50 Fun Facts About Balkans

Bulgarians call the Balkan Mountains by which name, meaning 'Old Mountain'?

Stara Planina gave the whole peninsula its name by mistake: a German geographer wrongly took it for the region's dominant mountain chain, and the label stuck.

Musala is the Balkans' highest peak, topping which Greek mountain by about eight metres?

Olympus reaches 2,917 metres, just short of Musala's 2,925. Under communism Bulgaria renamed Musala after Stalin, then gave the peak its old name back in 1962.

Which dog breed is named after a historical region on Croatia's Adriatic coast?

Dalmatian dogs take their name from Dalmatia, their first definite home. In England they won fame as coach dogs, trotting beside horse-drawn carriages.

In which language does 'balkan' mean 'chain of wooded mountains'?

Turkish. Where the word first came from is obscure, but the Ottomans used it for mountains in general, and a whole peninsula ended up named after a single range in Bulgaria.

In one myth the gods turned a boastful Thracian king into the Balkan Mountains, known in antiquity by which name?

Haemus. Another myth ties the name to the Greek word for blood: Zeus's thunderbolt made the monster Typhon bleed on the range.

Which tributary of the Danube is usually taken with it as the Balkan Peninsula's northern boundary?

The Sava. Drawn strictly, that line leaves only the part of Croatia south of the river, and the part of Serbia south of the Danube, inside the Balkans.

Which sea, home to Corfu, borders the Balkan Peninsula to the southwest?

The Ionian. Its islands, Corfu among them, spent half a century as a British protectorate until Britain gave them up in 1864.

Which Croatian city grew up inside the retirement palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian?

Split began as Diocletian's seaside retirement home. After invaders sacked nearby Salona in the 7th century, refugees moved in behind the palace walls, and the old town still fills it today.

Which name for the Balkans has gained ground since the 1990s, as 'Balkan' came to suggest war?

Southeast Europe. The wars that broke up Yugoslavia in the 1990s tied 'Balkan' to conflict, so when the EU launched a regional stability pact in 1999 it named it for South Eastern Europe.

Which Ottoman name for the empire's European lands was a 19th-century synonym for the Balkan Peninsula?

Rumelia means 'land of the Romans': the Byzantines still called themselves Romans, so the Ottomans gave that name to the European lands they took from them.

As of 2025, which EU term covers Albania and the five ex-Yugoslav states outside the union?

The Western Balkans. The label is political rather than geographic: it covers the countries of the region still waiting to join the EU, so a state leaves the 'Western Balkans' on the day it becomes a member.

Which great power took Bosnia from the Ottomans and formally annexed it in 1908?

Austria-Hungary fell apart itself ten years later, and the patchwork of small states left across the region gave English the word 'Balkanization', later applied to Africa as the colonial empires there broke up.

The cravat, forerunner of the necktie, takes its name from a French word for which Balkan people?

The Croats. Paris took up the knotted neck-scarf after seeing it on light cavalry known as Croats in the Thirty Years' War; cravate was simply French for 'Croatian'.

Which two 9th-century brothers from Thessaloniki are honoured as the 'Apostles of the Slavs'?

Cyril and Methodius. To preach to the Slavs in their own language the brothers devised the Glagolitic script; the alphabet later named after Cyril was the work of their followers.

The alphabet now used for Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian was first developed in which medieval state?

The First Bulgarian Empire. Churchmen there created the script for worship in Slavic, and it reached Kievan Rus only later, carried north along with Christianity.

Which city in European Turkey, near the Greek and Bulgarian borders, was the Ottoman capital before Constantinople?

Adrianople (Edirne). It gave the Ottomans a base on European soil for their push into the Balkans, so Byzantine Constantinople was left surrounded long before it fell in 1453.

Which Albanian national hero held off the Ottoman Empire for a quarter of a century, from 1443 to 1468?

Skanderbeg began on the other side: taken to the Ottoman court as a hostage, he rose to be one of the sultan's commanders before deserting in 1443. His double-headed eagle still flies on the national flag.

Which Balkan country rose against the Ottoman Empire in 1821 and became the first to win full independence?

Greece. The European powers stepped in on the rebels' side, and after their ships destroyed an Ottoman and Egyptian fleet at Navarino in 1827 it was declared an independent state in 1830.

Which four states formed the Balkan League that fought the Ottoman Empire in 1912?

Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro won so quickly that the Ottomans lost nearly all their European land within months, and by the summer of 1913 the victors were fighting each other over the spoils.

The Second Balkan War began in 1913 when Bulgaria attacked its former allies over which region?

Macedonia. Bulgaria felt cheated of its share and struck first at its old allies, only for Romania and the Ottomans to join in against it; within weeks it had lost much of what it had just won.

Which Bosnian Serb student assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital on 28 June 1914?

Gavrilo Princip got his chance by accident: a bomb thrown by another plotter had missed that morning, then the archduke's driver took a wrong turn and stopped a few steps from him.

Yugoslavia, the title the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes took in 1929, translates as the land of whom?

The South Slavs: 'jug' is south in Serbo-Croatian. King Alexander imposed the single name in 1929, after scrapping the constitution, to bind a kingdom that had been called after three separate nations.

Which language, carried out of Spain in 1492, did Bosnia's Sephardic Jews speak for centuries?

Ladino. When Spain expelled its Jews, the Ottoman sultan let them settle in his Balkan cities, and their descendants kept a form of medieval Spanish alive there for five centuries.

Whose failed invasion of Greece in 1940 forced Germany to send its own armies into the Balkans the following spring?

Italy. Mussolini attacked from occupied Albania in October 1940, but the Greeks threw his army back across the border, and Hitler had to come to his ally's rescue in April 1941.

Which conflict prompted the Truman Doctrine of 1947, America's pledge to help countries resist communism?

The Greek Civil War. When Britain said it could no longer afford to prop up the government against communist guerrillas, Truman asked Congress for $400 million for Greece and Turkey.

Which grouping did communist Yugoslavia help found with India and Egypt after breaking with the Soviet Union?

The Non-Aligned Movement was built to keep its members out of the Cold War, yet it outlived both that contest and Yugoslavia itself, and counted some 120 states in the early 21st century.

Which communist Balkan country outlawed religion in 1967 and proclaimed itself the world's first atheist state?

Albania. Enver Hoxha closed its churches and mosques, and quarrelled in turn with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and China, until the country was sealed off from almost everyone.

Who held Yugoslavia's six republics together until his 1980 death?

Josip Broz Tito ruled as president for life, balancing the six republics against one another. Eleven years after his death in May 1980 the federation began to break apart in war.

Which capital endured the longest siege of a capital in modern warfare, almost four years from 1992?

Sarajevo. Only eight years before the shelling began, the city had welcomed the world as host of the 1984 Winter Olympics.

Which former Yugoslav republic was the first to join the European Union, in 2004?

Slovenia broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991 after a war that lasted only ten days, and thirteen years later became the first piece of the old federation inside the EU.

Milos Obilic, Tsar Lazar and Karadjordje are folk heroes of which Balkan people?

The Serbs. Prince Lazar died fighting the Ottomans in 1389, Obilić is said to have killed the sultan in the same battle, and Karađorđe led the 1804 uprising that began to drive them out.

The 2018 Prespa Agreement between two Balkan neighbours settled a long-running dispute over what?

One country's name. Athens objected to its neighbour being called Macedonia, which is also what a province of its own is called; once the smaller state took the name North Macedonia in 2019, its way into NATO was clear.

Which territory declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008?

Kosovo. Serbia still counts it as a province of its own, yet in 2010 the International Court of Justice found that the declaration had not broken international law.

Which 1995 peace deal gave Bosnia and Herzegovina its three-member presidency?

The Dayton Agreement takes its name from Dayton, Ohio: the Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian presidents were kept at an American air base there for three weeks until they had a deal.

Bulgaria's Kazanlak valley, just south of the Balkan Mountains, is famous for producing which costly perfume ingredient?

Rose oil. The petals are picked by hand and hold so little oil that it takes thousands of kilos of them to make a single kilo, which is why it is one of the dearest ingredients in perfume.

Which ancient lake shared by North Macedonia and Albania is home to hundreds of species found nowhere else?

Ohrid is one of the oldest lakes in Europe. It has been cut off for more than a million years, long enough for its own fish, snails and sponges to evolve.

Which walled Adriatic city, formerly the Republic of Ragusa, ruled itself from the 14th to the 19th century?

Dubrovnik. The little republic kept its freedom for four and a half centuries until Napoleon's troops marched in and abolished it in 1808; its walls later played King's Landing in Game of Thrones.

The Ottoman-era Old Bridge destroyed by shelling in 1993 and rebuilt in 2004 stands in which city?

Mostar. Bosnian Croat guns brought the 16th-century bridge down in November 1993; its single arch was rebuilt in local stone, with divers raising blocks of the original from the river below.

The Bay of Kotor, with its medieval towns of Kotor and Perast, is an Adriatic inlet in which country?

Montenegro. The country's very name is Venetian for 'black mountain', a translation of the Slavic one, and a trace of the centuries from 1420 to 1797 when Venice ruled Kotor.

Which Croatian national park is famous for its cascade of sixteen tufa lakes and waterfalls?

Plitvice. The lakes are still building themselves: mosses, algae and bacteria turn limestone dissolved in the water into tufa, and the barriers they raise dam one lake above the next.

Which monastery, founded by the hermit Saint Ivan in the 10th century, is Bulgaria's largest and most famous?

Rila. Fire destroyed the monastery in 1833, and Bulgarians from all over the country paid to rebuild it over the next three decades, which made it a symbol of their national revival.

Which Greek rock formation in Thessaly hosts Orthodox monasteries built atop giant natural stone pillars?

Meteora. For centuries the only way up was by removable ladders or in a net hauled up on ropes; steps were not cut into the rock until the 1920s.

Which Balkan relish is made each autumn by roasting and peeling red peppers, often with eggplant?

Ajvar. Families roast the peppers outdoors in bulk each autumn so that there are jars to last the winter, and the relish spread across Yugoslavia after World War II.

What is rakia?

Usually 40 percent alcohol but far stronger when home-made, it is most often distilled from plums (sljivovica) or grapes.

An earthquake in 1963 left about 80 percent of which present-day Balkan capital in ruins?

Skopje. Help arrived from both sides of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union alike, and the city centre was replanned by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange.

Mother Teresa, born to an Albanian family in the Balkans, left home at 18 to join nuns based in which country?

Ireland. She joined the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin, who soon sent her on to India, where she spent the rest of her life.

Nikola Tesla, an ethnic Serb, was born in 1856 in Smiljan, a village now in which country?

Croatia. Tesla sailed for New York in 1884 and went to work for Thomas Edison, only to leave within months and become the champion of the rival alternating-current system.

Tennis champion Novak Djokovic was born in 1987 in which Balkan capital?

Belgrade. He took up tennis at four and rose through the junior ranks while Serbia lived through the wars and sanctions of the 1990s; by 2023 he had won 24 Grand Slam singles titles, more than any man before him.

The Danube is Europe's second-longest river, after which?

The Volga runs its whole course inside Russia, while the shorter Danube passes through or along ten countries on its way from Germany's Black Forest to the Black Sea.

The Iron Gates gorge on the Danube lies on the border between Serbia and which country?

Romania. When it and Yugoslavia dammed the gorge for hydropower, the rising water drowned Ada Kaleh, a river island that had been home to a Turkish community for centuries.