationship between Bulgaria and Macedonia has been one where Bulgaria wishes to incorporate Macedonia within their borders but has always been on the losing side of world conflicts, never allowing for integration.
Apart from forcing Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid to accept a liberal constitution, the "Young Turks" led by Pasha had no well-defined program. As with Gorbachev, Pasha and the Young Turks were determined to conserve in a loser more liberal form the Empire, which they perceived as threatened primarily by a reactionary Sultanate and near total resistance to change. The Ottoman Empire's disintegration enraged fundamentalists Muslims within Turkey. The increasingly authoritarian Young Turk regime culminated in the 1915 mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians, the century's first holocaust. This genocide was perpetrated because the Armenians demographically threatened the Muslim Turks.
Romania's language is Latinate, closer to ancient Roman. Roman legions conquered this territory in 101 AD. Romanians are closer in appearance to the Latins than to Slavs. In 325 AD Roman Christianity was brought to Romania. However invasion by Bulgarians brought in the Eastern Orthodox religion. Geographically Romania lies vulnerable between the Ukrainians and Russians and Turks. For the 14th century onward the Turks kept Romania in fear. There were uprisings against the Turks, for example Vlad the Impaler (the historical "Dracula") was a rebel against Turkish rule. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Russians invaded over a dozen times. In the 1860's the Romanians elected Karl Hohenzollern as their king. Carol I abdicated to his nephew Ferdinand, who married Princess Marie of Edinburgh, granddaughter to Queen Victoria. Queen Marie was a force behind the throne during World War I and died before her son Carol II caused havoc.
King Carol II is a colorful character, having deserted from the army, eloped with a Romanian aristocrat, then was forced to abdicate since Romanian law requires him to marry a foreigner. He marries Princess Helen of Greece and deserts her for Lupescu, his Jewish mistress. He abdicates a second time rather than return to his wife and leave his mistress. He extorted funds from casinos and deposited million in foreign banks. He declared dictatorship. He supported the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael until they turned against him because of his Jewish mistress. Hitler also told Carol that he preferred to have Codreanu as dictator of Romania rather than Carol. Carol had Codreanu and the legion leaders killed which angered Hitler. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu formed the Legion around secret nests of 13 men who drank each other's blood and vowing to commit murder if ordered. Carol formed his own Nazi party and repressed his countries 800,000 Jews. Stalin demanded Bessarabia and Hitler demanded Transylvania. Carol tired to play a double game and lost. He left Romania in 1940 in a train full of gold bound for Mexico. His 18 year old son, Michael became king. The Legion struck back, primarily at Romania's Jewish population, killing thousands. Hitler wished to obtain Romania's oil reserves. In 1947 King Michael also abandoned Romania in a train full of treasures as his father had done.
The fall of King Carol II Hohenzollern and the rise of reactionary forces in 1941 in Romania are a frightening tale. The rise of the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael, a terrorist group that committed murder against the Jews in their country, is a terrible story and helps us realize the degree of anti-Semitism throughout Eastern Europe.
Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania for a quarter-century until the army executed him. Ceausescu outlawed abortion and birth control so that the Romanians could outbreed the Hungarians. However poverty and semi-starvation increased infant mortality rates. Badly urbanized peasants worked in factories and lived in dorms where only alcohol and propaganda were readily available. Romania was allowed to fall under Stalin's domain at the peace discussions at Yalta.
In World War II, the Romanians were on the side of the Nazis while the Jews in Romania supported the Russians. The Romanian army killed 4,000 Jews in Jassy and then the army evacuated another 12,000 that dies of thirst and asphyxiation in railroad cars. Then in 1941 and 192 15,000 Jews were deported from Moldavia into Romanian run concentration camps. In 1944 when the Russians invaded Romania, the Romanians switched sides and began fighting the Nazis. The Romanians have always fallen between three empires, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, and Russia.
The Bulgars were a Tartar tribe. In the medieval period, Bulgaria was among the powerful kingdoms in Europe. Kings carved out empire from Albania to the Black Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains to the Aegean. In 865 Bulgaria became the first of the Slav peoples to embrace Orthodox Christianity. Byzantine Emperor Basil defeated King Samuel and had 14,000 prisoners blinded - the most horrific moment in Bulgarian history. Bulgaria then endured 500 years of Ottoman occupation. Turkish rule was bloodier in Bulgaria than anywhere else. In 1876 Turks encouraged band of Bulgarians converted to Islam to hack to death 5,000 Orthodox Christians. A Russian army swept through Bulgaria in 1877 liberating Bulgaria from Ottoman rule.
Kaplan argues that Greece must be understood through the eyes of the Balkans rather than through a Hollywood lens. He tells of Salonika - Thessaloniki in Greek -a community of Spanish Jews. In 53 AD St. Paul preached from the Synagogue. Jews from Hungary and German arrived in 1373. Following the conquest of Salonika by the Ottoman Turks, 20,000 Spanish Jews received permission to move there in 1492. By 1913 half the population of the city was Jews. The Nazis captured the city in 1941 and in five months had sent almost all the Jews to concentration camps. Of all the cities in Nazi-occupied Europe, Salonika ranked first in the number of Jewish victims: out of a population of 56,000, 54,0505 - 96.5%- were exterminated at Auschwitz.
The Greek Church was the mother of all Eastern Orthodox churches, which are treasure houses of their culture that survived the Ottoman rule. Hagia Sophia built in the sixth century AD by Emperor Justinian became the prototype for all Orthodox cathedrals, for St. Marks in Venice, and for mosques throughout Turkey. Byzantium, an empire created in AD 324, as the successor of Rome, and destroyed 1,100 years later by Ottoman Turks in 1453. During these eleven centuries, the Byzantine Empire was a Greek empire. Ottoman Turks ejected the Byzantine Greeks from Constantinople in the fifteenth century but large Greek communities survived in Istanbul and along the western shore of Asia Minor - particularly Smyrna. In 1921 the Greek army advanced into Asia Minor beyond the Greek occupied coastal areas. In 1922 Kemal Ataturk, in the midst of developing a new Turkish republic, drove the Greek army back. Greek dead numbered 30,000. Then 400,000 Turks from Greek Thrace moved into Turkey and 1,250,000 Greeks from Asia Minor went into exile in Greece, increasing the population by 20%. Refuges tripled the size of Athens. The Nazi invasion left 8% of the population dead, followed by the Greek Civil War which saw more destruction than the war against the Nazis.
Constantinople is a Greek word for a historically Greek city. The Cyrillic alphabet, used in Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, and Russia, emerged from the Greek alphabet when two monks, Cyril and Methodius, left Salonika in the ninth century AD to proselytize among the Slavs. The ultimate achievement of Periclean Athens was to breathe humanism - compassion for the individual - into the inhumanity of the East. Classical Greece of the First Millennium BC invented the West by humanizing the East.
This well written book taught me much about the Balkans and gave me an appreciation for these boiling nationalistic forces that run against each other century after century.
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History Feature
- Good binding.
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History Overview
This new edition includes six opinion pieces written by Robert Kaplan about the Balkans between l996 and 2000 beginning just after the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords and ending after the conclusion of the Kosovo war, with the removal of Slobodan Milosevic from power
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History Specifications
From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare now sweeping Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy.
This enthralling and often chilling political travelogue fully deciphers the Balkans' ancient passions and intractable hatreds for outsiders. For as Kaplan travels among the vibrantly-adorned churches and soul-destroying slums of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he allows us to see the region's history as a time warp in which Slobodan Milosevic becomes the reincarnation of a fourteenth-century Serbian martyr; Nicolae Ceaucescu is called "Drac," or "the Devil"; and the one-time Soviet Union turns out to be a continuation of the Ottoman Empire.
Available at Amazon Check Price Now!
Related Products
- The Balkans: Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999
- Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Penguin Classics)
- Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus
- The Balkans: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles)
- The Bridge on the Drina (Phoenix Fiction)
Customer Reviews
Potted history goes east - reader 451 -
Balkan Ghosts is a compete curate's egg: it is neither history nor travel writing, neither political analysis nor journalism, nor is it all these things together.
Its chief merit is in the prologue: a set of articles published in the 90s by Kaplan arguing for Western intervention in the Yugoslav wars. If anything, these articles were not vocal enough, but they act as a vital reminder of the abject failure of judgement and nerves of the US and EU - particularly the EU, supposedly founded to avoid such wars and atrocities reoccurring in Europe ever again. Then Kaplan says that Clinton may have been influenced by his book against intervention because it sounded the note of unsolvable, age-old hatreds. The author wrings his hands. But the paradox is that when one moves on to the section on ex-Yugoslavia, one understands Clinton. It does portray a stereotypically violent, `eternally unfathomable East'. It has either too much or too little history. Kaplan's dubious premise consists in John Reed and Rebecca West: not exactly neutral material, and written decades ago. He never pauses to question why his interlocutors - intellectuals and officials - carry on about historical events of which they have no personal experience. And he makes no attempt, beyond passing mention, to dissect the impact of communism and of the region's peculiar 1970s economic experiment.
Balkan Ghosts improves when it begins to describe Romania and Bulgaria, in which the author spent more time. It becomes more like a travel book, and the historical commentary is more nuanced, relevant, and up-to-date. Kaplan also convinces when he writes on the holocaust in the Balkan region, especially Salonika. Then the book tends to end again in caricature and cultural typecasting on Greece, though the Papandreou story is interesting. Kaplan deserves credit for having raised the alarm on brewing trouble in the Balkans. His sections on Romania and Bulgaria capture the essence of their now (thankfully) vanished post-communist scenes. But history on the Yugoslav states is better found in Noel Malcolm's Bosnia and Kosovo books.
Balkan Ghosts as a travel guide - S. Otte - indianapols, IN
We used the book as a introduction to a trip we were taking to the Balkan countries and it gave us fantastic background information in a readable non-academic format. While it is a bit dated, the information was still pertinent because of the lack of progress in that area. A "must read" if you are thinking of visiting the area.
Great book. Robert D. Kaplan is an excellent writer. - Benoit Stephenson - San Francisco, CA USA
I would definitively recommend this book to anybody who wants to learn more about the Balkans, and related history. The book is very well written, and makes a complex and deep subject a relatively easy read.
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Sep 27, 2010 22:00:06
