The Balkans: Outskirts of Empires

17 hrs. 7 min.

Miscellaneous

Language Russian

Author Andrei Shary

Narrator Mikhail Roslyakov

Description

The Balkans have always been and remain a mythological space that feels hard to grasp for the European mind. Here ancient civilization took shape; in the Middle Ages, Greco-Slavic principalities and kingdoms rose and fell. Byzantium stood guard over Europe for a thousand years until it was swallowed by the Ottoman avalanche. For centuries, the idea of uniting the South Slavs struggled here—at the fringes of great empires—against the concepts of independent state development of each people. In the Balkans converged the key civilizational seams and rifts of the Old World: Western and Eastern Christian rites faced off against Islam and tried to coexist with it; the Slavic world sought mutual understanding with the Turkic, Romance, Germanic, Albanian, and Hungarian worlds. For three centuries, Russia defended its own interests in the Balkans.

In his book, Andrey Shary—an acclaimed writer and journalist—writes about old and new Balkan states bound together by a shared historical fate, close cooperation, and a centuries-long experience of coexisting—yet also separated and torn apart by endless feuds and internal contradictions.