Balkan history Quotes

The Macedonian people and their kings were of Greek stock, as their traditions and the scanty remains of their language combine to testify.

I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country.

Live and let live has never been a Balkan rule…. Following five centuries of subjugation the Balkan peoples have had only half a century of freedom for experiment in nationhood,--a half-century, too, which has been distracted by the plots and counter-plots of foreign statesmen.

Let's make a deal with the Serbs. Neither history nor emotion in the Balkans will permit multinationalism. We have to give up on the illusion of the last eight years... Dayton isn't working. Nobody - except diplomats and petty officials - believes in a sovereign Bosnia and the Dayton accords.

We're not trying to recreate Yugoslavia

The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.

Yugoslavia was a kind of superpower. Great movies. Beautiful novels. Great rock-and-roll. We became a superpower in basketball. The problem is that people needed to identify more strongly with it after Tito and his awful, tricky way of leading the country.

The Serb kingdom, after varying fortunes culminating in the magnificence of Tsar Stephen Dushan, crowned in 1346 as "Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks" with territories stretching from the Danube to Thessaly and from the Adriatic well into what is today Bulgaria, went down at last before the Turkish invasion; the fatal blow was received on the Field of the Blackbirds on the 15th of June, 1389, a day remembered by the Serbs each year through five centuries as a day of mourning--now the national holiday.