Im not from Europe. Can someone explain what are the Balkans exactly and why there’s “beef” between them?
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The Balkans are a group of countries at the crossroads of Europe, Russia, and Asia.
Because they are at this crossroads, different groups have taken up different cultural and religious traits from the surrounding areas. Some are Muslim, some are Eastern Orthodox, some are Roman Catholic. Some write with the Roman alphabet, some with the Cyrillic alphabet.
Throughout history, these different groups were part of different empires and alliances, but they were often right on the borders of those empires. The different empires, in their many, *many* wars, would fight in the area of the Balkans. This led to numerous massacres, atrocities, and horribly unspeakable things.
So many unspeakable things that different groups have been massacred by basically every other group so badly that it left a cultural scar. A defining part of the culture of the Balkans is which atrocity your group has identified with, and which other groups you blame for those atrocities. Conversely, you are also required to *ignore* the atrocities committed by your ancestors against your neighbors.
This history goes back to the Roman Empire, through the Byzantine Empire, through the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, the USSR, Yugoslavia, through to today.
Through that history, there were times when the regionalism was forcibly quashed under a ruling empire, allowing those regionalist/nationalist feelings fester and metastisize.
I don’t know how to fix it.
I had a coworker from the region. He claimed to speak 9 languages. (I personally feel they were closer to dialects, but the definition of a language is a dialect with an army….)
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