Balkans travel guide

In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in a political act aiming at freeing Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian rule. Within weeks, a complicated web of alliances and treaties drew the Great Powers into war. In the aftermath, the Balkan territories were divided up into new states, among them a new country, Yugoslavia, or the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. But fault lines along kaleidoscopic ethnic, religious, economic and political grounds remained, further widened by the war.

In 1939, World War II kicked off and the Balkan states became involved reluctantly, amid tussling over them by Germany and the Soviet Union. When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia, fearing it was about to side with the Allies, the country was broken up.

After the war, the already complex Balkan map was redrawn once again by the victors – the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. Eventually, the fractious region was united (and dominated) by Communism, but actual political unity remained elusive. Ruled by Communist dictator Marshal Tito, a Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was formed comprising six republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia and Serbia (the latter including an autonomous province, Kosovo). Yugoslavia would shortly afterwards split from the Soviet Union, however, and pursue its own socialist trajectory.

Tito’s authoritarian rule papered over the cracks and held the fragile country together, but on his death in 1980, the Serbian Communist official Slobodan Miloševic began to promote Serbian nationalism in Kosovo, and shortly afterwards Croatia and Slovenia, followed by Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, declared independence. Always a tinderbox with its diverse populations and confused loyalties, not to mention minority groupings and disputed territories, the Balkan region slipped into bloody conflict. As it worsened, amid allegations of ethnic cleansing by Serb forces, the UN sent in a large body of peacekeepers.

By the mid-1990s, all that was left of Yugoslavia was Serbia, Montenegro, and parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina inhabited by Bosnian Serbs. Vicious battles continued until, in 1998, Miloševic ordered his troops into the independent province of Kosovo, leading to an outbreak of fighting that displaced hundreds of thousands of Kosovan Albanians. A NATO bombing campaign forced Miloševic to the negotiating table and troops were withdrawn from Kosovo. Miloševic was sent to The Hague for war crimes, dying before the court delivered its verdict, and by 2006 Yugoslavia was no more, all of the Republics having taken independence and gained a degree of stability.

In 2008, Kosovo seceded from Serbia. All the Balkan countries, some of them heavily scarred by war, are now either members of EU and NATO or friendly towards the organisations. Well, friendly-ish, in Turkey’s case. Throughout the Balkans’ convoluted history, domination by a succession of empires from the Ottoman to Fascist and Soviet kept age-old hatreds at bay but bubbling under the surface, with flare-ups whenever the occupiers fell. The stability that comes from membership of the European Union may prove to be of vital importance to the region’s future happiness and prosperity.

“Visitors to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Balkans should go there without prejudice in regards to the causes of the 1990s war,” says Stefan Hellmuth of our partner Intrepid Travel. “Listen to stories from different angles and from people of different ages in different regions, and stay open minded. After all, the majority of the people suffered, and no one wanted this to happen in the first place.”