That which the Balkans call “Home”

On the Ashes of a Yugoslavian Dream

Thinking about the Balkans, even for those of us who live here and call it “home,” reminds one of feeding ravens. One cannot escape an eerie feeling around us: simply put, we are here, but we seem to be ravenous for that which leads to conflict. Some theorists, to denote this quality of “unfriendly partition,” have made a universal name out of us – “balkanization.” Although this is a complete misjudgment of our situation, it is also racist. But the question still remains: Why are we the way we are? Much to the contrary, of course, we are not those who constantly utter the Rilkean cry to be heard among the Angels’ Orders (although we do have our rare “existential” hiccups): we are everyday people, who go about having certain thoughts in our inner cabinets and certain feelings we hold dear to our hearts. We love to live, and the general mindset is not to make our ontology tormented by the question “if we should be or not.” We want to be – and in this sense, we are joyful and jokingly frolic, – just as the Croatians’ proverb goes “Mi o vuku, a vuk na vrata” (“Speak of the wolf, and the wolf shall appear”), so it is with all the inclinations that we end up considering not to be. Nietzsche would have liked us very much for this. In this essay, I wish not to interfere with these thoughts and feelings, as much as to make them philosophically understandable to myself and thereby, I hope, to make them worthy of another name than the one used today.

That eerie feeling around us is a product of a more noble feeling. We are, and I mean here Albanians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Croatians, Greeks, Kosovans, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Serbians, and partly Romanians, closely attached to that thing which we call “home.” First, this is, of course, our own simple home. In many of our folktales, we are taught that our homes are sacred things, and despite dreary urbanization and vile modernist architecture, we keep them simple. Usually, it is one story with a red roof, bare white, and a cozy garden to plant our favorite trees and flowers, and most likely, a dog or many cats. Also, our gardens are a hoarding habitus. In the rural Balkans, with almost no exception, we are more likely to knit our old shoes than buy new ones: so is the case with everything else that gets old – we just might need it. Second, our “home” is personified in our land and property, which we hold as things to be worth dying for, even when there is no greater enemy than our neighbor in the next garden. And third, this feeling is the makeup of our states. We see the state as a “common home,” just as the ancient Greeks saw it with “συνοικισμóς,” which is no longer and never was a “social contract” – as much as it is “our common home.” This becomes crystal clear to that great Bulgarin writer Ivan Vazov, who in his book “Under the yoke; a romance of Bulgarian liberty” – writes about certain men in the trenches, dealing head-first with the enemy (Ottomans), who cried out “We want to be set free, (we want) to go home.”¹ But thankfully, there were other Bulgarians who were more solid, who knew that home was their state too.

Hardly any state in the Balkans (with the exception of Croatia, maybe) has had the fate to articulate this phenomenon of “home” in a good manner, and the worst thing has ensued, the “Blut und Boden Ideologie.” By this I specifically mean – the emphasis on race, blood, with the addition of history, and religion, which “strangely” enough, has been the default position of our main “left” parties. It still is. Ancient languages, the etymology of all words, great (and not so great) leaders, and buildings (even those by Native Americans) – you would be surprised to find books in our marketplaces proving to you that any of our Balkan countries (usually those of the language in which the book is written in) were the founders and builders of them.

This feeling at “home”, all in all, is a good thing if you want to conserve your inheritance (which Burke would have liked, and Næss would have seen it as a good thing in its ecological ways), but a difficulty to master and not find scapegoats when it gets violated (which we don’t have a Burke nor a Næss to tell us what to consider). And usually what we do is – the scapegoat is the country next to our border. Especially if this country bears something that hinders our home’s beliefs, but this confusion is not entirely our fault. In the West, there is almost a unison of voices that most of the political unrest in African countries is caused by what the Western Imperialism left: although we, who call the Balkans our “home,” and the people who theorize about us – have a harder time accepting that some of the responsibility (if not all of it) for the brutish Balkan Wars and most of the (inherited, paranoid) motives behind the Yugoslavian Wars, were caused by the traces of Ottoman Imperialism. This isn’t to say that the religion they left behind (which either they made us pay a blood tax or money if we didn’t want to convert) is inherently bad, nor that the wild nationalism that gave rise to the Balkan Wars and Yugoslavian Wars is justified. But the presence of these deep, religious, and paranoia-ridden motives about the well-being of our “homes” trauma was left behind largely from their doings. We are deeply scarred by this, but we go about ignoring it, and maybe this is our own Balkan way of finding that silent and lethargic comfort to just heal.

Our fallback to Marxism, in the midst of the last century – if you see it in the perspective of the relatively fluid Yugoslavia, but also in the iron teeth of Albania’s isolation, was more of a surviving mission in the world for our “home,” than an acceptance of that deeply metaphysical and personalistic Marxist historical law, as taught by the USSR. I think this is true of all want-to-be-communistic societies, but especially those that were in the Balkans, that, despite Marx’s hope, they will inevitably end up in wild nationalism (just like Albania, just like the Yugoslavian states and provinces, you name it). What is happening in such cases, I think is, first, because of the establishment of a historicist telos like communism, the necessity being brought about is that of the creation of an isolated state or a bloc of many states. This is because communism has goals with universal premises and must necessarily spread itself in the world, while the rest of the world simply refuses it, second, because the society with communistic goals creates a state that, (being in or not in a bloc), has the pride that it and it alone is doing the work of the world. That this society alone has accepted a ‘divine’ telos of a classless society and recognizes the international movement. When we add that religion, property, and freedom, even to write whatever we want, aren’t accepted in states with communistic goals – the end of those much-needed healthy means for a society to be indifferent towards any kind of universal telos falls apart: and what remains is the state (or the bloc of states), composed of a society with a historicist telos and the work of the world on its shoulders. Thus, we have the creation of a society that is more “special” than any other, more prideful than any other, more propagandistic than any other, and, in the end, more nationalistic than any other. But in the Balkans, history shows that whatever this hybrid nationalism of a society with a historicist telos is, it was not stronger than our old “homes.” The ones whom we called upon to bring down our communist-oriented states, their idol statues, or even cause havoc to one another (just like in Yugoslavia) to show again and again that we are more loyal to our own “homes,” than that bundle of communistic yoke that leads us to a universalist-inspired nationalism.

I once asked one of my philosophy professors (A. Salihu) how he got away from the Marxist indoctrination that he was educated on, and he said something that has remained with me. “I felt like an autist,” he said, telling me how he felt in his university years. “Through my visits and readings, I saw that the world doesn’t work like they were telling me that it works.” I see myself in this feeling when I look back in the history of the Balkans, and I tread the same roads and breathe the same air that those people who lived not too long ago did. I also find myself in the traces of what once made almost the whole of the Balkans a “home.” Not too far from my own home, there is a forest that was planted by common people, with the initiative of the state, in the mid-50s, and the pines are still standing: my grandfather then helped to plant it, and many of our grandfathers helped such projects too. Many folktales are loomed around that forest, many of which even I know, and as much as today it is littered by dunderheads – it still remains the rural heart of the city I live in (Gjilan), which was largely built as a center from that time. I also know about the crimes of the Yugoslavian Wars, I experienced them even in the deep traces that they left in my family members, and the war’s hellish ways are always unforgettable. But the same feeling did this – the feeling of belonging to a “home.” One was trying to build one, and the other was trying to return to one long forgotten. Hence why I find it deeply wrong, ill-intended, and more than troublesome to call our situation with the name “balkanization,” thus to step on that feeling of “home” which was noble to our forefathers and foremothers, and it is quite dear to me also.

We are not people who are instinctually pushed to have conflicts and wars: our nationalism was and is largely a flight or fight situation rooted in Ottoman imperialist trauma, pushed by that Marxist nationalism, straight to the “nationalisms” that brought it down and have created the borders that we today know and draw. Yes, sure, we do have an inability to articulate what this feeling of “home” really means, and the cold conflicts now are not to be ignored. But it is this feeling that makes us continue to live onwards and think that life is good. And as much as our epic “pagan” poems call forth this feeling, that much even our sometimes-brutal notes on social media reflect. I think this is a clearer way to think about our situation – it is by no means one of many ways – and more than for certain, we still do need time to mature out of some things. But up until then, we will just have to work towards a fiery bird that will rise from the ashes we stand upon: whether that be many fiery birds as today or a fiery bird at it used to be. Whatever the dwellers of this most intricate land chose to call their “home.” Most of us are grateful for the West-given possibility to think these things through in time of peace: but even more of us are grateful for that thing which we call “home,” the enchantment of which not only illuminist philosophies (despite what our tame philosophy and sociology professors try to fearmonger us), neither Marxist, nor the scientific present age, could shake it from us. And why this is so, I don’t know. But nonetheless, I am thankful that I have it, and I am deeply humbled and thankful that other people in the Balkans, despite everything, still feel it too. I cannot offer another name for what is happening in the Balkans, nor do I think there is a need to denote something in our example, but if you are looking for one, my whole being cries out, almost in a Rilkean way, that it is just people loving their home. That it is just our “home.”

The southwestern view of the forest planted with state initiative mid-50s, colloquially known as “The Pines” [“Pisha”]: the visible peak in the right corner is the Luboten mountain, also part of that “home” feeling – as depicted in the Albanian fairy poem of 1685 by Luke Bogdani.

Photo taken by me [05/04/2025]. The coordinates of the forest: 42°26’16.6″N 21°29’32.8″E.

Notes.

1 – Vazov, I. (1912). Under the yoke: a romance of Bulgarian liberty (trans. Gosse, E). London: William Heinemann. F – 216.