Balkanalysis.com

Editor’s note: The announcement that legends of rock U2 will be playing Zagreb this summer caused mass excitement; the Balkans now seem definitively on the map of the biggest popular artists. As the weather warms up and the thoughts of all turn to enjoyment, we present something different, with a rundown of the biggest musical [...]

By David Binder* The Convair 340 was packed with Macedonians anxious about their families and homes. In the cockpit the JAT pilot dipped the nose down over the city and rolled the plane slightly to the starboard to give me an opportunity to snap pictures from the cockpit with my clumsy but reliable Rolleiflex: A [...]

By Dejan Ciric* This article is based on two short memoirs. The writer of the first one is Fotije Stanojevic, a Serbian diplomat active during the first half of the 20th century. Stanojevic was born in 1874 in the eastern Znepole region, in the little village of Babe. Since 1950, however, this village has been [...]

(Balkanalysis.com Research Service)- The first New Year’s gift of 2009 to the citizens of many Balkan countries has come in the form of the season’s first significant snowfall, blanketing large areas in Macedonia, northern Greece, Serbia, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Albania. In the Macedonian capital of Skopje, some 16cm of snow has accumulated in the past [...]

By David Binder* Talk of a “Greater” this or that Balkan nation-state has subsided in recent years as the region experienced the creation of ever more mini-republics – a total of eight on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. The trend toward fragmentation was initiated by petty nationalists and fostered by the United States and [...]

By David Binder* Crucial decisions about Serbia’s territorial integrity and the direction of its foreign relations in the context of May 11 elections are reminders of the life and times of the prime minister and party leader Nikola Pasic (1845-1926). While one might rightly dwell on Pasic’s fundamental contributions to the development of parliamentary democracy, [...]

By Christopher Deliso “When they attack, what should I do first?” a young Serbian KPS police commander says. “Should I try to evacuate my children, or fight back? We are twenty, thirty thousand. They are two million.” The likelihood or not of such an imagined massive assault from Albanians doesn’t matter here in Mitrovica, the [...]

By David Binder* Serbia is both blessed and cursed. So, too, are those blessed and cursed that are forced by geography or other circumstance to deal with Serbia. They usually become entrapped. The reason is obvious. As defined in the last century by Jovan Cvijic, the preeminent Serbian geographer of the Balkans, “We built our [...]

By Nicky Gardner* When the celebrated English travel writer Edith Durham arrived at the monastery at Gracanica one hundred years ago, she came to a place that had virtually no experience of the twentieth century. It is an episode that Durham recalls in her book High Albania. The incumbents, evidently horribly worried by Durham‘s unmarried [...]

By Dejan Ciric In the third of a three-part series, Serbian historian Dejan Ciric narrates the developments that led, by the end of the 19th century, to the creation of a relatively modern health care system in the small town of Pirot. During the time of the Turkish reign, there were several doctors in the [...]