Balkan Identities brings together historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars all working under the shared conviction that the only way to overcome history is to intimately understand it. The contributors of Balkan Identities focus on historical memory, collective national memory, and the political manipulation of national identities. They refine our understanding of memory and identity in general and explore and assess the significance of particular manifestations of Balkan national identities and national memories in the region. The essays in Balkan Identities grapple with three major problems: the construction of historical memory, sites of national memory, and the mobilization of national identities. While most essays focus on a single country (e.g. Croatia, Romania, Turkey, Cyprus, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia), they are in dialogue with each other and share an opposition to rigid isolationist identities. Illuminating and challenging, Balkan Identities demonstrates the ever-changing nature of a troubled and culturally vibrant region.

This book gives an insight into the media constructions of historical remembrance reflecting transnational, national or nationalistic forms of politics. Authors from post-Yugoslavia and neighbouring countries focus on the diverse transnational (such as Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav etc.) and national (such as Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian etc.) memory cultures in South-Eastern Europe, their interference and rivalry. They examine constructions of memory in different media from the 19th century to recent wars. These include longue durée images, breaks and gaps, selection and suppression, traumatic events and the loss of memory, nostalgia, false memory, reactivation, rituals and traces of memory.

Everyday Life in the Balkans gathers the work of leading scholars across disciplines to provide a broad overview of the countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. This region has long been characterized as a place of instability and political turmoil, from World War I, through the Yugoslav Wars, and even today as debate continues over issues such as the influx of refugees or the expansion of the European Union. However, the work gathered here moves beyond the images of war and post-socialist stagnation which dominate Western media coverage of the region to instead focus on the lived experiences of the people in these countries. Contributors consider a wide range of issues including family dynamics, gay rights, war memory, religion, cinema, fashion, and politics. Using clear language and engaging examples, Everyday Life in the Balkans provides the background context necessary for an enlightened conversation about the policies, economics, and culture of the region.

There are many books out there on all the different aspects of preparedness and survival that can provide you with information, checklists, and theoretical solutions to potential problems. But no matter how much you read or how well-researched the books you choose are, there's only so much you can take away from these tomes. Getting your information from someone who has survived a "sh*t hit the fan" crisis will take your preparedness to an entirely different level. Meet Selco, a legend in the preparedness world. He survived in a city that was under siege for more than a year. He had no power, no running water, no stores for supplies, and every day, he ran the risk of meeting a violent death, whether by shells, sniper fire, or a person intent on hurting others. This book is a collection of memories from the darkest days of the Balkan War, where each moment could have been his last. This isn't a cheerful and uplifting guide to survival. There's no misplaced optimism. There's only Selco, the darkness he faced, and the grim reality of an SHTF scenario most of us can't even fathom. But if you can grasp it all before it happens, you'll be much further ahead than those who are frozen in shock.***Please note that Selco's first language is not English. These stories have been lightly edited for clarity, but they still retain the "accent."

This volume brings together a diverse group of scholars from North America and Europe to explore the history and memory of Germany's fateful push for power in the Balkans during the era of the two world wars and the long postwar period. Each chapter focuses on one or more of four interrelated themes: war, empire, (forced) migration, and memory. The first section, "War and Empire in the Balkans," explores Germany's quest for empire in Southeast Europe during the first half of the century, a goal that was pursued by economic and military means. The book's second section, "Aftershocks and Memories of War," focuses on entangled German-Balkan histories that were shaped by, or a direct legacy of, Germany's exceptionally destructive push for power in Southeast Europe during World War II. German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century expands and enriches the neglected topic of Germany's continued entanglements with the Balkans in the era of the world wars, the Cold War, and today.

This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The major question addressed here is how modern Balkan nations have voiced claims about their past by establishing ’proof’ of a long historical presence on their territories in order to legitimise national political narratives. Focusing on claims constructed in relation to tangible evidence of past presence, especially architecture and townscape, the contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. This comparative take on Balkan public uses of the past also reveals many common trends in social and political practices, ideas and fixations embedded in public and collective memories. Balkan Heritages revisits some general truths about the Balkans as a region and a category, in scholarship and in politics. Contributions to the volume adopt a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective of Balkan identities and heritage(s), viewed here as symbolic resources deployed by diverse local actors with special emphasis on scholars and political leaders.

This volume explores how the process of European integration has influenced collective memory in the countries of the Western Balkans. In the region, there is still no shared understanding of the causes (and consequences) of the Yugoslav wars. The conflicts of the 1990s but also of WWII and its aftermath have created “ethnically confined” memory cultures. As such, divergent interpretations of history continue to trigger confrontations between neighboring countries and hinder the creation of a joint EU perspective. In this volume, the authors examine how these “memory wars” impact the European dimension - by becoming a tool to either support or oppose Europeanisation. The contributors focus on how and why memory is renegotiated, exhibited, adjusted, or ignored in the Europeanisation process.