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| Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert D. Kaplan
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (121 reviews)
Sales Rank: 43468
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0312424930
Dewey Decimal Number: 949.6
EAN: 9780312424930
ASIN: 0312424930
Publication Date: May 1, 2005
Release Date: April 14, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in 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. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as "the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date" (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.
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.
Amazon.com Review
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.
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 Excellent and broad sweeping introduction to the Balkans September 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 $50 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.
Chosen Histories Come home to Roost June 26, 2008
This was Kaplan's, (the author of the award winning and rather incredible book The Coming Anarchy), first book. It is both a literal and a conceptual travelogue through the history of the Balkans. With the skill of an historian, and the flair and intimacy of a seasoned journalist, Kaplan captures the "chosen-ness" of the disparate "chosen histories" that have exorcised an entire region for the last seven hundred years.
In doing so, he brings vividly to life the psychodynamic theories of the brilliant Volmik D. Volkan, in his "The Pschodynamics of International Relationships." In that book Volkan, et.al., made clear that culture is nothing, if not "living collective tribal memory." The memory of the tribe is reconstructed in the present as "chosen injuries," "chosen traumas," and "chosen histories."
This book is about the "chosen histories" of all the different sides who are at "right angles" to each other in the Balkan region. Kaplan takes us on a guided, but structured tour, region-by-region, devoting a chapter to each country -- to its history, its art, its architecture, its collective dreams and hopes -- sharing intimate conversations with ordinary as well as important people on all of the various sides of past conflicts.
Altogether, this makes for a rich, layered and densely packed narrative that has the feel of walking into the same "time warp" as his subjects in their respective narrative re-creations. As Volkan predicted in both the book cited above and in his even more brilliant book "The Third Reich in Consciousness," that "chosen traumas," and "chosen insults" would be repeatedly "relived," as if they happened just yesterday: The collective nerve endings and emotions of the people remain "raw," even across generations.
In terms of volatility, the socioeconomic and political grid of multiple ethnicities, religions, races, and cross-generations grievances, the Balkans remains without a rival, as subsequent events were to prove most devastatingly.
Although it is not as theoretically sweeping or as gritty as "The Coming Anarchy," this was a deeply thoughtful and timely book, coming out just before the region exploded into the very chaos that Kaplan had so presciently predicted. It certainly put Kaplan on the map, as well it should have. Five Stars.
 Superficial but nice overview of the Balkans for those who know little about the area May 30, 2008
How one judges/reviews a book tells as much as about the judge/reviewer as the book sometimes. I know very little about the Balkans. I expected to increase my little knowledge of the area a lot by reading Kaplan's book. In that sense, I was not let down; this book multiplied my knowledge of the Balkans many times. The book covers the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. In each part, the reader learns a bit about the history and people of the region. For the person who knows little about this fascinating region, the book provides a nice overview.
I did not find the book organized well. Historically, it jumped all over the place. The author quotes multiple authors liberally (for example, Rebecca West on Yugoslavia). At times I wondered to myself why I was not just reading their works instead of Kaplan's. Disproportionate amount is allocated to Romania (over one third of the book). I was surprised and disappointed by his lack of coverage of Bosnia and Montenegro. Long sections are dedicated to the author's interview of citizens of these countries. These interviews and interactions are fine if the author's goal was to give the reader insight into cultures, however he uses the interviews to educate the reader on historical events. That would be like talking to an average American who was alive during WWII and hoping to understand the events that led to Pearl Harbor. The conversation may be interesting, but if your goal is to teach readers history then I would argue that there are much better ways of doing it. It is not scholarly in that sense.
Writing style was mildly entertaining. I have to admit that I don't enjoy reading travelogues and if you are a fan of travelogues then you may enjoy this book more than I did. If on the other hand, you already have some knowledge of the Balkans and you hope to increase your understanding then I would find a different book.
 A Traveler's View of the Balkans May 9, 2008
At the front of the book is the Author's map of the Balkans which begins in the north with Austria and ends in the south with Turkey and Greece, in parallel and separated by the Aegean Sea. There are two tracks going from north to south. The western track follows the Adriatic Sea down to Greece while the inland eastern track begins with Hungary and ends with northern Turkey.
The Author travels both tracks, spending a bit more time along the eastern track, particularly Rumania and Bulgaria. His contribution to history comes from a ground view of interviews with people along his path. As opposed to the view from 30,000 feet, the Author's ground level travels allows him to record pictures of life as experienced by the people whose homes were in the Balkans.
Balkan Ghosts is an interesting book that sheds light on some historic events.
Development Professional, Bosnia April 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I tend to enjoy Kaplan's books very much. His writing style is very smooth, fluid, and entertaining, and provides for a pleasant read. Having lived, however, in Eastern Europe now for many years, I find it rather odd that the author skipped Bosnia and Herzegovina altogether.
He covered this region though very well, better than most other authors. I did not rate this book with '3 stars' because I did not agree with what the author said, nor because it was a boring book. I rated it as such because, first, it was written during the initial phase of the Balkan War, which I assume was the reason why Bosnia was skipped from this book. On page 3 (I think) he apologized for doing so. However, he still managed to cover Serbia and Croatia, so war couldn't have been much of a barrier to research.
Because he left out Bosnia, I feel that many pieces of history are left unanswered, and not connected. As this country, during Yugoslavia, represented the cultural epicenter of Europe, and symbolized multi-ethnic tolerance, Bosnia should have played a role in this work. Bosnia also has produced the Nobel Prize winner, Ivo Andric. The history of the Balkans is drastically changed once this small, yet highly significant country, is not included in its overview.
Still, if you have never lived/traveled to this area, you will defintely enjoy this book.
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