Balkan Europe

Overview

Two American scholars, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, came to Yugoslavia in the thirties to record illiterate singers able to compose thousands of lines while accompanying themselves on a fiddle: what they observed there helped them understand how the Iliad could have been composed. The region lived five centuries under the Ottoman Empire, and its modern literatures were born with the independences of the nineteenth century. Ivo Andric received the Nobel in 1961 for The Bridge on the Drina. The Bridge on the Drina tells four centuries of a Bosnian town around an Ottoman structure.

What circulates

Serbo-Croatian has been written in two alphabets and is today named in four ways depending on the state, without readers ceasing to understand one another. The wars of the nineties separated markets that had formed only one, and many authors of that generation publish from exile, in Paris, Berlin or Ljubljana.

Limits of this grouping

The word Balkans comes from Turkish and names a mountain range; in Europe it took on a pejorative sense, down to the verb to balkanise. The zone leaves aside Greece, which belongs to the same Ottoman past, and Slovenia, filed under Central Europe, although both shared that history. Both shared five centuries of that empire.

Works cited

• NovelThe Bridge on the DrinaNa Drini ćuprijaIvo Andrić · 1945The book appeared in Belgrade five months after the liberation of the city, together with two other novels written during the occupation.Literature
• PoetrySongs of the Serbian PeopleСрпске народне пјесмеVuk Stefanović Karadžić · 1814A collection of oral songs that served two causes at once: giving Serbian an orthography and a written literature, and providing a nation in the process of rising up with a past it could recite.Literature
• EpicSongs of the Frontier WarriorsKëngë kreshnikëshAnonymous · 1937The mountains of northern Albania, where bards recited these songs from memory, accompanying themselves on the lahuta.Literature