Balkan Ghosts - Robert Kaplan

Balkan Ghosts is an excellently written history and travelogue of sorts from the author's extensive time spent living and working from Croatia to Greece up the Black Sea coast to Romania. In each of his selected countries, his writing meanders between evocative, colorful and visceral interviews written in the "modern" period of writing, 30 years ago, and history that runs back to the Eastern Roman Empire.

While I loved Kaplan's style of writing, I hesitate to say the book was enjoyable. So much of what it covers is a history that is not marked by periods of progress stalled by brief spurts of problematic rulers or providentially poor disasters, but rather huge swathes of time where suffering or hardship punctuated by brief breaths of peace arrive. The history he covers is difficult to romanticize, and has no large numbers of heroic figures. It is a great reminder of that all men on this side of eternity have the same sin that marks them and works evil unimaginable on the world. I received a fair amount of education on the evils of Nazi Germany, or Stalin's Russia, but most Americans I think would struggle to find the countries in Balkan Ghosts listed on the map. Most would know nothing of the millions of deaths that happened even in the last century in them. Although they are not beautiful or happy stories, they are stories I wish I had heard sooner.

For my own interest in the Balkans as a future home, it has given me helpful context, and a much more open understanding of the messiness of politics tied to cultural and ethnic identity. The focus on historical ills, demonization of cultures, beatification of revolutionaries barely aligned with their ideology who were deeply wicked and flawed men, and obsession with ethnicity are all features of the regions history that made me think long and hard about my own country's political climate. If one region's history looks like this with these features, why couldn't mine?

One thing that has struck me is that there does seem to be a particular type of character with whom Kaplan spoke frequently, and those characters were often eccentric, outstanding and highly nationalistic (or downright racist in some interviews). I bring this up just to say, I'm not sure if that was something that, as a journalist, he knew would be a fascinating headline, or if that characteristic is something which was a more holistic representation of the region. My own experience with Balkan nationals I've met in the US and abroad has been generally apolitical and incredibly friendly with no hint of that seething racism toward anyone. That said, the events in history that he covers are, objectively, events which were often motivated by factors like what language one spoke, the creed one believed, or one's ethnicity.

For any with an interest in history, this is a worthy read of an era which, thankfully, seems to have mostly passed by. The Balkans, as a region, include some of the most wonderful people and natural beauty in the world, and thank God that the wars which marred so much of the last century have not burdened them in this one. I would absolutely recommend the book for any who have an interest in the Balkans, in history, or those that love a bit of living anthropology, but be skeptical of treating this as a gospel of how the region is now.