I remember my first month in Potsdam, in 2015. At the entrance to the City Library, the librarian looks at the index and says: "Ah, Balkans..." with a specific intonation, like when a doctor announces a diagnosis. It wasn't hostile, but rather a kind of pitiful fascination.
Later I recognized it in various situations. For example, my first landlady, a professor of history, who one day decided to explain to me "the essence of the Balkan problem".
Five hundred years under the Turks, she began, as if reciting a well-learned lesson. I nodded and thought how surprised she would be to know that the Pax Ottomana brought more stability than many periods of "freedom" that followed.
I didn't want to spoil that nicely packaged story of the eternal Balkan curse.
Because you know, it's such a neat narrative structure: five centuries under the Turks, eternal hatred, mystical bandits fighting for freedom. It's like watching a well-directed movie where everything has its place and meaning.
And reality? The reality is, of course, much more boring. When you scratch a little under the surface of the big stories about eternal conflicts and ancient hatreds, you often find quite prosaic things - the struggle for resources, political manipulations, economic interests. But who would listen to that? It is not exotic enough, "Balkan" enough.
From Byron onwards
I like to follow how that narrative about the "unfortunate Balkans" developed. First Lord Byron with a romantic vision of wild Albanians ("free as the winds that blow round their mountains"), and Rebecca West with an epic travelogue between two wars.
Everyone saw what they wanted to see, exoticism, mystery, violence. And we somehow adopted their projections as our own identity.
Byron's description of Albania and Greece sounds almost comical today, but that image became the foundation for an entire genre of travel writing. Just imagine how many young Englishmen and women later came here looking for those "wild people" (I include us, of course), and of course, they found exactly what they were looking for. That's how it goes with prejudice, you always find what you expect to find.
And then came Rebecca West with her "Black Lamb and Gray Falcon." She traveled through Yugoslavia between the two wars, supposedly to understand how national identities are forged and united.
But she wrote something completely different: an epic tale of love, death, politics and violence, all intertwined in a fatal Balkan knot. Her book is the Bible for all who wrote later on the Balkans, although it spoke more about the projections of the Western mind than about real life here.
Vesna Goldsworthy has brilliantly debunked this in her book "Inventing Ruritania". She showed how Western writers and filmmakers found the perfect stage for their fantasies in the Balkans. Everything they were not allowed to say about sex, religion, violence, they projected it all on us.
They invented an entire imaginary country, Ruritania, which became the archetype of a tragic and backward Balkan state. And the worst thing is that we started playing the role they wrote for us.
Then came Dobrica Ćosić with the metaphor of "a man tied to a railway". How we just embraced that image of helplessness, that idea that we are condemned to eternal suffering! And it is no coincidence that this metaphor became popular just when we needed justifications for new conflicts.
And that's how we got to the nineties, when the Western media pulled the old stereotypes out of mothballs. "Ancient hatreds" have become the most popular cliché on the evening news. It was so convenient, you don't have to explain the complex political and economic causes of the conflict when you can just say "it's the Balkans". And we...?
Are we special?
I recently attended an interesting conference on postcolonial studies. I deepened my conviction that the whole story about the especially turbulent Balkans is a matter of perception, not historical reality.
Yes, the nineties were terrible, thousands of dead, millions of refugees, destroyed cities and villages, broken family ties. These are real tragedies, real people, real lives. And anyone who survived those years has the right to say that he saw hell.
But when you look at the bigger picture, when you put those numbers next to other European tragedies, you see something strange. Britain lost 886.000 people in the First World War, another 450.000 in the Second. Spain buried half a million souls in its civil war. And let's not talk about the horrors of sub-Saharan Africa, where over two million people have died since 1989 alone.
It turns out that we in the Balkans were not as particularly turbulent as we like to think. When you look at the other figures, we averaged 2,68 conflicts per century, exactly the same as the great Britain. Russia even "beat" us with 3,57 conflicts. And Italy and Spain? Somewhat calmer: 1,79 and 0,89 conflicts (according to Correlates of War).
I do not say this to minimize our tragedy. Each death is one death too many, each refugee is one too many.
But I say that to show how the myth of the "eternal bloody Balkans" served others more than us. While the Western media made a spectacle out of our wounds, real people were suffering. And that suffering was neither greater nor less than the sufferings of other nations in other wars. She was only better differently covered by the media.
Again about the "Balkan curse"
The most interesting thing for me at the conference was when they started talking about the so-called "peaceful periods" in Europe. You know that famous Pax Britannica from 1815 to 1914? Well, it turns out that this "peace" was valid only for some.
While they were bragging about peace, we had the Greek uprising, the Serbian-Turkish wars, and then the Balkan wars. But you know what a paradox is? We actually had the longest period of peace in European history, about 250 years under the Ottomans.
During that time, "civilized" Europe was at war like there was no tomorrow. Even then, when we had the longest period of peace in European history, we still talked about "five centuries under the Turks" as an unbroken chain of suffering.
And perhaps that is the most terrible thing, that all our real tragedies, all our real dead, have become just another television story, another proof of the "Balkan curse". And behind those cameras, behind those big words about "ancient hatreds", there are real widows, real orphans, real people who still carry scars today.
Milica Bakić-Hayden explained it brilliantly with the concept of "nesting orientalism". We, she says, accepted Western prejudices about us, but then we projected them further, everyone looked at those further south and east than themselves as "more primitive".
That's how Serbs looked at Bosnian Muslims, Croats at Serbs, all together at Albanians... It was as if we were building some kind of pyramid of contempt to make ourselves feel more civilized.
We should, by all accounts, stop hiding behind the "Balkan destiny". It is just an excuse used by political elites to avoid responsibility. As if to say: "It's not up to us, it's a curse."
It is not a curse, but a specific policy of specific makers of immediate political decisions. And don't hide behind witchcraft.
It's time to stop being hostage to our own myths. Our history is neither better nor worse than the history of other nations.
It's not about how much we suffered, it's about what we learned from that suffering. And perhaps the greatest irony is that, in building the myth of our special misfortune, we have failed to see how ordinary we really are in our sufferings and hopes.
*the author is a psychologist
