Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

While Balkan Ghosts certainly provides a lot of factual information for the reader, it ultimately fails to offer a creative assessment of the region, its troubles, and its future. One can learn much of the more macabre aspects of Balkan history by reading Kaplan's book, but not a real understanding of the "whys" behind the grisly detail. For example, while Kaplan often describes religious sites, personalities and historical events, he fails to analyze the critical role that religious faith, and denomination (in some cases), has played in the formation of national cultures and identity in the Balkans, and the impact that this has on the current crisis. Because if this, the book becomes a reportage that treats religion as ethnicity without examining how or why this is the case, and why this situation perseveres to this day. The book is definitely tainted by its perspective of a cynical Western outsider, without an insider's view of the Balkan societies, and what makes them tick. The result is a curious melange of Western triumphalism, cynicism and pessimism. Undoubtedly, despite its flaws, the book is an entertaining and enjoyable read, and it does provide a lot of information for those who are new to the region. A more penetrating, and less superficial, analysis would have been more satisfying, however, in light of the almost daily coverage of events in the Balkans on the evening news.

While Balkan Ghosts provides the uninformed reader some fairly good background information, it is badly flawed by the author's biases, particularly against the Turks and to a lesser degree against Communists of all stripes. Far from trying to conceal his antangonisms, he practically wears them as a badge of honor. Entire cultures seem to be judged good or bad in his book depending on where they fall on a scale of "Western values".
Another thing I found annoying about this work was Kaplan's adulation of (not to mention borrowing heavily from) "Dame" Rebecca West's earlier writings on the Balkans. To the extent that both of these books are essentially travelogues, this is appropriate: but insofar as Kaplan attempts political, historical and cultural analysis of this region (as any writer on this subject must inevitably do), his over-reliance on West's writings largely doom that effort.
I would only recommend this book to someone with little of no knowledge of the Balkans, but I would advise them to take it with a large grain of salt and to be aware of the writer's ideological animus.

Well, well, well. Predicting the future is a mug's game. A mere 10 years ago, when Robert Kaplan produced 'Balkan Ghosts,' he thought the Balkans would continue to be the seedbed of international conflict, as it was in the 20th century.

Conditions there have hardly improved in the past decade, but we've since found something else to occupy our minds.

What Kaplan failed to understand was that no one -- not just Bismarck, who was impolite enough to say so out loud -- cared about what happened to the people who lived in the Balkans. It seemed to be the 'cockpit of Europe,' because six empires that were hesitant to confront one another directly (Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, French, British) could jockey for advantage in the Balkans. How stupid. The advantages that might theoretically have been won were not worth much, and the cost of not getting them (the usual state of affairs) was very high.

Most of those empires no longer exist. Great powers still jockey and use proxies to seek advantage, but the Balkans are no longer convenient.

From here on out, the factions there will have to struggle on their own.

Kaplan makes it clear that they will do so. A graceful writer, he spent enough time in the various countries to know something about them. He mildly calls his book a travelogue, but it lacks most of the defects of that genre.

I found 'Balkan Ghosts' amusing as far as it went -- but it was surprising how short a distance it went in many instances. The concentration on Rumania was, I suppose, an artifact of Kaplan's interest -- when reporting in the late '80s -- in the only former Soviet satellite that broke away with a lot of bloodshed.

He admits he had spent much less time in what was then Yugoslavia, but from his book you would think that the history of the Croats as the murderous enforcers for the Roman church began in 1941. The actual history has a depth of centuries.

Two other things leapt out at me from the pages of 'Balkan Gnosts.' Although practically everyone he came in contact with was perpetually soused in slivovitz, nowhere in his sometimes rhapsodic descriptions of the countryside does he mention plum orchards.

For a man doing a political travelogue in a region that in the 1980s began generating genuine popular political parties for the first time in 1,600 years, it is strange that he never interviewed a leader of any of these parties. He interviewed people who commented on the leaders, but not the leaders themselves.

Though the problems of the Balkans seem less urgent to outsiders than they may have in the late 1990s, 'Balkan Ghosts' is not fatally dated as a book. The history, the monasteries did not change.

But do not be deluded that Kaplan has provided 'an introduction to the Balkans.' There are far too many areas he never touches for it to be that. To list just one (but a big one): There is not a single word about pan-Slavism. The reason is obvious: Kaplan is certain that particularism will triumph over assimilation every time in the Balkans. He may be right. But there has been that countercurrent of assimilationism present all along.

'Balkan Ghosts' is an impressionistic tour de force of the Balkan. It doesn't come near Rebecca West's masterpiece 'Black Lamb and Gray Falcon' - but it is a travelogue in the same tradition. The author, who is acquainted with certain parts of the Balkan, crosses these tortured lands just prior to the Yugoslav wars of secession. His prognoses are accurate, his depiction of ancient ethnic enmities sweeping, his pessimism justified in hindsight. But too many important aspects are neglected or papered over. The responsibility of the West, the interplay of big powers, the ineptitude of international organizations, the forces of democracy and ethnic reconciliation in the region, religious co-existence and much more besides. Though one sided and biased, it is a must read - if only to understand what influenced the American administration of Bill Clinton in the formulation of its Balkan policies. Sam Vaknin, author of 'After the Rain - How the West Lost the East'.

This is an unforgettable book. It is a strictly personal testimony of one of the most troubled parts of the world, in all human history. Kaplan is not just a journalist, nor a historian, nor a political analist. He is an extremely well-read man, informed about the place he is travelling around (something you can not say about most journalists). Do not expect to find utmost objectivity here. Kaplan does not pretend to be objective, just fair. What is the key to his success? It is this: his readings, the fact that he establishes personal bonds with people who give him insights and, most of all, his intelligence. Kaplan is never sentimental, but he is sympathetic and really tries to understand what goes on. Of course, he filters facts through his Western background. It is the honest thing to do. If you read this, you will gain a lot of ground in understanding the uncomprehensible things that happen, even today as I write, in that crucial corner of the world. Kaplan warned the world about what was going to happen there. It did. And now, all we have is this excellent account of what the Balkans are, why, and how. Kaplan follows the path traced by other writers in his genre, like Ryszard Kapuscinski and Rebecca West herself. We need more of these witnesses to history, even if we do not agree with them all the time.

During the 1990s the Balkans again were center stage. We learned about Slobodan Milosevic, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, Croatia's unsavory past with the Ustashe, Radovan Karadzic, besieged Sarajevo, the Dayton Accords, and a host of other bewildering events, personalities, and locations.
Why did the Balkans explode again? Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History (1993) offers a sensitive and sympathetic, but nonetheless chilling look at Balkan history. Despite the recent collapse of the Soviet Union, the Balkans, a geographically complex mix of religious and ethnic groups, were still largely quiet in 1993 when Kaplan published his unsettling prognosis.
Kaplan has been widely acclaimed for this portrayal of the modern Balkans and he is recognized for his influence on American foreign policy. His writing is superb, possibly giving an undue weight and significance to Kaplan's historical and political analysis.
But, others argue that Kaplan - with his inherent Western bias - cannot understand and appreciate the Balkans. Others blame the rivalry of great powers - the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Hitler's Germany, Czarist Russia, the Soviet empire, and American imperialism. Leave us alone and we will resolve our issues ourselves.
Having read Balkan Ghosts, I am not surprised by these disparate reviews. Seemingly everyone views the Balkans through flawed lenses, all distorted by a long history of religious and ethnic warfare, acts of great cruelty, shifting alliances and borders, and continual oppression. Reading Balkan Ghosts, I wondered whether the tenacious grip of history will ever be broken.
Kaplan is certainly provocative. He argues that the Balkans are only comprehensible in terms of the past. Everyone everywhere thrusts maps forward, depicting larger boundaries, reflecting past glories. For each ethnic group, history begins at the zenith of past glories, the maximum territorial extent.
He claims that modern terrorism began in the Balkans. Radical clergy has its birthplace here also. Classical Greece so prevalent in Western thought is mythology; it ceased to exist during the past 1500 years. Greece today is as much a part of the Balkans as is Bulgaria and Romania.
As we travel with Kaplan across Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he looks for meaningful patterns underlying the complex mosaic of historical forces. He incorporates intriguing analysis and comments of earlier travelers, notably from Dame Rebecca West's travels immediately before WWI, from Walter Starkie's travels with Gypsies through Hungary and Romania in 1929, and from commentary by various journalists spanning the last century.
I was captivated by Balkan Ghosts and it is hard imagine a more riveting introduction to the Balkans. I am compelled to read more and I hope to become familiar with writings by Balkan authors. I highly recommend Robert Kaplan's remarkable work.

In Balkan Ghosts, Robert Kaplan provided a glimpse of modern Balkan life focusing principally on political, social and economic matters, with bits of religion appearing as it affected the other categories. Kaplan openly admired the works of earlier journalists who had featured prominently in making the Balkans known to Westerners. He particularly respected Rebecca West and John Reed and readily acknowledged their influence on his career and his book.

Kaplan, who spent many years in the Balkans as a journalist, recounted his experiences in order to make some sense of a part of the world that has fre-quently been misunderstood among the Western nations. He divided his work into four main sections: Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Building on that framework, Kaplan related anecdotes and observations based on his experi-ences in the respective areas. Balkan Ghosts is not a single "Grand Tour‿ but rather a composite of many visits over the 1980s and 1990s. Occasionally he explicitly referred to specific multiple visits to illustrate the change, or lack thereof, over time.

Kaplan revealed a gritty and raw culture. He indicated that he intentionally sought to blend in with the locals, as far as it was possible. He sought to avoid a scrubbed and sanitized picture that the local chamber of commerce or the na-tional tourist bureau might want to convey; instead, he tried to discover how eve-ryday people lived and what they thought and felt.

He peppered his narration of his personal experiences with bits of history in order to set the stage for current events. Kaplan displayed a discerning politi-cal acumen in his summations of the local affairs. His explanation of Croatian Catholicism, its tangled history and the intensity of the Croats' feelings about Archbishop Stepanic leave the reader less bewildered by how any sane people could act as they have. Similarly, his stories of the encounters with the Romani-ans and Moldovans helped explain how people could be caught up with intense nationalism and anti-Semitism.

The author stressed that Balkan culture is Eastern. He quoted Panayote Dimitras as saying, "Greeks are married to the East. The West is our mistress only. Like any mistress, the West excites and fascinates us, but our relationship with it is episodic and superficial.‿ Although the remark was aimed specifically at the Greeks, the attitude seems indicative of Kaplan's Balkan views in general.

Moreover, Kaplan's pages fairly drip with tales of vengeance and festering resentment - vengeance against Gypsies, against Jews, against Turks, against Croatians by Serbs, against Serbs by Croatians, resentment of Serbian domi-nance, resentment of Macedonian independence, and resentment of Bosnian Muslims. These feelings are not the good-natured rivalry where participants feign passionate opinions; rather, these emotions pervade the cultures and color trade, politics and religion. Indeed, a large contributing factor to these various hatreds is the conflict between religions, especially Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Islam, though Judaism and Protestantism each play an occa-sional role as well. When discussing territorial reassignment after one or the other of the many wars, Kaplan pointed out that each nation insisted on the par-ticular historical mapping of its national boundaries when they enjoyed their largest expanse, regardless of how tenuous the justification to support such a posi-tion. In a similar vein, in the many and various ongoing conflicts, emotion rather than reason characterize the discourse. Since these conflicts frequently trace their origins to some form of religious controversy, it is not surprising that emotion calls the tune and calm reflection and level-headedness are secondary.

Kaplan left the reader with the idea that a true and lasting peace does not loom imminently on the Balkan horizon. He suggested that the untangling of complicated threads of resentment must first be addressed; he indicated that the mere imposition of order from outside powers will not suffice in an area where memories of past injustices linger for centuries, passed through the generations.

Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts is more than a travel book for most of his experiences in the Balkan's were far from tourism. Rather, like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, his book explores time and place with the precision of an anthropologist.

Kaplan points out that this area of the world seems to have a talent for starting wars and once was called `ethnic trash' by Karl Marx. Serbia is the area where Habsburg Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated, an event that sparked World War I. From here come the 20th century's first terrorists. Kaplan points out that the Balkans are not just the area where Communism meets capitalism. It is also the place where Roman Catholic meets Eastern Orthodox, where Christian meets Islam, where Rome meets Constantinople, where Habsburg Austria-Hungarian empire meets the Ottoman empire. Kaplan identifies the principal illness of Balkans which he sees as conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that its borders expand to the point at which their empire reached its heights in ancient or medieval times.

Croatia's unique history is explored, its alliance with Hapsburg Austria, and its history of conflict between Catholic and Orthodox Serbs. A fascinating part of the book is the rise of Croatia as a small nation only to become a puppet of the German Nazis. During this time murders against both Orthodox Serbs and Jews occurred. The figure of Catholic Cardinal Stepinac remains controversial to this day, for he appeared to support the fascist nationalists until their murder of Jews and Orthodox Serbs reached terrible proportions. He chastised the fascist around the fall of Nazism in World War II but was later tried as a war criminal by the communist Tito. Tensions remain to this day between Catholic Croatia and the mixed ethnic state of Bosnia where Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims all live in suspicion of each other.

Kaplan repeatedly praises the work of Dame Rebecca West in her Black Lamb Grey Falcon. West indicates that the Turks ruined the Balkans so greatly that it has never been repaired.

Albanians descended from Illyrian tribes and their language bears no similarity to other languages. Kosovo has gone back and forth between Serbian and Albanian control. Enver Hoxha was a young Communist freedom fighter against the Nazis. At the end of World War II, Albania had lost more than 7% of their population.

Macedonia is a mix of ethnic groups. Turks, Albanians, Serbs, Rumanians, Greeks, and Bulgarians live there side by side since the days of St. Paul. Czar Alexander II's war to liberate Bulgaria from Turkey in 1877 was the first spark of modern Great Power conflict. Russians occupied the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and dictated to the defeated Turks the Treaty of San Stefano. The union of Macedonia and Bulgaria created a pro-Russian state. Germany's Bismarck set out to revise the Treaty in the Congress of Berlin. Macedonia was returned to Turkish rule upon pressure by Germany and Great Britain on the Russians. To balance the powers, Turkey got Macedonia, Austria got Bosnia, an arrangement leading to World War I. The Russian forces in Bulgaria drove the Muslims into Macedonia whereas the Austrian advance into Bosnia also drove the Muslims south into Macedonia, where the enraged Turks began terrorizing the Orthodox Christians. The relationship between Bulgaria and Macedonia has been one where Bulgaria wishes to incorporate Macedonia within their borders but has always been on the losing side of world conflicts, never allowing for integration.

Apart from forcing Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid to accept a liberal constitution, the "Young Turks" led by Pasha had no well-defined program. As with Gorbachev, Pasha and the Young Turks were determined to conserve in a loser more liberal form the Empire, which they perceived as threatened primarily by a reactionary Sultanate and near total resistance to change. The Ottoman Empire's disintegration enraged fundamentalists Muslims within Turkey. The increasingly authoritarian Young Turk regime culminated in the 1915 mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians, the century's first holocaust. This genocide was perpetrated because the Armenians demographically threatened the Muslim Turks.

Romania's language is Latinate, closer to ancient Roman. Roman legions conquered this territory in 101 AD. Romanians are closer in appearance to the Latins than to Slavs. In 325 AD Roman Christianity was brought to Romania. However invasion by Bulgarians brought in the Eastern Orthodox religion. Geographically Romania lies vulnerable between the Ukrainians and Russians and Turks. For the 14th century onward the Turks kept Romania in fear. There were uprisings against the Turks, for example Vlad the Impaler (the historical "Dracula") was a rebel against Turkish rule. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Russians invaded over a dozen times. In the 1860's the Romanians elected Karl Hohenzollern as their king. Carol I abdicated to his nephew Ferdinand, who married Princess Marie of Edinburgh, granddaughter to Queen Victoria. Queen Marie was a force behind the throne during World War I and died before her son Carol II caused havoc.

King Carol II is a colorful character, having deserted from the army, eloped with a Romanian aristocrat, then was forced to abdicate since Romanian law requires him to marry a foreigner. He marries Princess Helen of Greece and deserts her for Lupescu, his Jewish mistress. He abdicates a second time rather than return to his wife and leave his mistress. He extorted funds from casinos and deposited $50 million in foreign banks. He declared dictatorship. He supported the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael until they turned against him because of his Jewish mistress. Hitler also told Carol that he preferred to have Codreanu as dictator of Romania rather than Carol. Carol had Codreanu and the legion leaders killed which angered Hitler. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu formed the Legion around secret nests of 13 men who drank each other's blood and vowing to commit murder if ordered. Carol formed his own Nazi party and repressed his countries 800,000 Jews. Stalin demanded Bessarabia and Hitler demanded Transylvania. Carol tired to play a double game and lost. He left Romania in 1940 in a train full of gold bound for Mexico. His 18 year old son, Michael became king. The Legion struck back, primarily at Romania's Jewish population, killing thousands. Hitler wished to obtain Romania's oil reserves. In 1947 King Michael also abandoned Romania in a train full of treasures as his father had done.

The fall of King Carol II Hohenzollern and the rise of reactionary forces in 1941 in Romania are a frightening tale. The rise of the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael, a terrorist group that committed murder against the Jews in their country, is a terrible story and helps us realize the degree of anti-Semitism throughout Eastern Europe.

Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania for a quarter-century until the army executed him. Ceausescu outlawed abortion and birth control so that the Romanians could outbreed the Hungarians. However poverty and semi-starvation increased infant mortality rates. Badly urbanized peasants worked in factories and lived in dorms where only alcohol and propaganda were readily available. Romania was allowed to fall under Stalin's domain at the peace discussions at Yalta.

In World War II, the Romanians were on the side of the Nazis while the Jews in Romania supported the Russians. The Romanian army killed 4,000 Jews in Jassy and then the army evacuated another 12,000 that dies of thirst and asphyxiation in railroad cars. Then in 1941 and 192 15,000 Jews were deported from Moldavia into Romanian run concentration camps. In 1944 when the Russians invaded Romania, the Romanians switched sides and began fighting the Nazis. The Romanians have always fallen between three empires, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, and Russia.

The Bulgars were a Tartar tribe. In the medieval period, Bulgaria was among the powerful kingdoms in Europe. Kings carved out empire from Albania to the Black Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains to the Aegean. In 865 Bulgaria became the first of the Slav peoples to embrace Orthodox Christianity. Byzantine Emperor Basil defeated King Samuel and had 14,000 prisoners blinded - the most horrific moment in Bulgarian history. Bulgaria then endured 500 years of Ottoman occupation. Turkish rule was bloodier in Bulgaria than anywhere else. In 1876 Turks encouraged band of Bulgarians converted to Islam to hack to death 5,000 Orthodox Christians. A Russian army swept through Bulgaria in 1877 liberating Bulgaria from Ottoman rule.

Kaplan argues that Greece must be understood through the eyes of the Balkans rather than through a Hollywood lens. He tells of Salonika - Thessaloniki in Greek -a community of Spanish Jews. In 53 AD St. Paul preached from the Synagogue. Jews from Hungary and German arrived in 1373. Following the conquest of Salonika by the Ottoman Turks, 20,000 Spanish Jews received permission to move there in 1492. By 1913 half the population of the city was Jews. The Nazis captured the city in 1941 and in five months had sent almost all the Jews to concentration camps. Of all the cities in Nazi-occupied Europe, Salonika ranked first in the number of Jewish victims: out of a population of 56,000, 54,0505 - 96.5%- were exterminated at Auschwitz.

The Greek Church was the mother of all Eastern Orthodox churches, which are treasure houses of their culture that survived the Ottoman rule. Hagia Sophia built in the sixth century AD by Emperor Justinian became the prototype for all Orthodox cathedrals, for St. Marks in Venice, and for mosques throughout Turkey. Byzantium, an empire created in AD 324, as the successor of Rome, and destroyed 1,100 years later by Ottoman Turks in 1453. During these eleven centuries, the Byzantine Empire was a Greek empire. Ottoman Turks ejected the Byzantine Greeks from Constantinople in the fifteenth century but large Greek communities survived in Istanbul and along the western shore of Asia Minor - particularly Smyrna. In 1921 the Greek army advanced into Asia Minor beyond the Greek occupied coastal areas. In 1922 Kemal Ataturk, in the midst of developing a new Turkish republic, drove the Greek army back. Greek dead numbered 30,000. Then 400,000 Turks from Greek Thrace moved into Turkey and 1,250,000 Greeks from Asia Minor went into exile in Greece, increasing the population by 20%. Refuges tripled the size of Athens. The Nazi invasion left 8% of the population dead, followed by the Greek Civil War which saw more destruction than the war against the Nazis.

Constantinople is a Greek word for a historically Greek city. The Cyrillic alphabet, used in Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, and Russia, emerged from the Greek alphabet when two monks, Cyril and Methodius, left Salonika in the ninth century AD to proselytize among the Slavs. The ultimate achievement of Periclean Athens was to breathe humanism - compassion for the individual - into the inhumanity of the East. Classical Greece of the First Millennium BC invented the West by humanizing the East.
This well written book taught me much about the Balkans and gave me an appreciation for these boiling nationalistic forces that run against each other century after century.

Kaplan has not composed this work in order to reveal his own biases. He has written a book which attempts to explain the origins of certain stereotypes. Any book about Balkan history and culture would be severely incomplete and inaccurate if it attempted to be politically correct by avoiding description of the dominating economic, cultural, and political rivalries. Kaplan's book is essential because it attempts to explain the mind of the irrational nationalist. Kaplan WANTS to bring the banality of ethnic nationalism to the reader. He insists on stereotypes because, in many cases, they're valid. Ask yourself this question: Does the average Serb or Croat contemplate the subtle political ramifications of his/her ethnic affiliation as a university scholar probably would? No. He is much more likely to wave the flag ang grab a rifle. Kaplan explains why this is so.

The problems in the Balkans, former Yugoslavia, has dominated the news since the mid-1990's. Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, the issues are complex and there are many players. It is not an easy issue to figure out.
In 1989, Kaplan visited many of the regions in the Balkans and simply talked to people from different ethnic groups, areas, and religions. The result is a informative, easy to read, history of the region and its conflicts that was way ahead of its time.
In Reading Balkan Ghosts, you see first hand how the various groups in the region feel about each other. YOu see first hand how old hatred, very old hatred in some cases is the root cause of todays problems. Grudges going back to the days of the Ottoman Empire are still held. If you want to learn why there are problems in the Balkans, what these problems are than read this book.
Kaplan is a great author. All his books are great reads, and unfortunately too true. Kaplan predicted what happened in the former Yugoslavia and his other books warn of the coming global anarchy from places like the Balkans, Africa etc.
I highly recommend this book.

I picked up this book because it has received good reviews. All I wanted was to get an objective and balanced third party opinion about situation on the Balkans. Well, the experience was exactly the opposite. I rarely hate books, but tell you the truth this was the one... I started hating the book from the second page where a nice panegyric to Mr. Kaplan is placed below his own smirking portrait. Apparently he was the first American author, I read, warning the world about upcoming Balkan catastrophe. Yeah, right...
I continued to hate it through the foreword where Mr. Kaplan pointed out to me that he was and still is a supporter of the USA sending combat troops to the former Yugoslavia to pacify the region. Here I was presented with a military solution to the Balkan problems on the page two of the Foreword... This is even before I heard anything whatsoever about what was wrong with the Balkans. I wanted to throw the book through the window many times since I soon realized that Mr. Kaplan wasn't objective and the balanced picture was not his goal. He obviously not only had a love affair with himself but also had an axe to grind. Boy, was I right!
Lacking history training, he constantly repeats old Western stereotypes. He is using the data taken from the dubious sources. Sometimes it feels like a daily tabloid type of read. This helps to create caricatures, not balances portraits of peoples and nations. He knows some facts, but his knowledge is superficial and mostly sensation-oriented. Usually the less is the knowledge the higher is moral ground taken by the critic. Mr. Kaplan delivers his opinions from the high moral ground.
No one spared, but the groups outside of the "Big Three" of the American religions - Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism are suffering the most form the patronizing attitude of the author. Particularly scornful he is towards Muslim Turks and Orthodox Romanians and Serbs. There is no drama. Mr. Kaplan doesn't suffer with his characters and he doesn't change with them. He finishes the book with the same tone and attitude as he starts it. Intellectualism and sarcasm without much compassion - this is a bottom line of this book.
The one thing is certain - you will learn some curios (mostly morbid) facts about the past of the Balkan nations. However, I doubt it will be a good guide for understanding the past or predicting the future of this troubled region. After all, the book is only a travelogue, which tells us more about Mr. Kaplan's state of mind rather than the nations he describes. But, hey, lets be fair to poor author, at least the author kept some humility if his picture is only on the second page of the book. He could have insisted to put it on the front cover like some other self-loving types. In short, don't waist your time, unless you enjoy sensation of pile of dirt thrown on your head from above.

Kaplan's book is thought-provoking and makes a good read for entertainment purposes. However, anyone hoping to gain an understanding of history in the Balkans should go elsewhere. I have worked in extensively in Croatia and traveled throughout the region, and Kaplan repeats a lot of ignorance. Many times, he avoids basic scholarship and recounts legends of historical events. His method of investigating locales provides texture but not accuracy. It would be as if a foreign journalist traveled through America, relied on old travel guides for reference, and interviewed people at the local diner about the Civil War and wrote their versions of events as an accurate portrayal of the US.

This is a wonderful book. It describes the author's journey through Eastern Europe, the people he met, the historic sites he visited and what the sites mean. Some disgruntled reviewers here complain that the author is biased and gives a silly account of history. This is not a history book. Mr. Kaplan is a journalist and a very good one too. He tells the reader WHAT HE SAW and how it looked like. Being from Eastern Europe myself, I find his descriptions of places and certain characters very accurate. So I trust him on the part that I knew little about. Mr. Kaplan's statements didn't seem biased to me at all. In fact, I can relate to most of his feelings. The critics should at least acknowledge Mr. Kaplan's personal contribution to this work. He hitched through a very un-Western area, alone trying to talk to people and absorb what he saw. What was there about his condescending bias?...

I'm pleased that so many people take exception to this book. Good journalism is always biased: a writer is not an automaton, but a real person who brings his own belief system to the work at hand.
Not surprisingly, this annoys a lot of people. Tough. The journalist has as much right to his opinion as the reviewer has to his. Let's face it: we're all biased. We all think 'unbiased' means 'the writer sees things exactly as I do'.
We also all tend to conveniently ignore facts which don't fit in our view of things. The Serb ignores reports of Kosovar women nailed to barn walls and gang-raped to death; the Kosovar ignores reports of entire Serb villages massacred and plowed under. Extreme examples, but on a smaller scale we are *all like that*.
The point is, condemning a reporter for being biased is the pot calling the kettle black. If we weren't biased, we wouldn't write reviews.

Kaplan writes with the finely-honed skill of the very best journalism can offer. His talent for description and story-telling can not be questioned. He is clearly a scholar willing to dig for more. A writer can only give perceptions. I believe history is as Mark Twain called it, Fluid Prejudice. History as told, as studied, has the limitation of being from a singular viewpoint. This author has done his homework and braved the terrain to give the reader his own first-hand account. He has told his story with a compelling alacrity and grace, in spite of the tragedy and horror and complexity which is woven throughout this attempt to illuminate the history of the people of the Balkans. I am recommending it to everyone I know. Bravo, Mr. Kaplan.

Kaplan weaves a masterful mix of travelogue, history and sociopolitical insight into a book about his journey through the Balkans, before Kosovo became headlines. He traveled throughout the region during the 80's and wrote stories of his adventures along the way. He uses the word idiosyncratic to describe his writing, given that his style mirrors past journalists/travelers who sought to understand the root causes of social and political behavior through the lens of history. Thus, expect a solid accounting of historical narrative for each country, coupled with a mix of contemporary thought largely begotten through his conversations with local politicians, journalists, and travelers.
Criticisms:
1) His approach is fairly egotistical since he believes that few Western reporters actually capture the complexity of the region, and none, except a rare few (of which he is one), ever understand the people or their real motivations. Although his assessment of Western reporters may have elements of truth, he seems to make the point numerous times throughout the book as if to create his own air of superiority.
2) Kaplan's assessment of Greece seems to carry the most weight since he lived there for seven years, whereas he sometimes only spends days in other regions. Nevertheless, he feels obliged to draw the same broad generalizations from those areas where he spoke to relatively few people, as he does from places where he met many people and spent much time. His underlying assumption throughout the book is that only a thorough understanding of history can engender a comprehension for the present state of affairs. Thus, in the countries he frequented little, he feels a fair amount of research in history allows him to make the same prognostications as he makes in areas where he has gotten to know many people.
Barring the above critiques, I enjoyed the book and found myself coming back to it until complete. He complements a firm grip of historical facts with a wonderful ability to depict people and places through metaphor and descriptive writing. Here is an example, "Greeks are married to the East. The West is our mistress only. Like any mistress, the West excites and fascinates us, but our relationship with it is episodic and superficial." His ability to characterize relationships, people and places with words is refreshing. I will definitely read more Kaplan.

This is an interesting book, for many for reasons, chief among them ... it was researched just before Slovenia broke off from Yugoslavia, setting off the events that came to dominate the 1990s. Contrary to the billing, this is not a travel book (although it could pass for one): This is a book and the foolishness of misplaced priorities and the danger of modern ethnic divisions.
If the book had been written later, Kaplan would surely have focused more heavily on Serbia and Bosnia. In this book, however, the most ink goes to Greece. I would like Kaplan to write an entire book on the subject...

This was Kaplan's, (the author of the award winning and rather incredible book The Coming Anarchy), first book. It is both a literal and a conceptual travelogue through the history of the Balkans. With the skill of an historian, and the flair and intimacy of a seasoned journalist, Kaplan captures the "chosen-ness" of the disparate "chosen histories" that have exorcised an entire region for the last seven hundred years.

In doing so, he brings vividly to life the psychodynamic theories of the brilliant Volmik D. Volkan, in his "The Pschodynamics of International Relationships." In that book Volkan, et.al., made clear that culture is nothing, if not "living collective tribal memory." The memory of the tribe is reconstructed in the present as "chosen injuries," "chosen traumas," and "chosen histories."

This book is about the "chosen histories" of all the different sides who are at "right angles" to each other in the Balkan region. Kaplan takes us on a guided, but structured tour, region-by-region, devoting a chapter to each country -- to its history, its art, its architecture, its collective dreams and hopes -- sharing intimate conversations with ordinary as well as important people on all of the various sides of past conflicts.

Altogether, this makes for a rich, layered and densely packed narrative that has the feel of walking into the same "time warp" as his subjects in their respective narrative re-creations. As Volkan predicted in both the book cited above and in his even more brilliant book "The Third Reich in Consciousness," that "chosen traumas," and "chosen insults" would be repeatedly "relived," as if they happened just yesterday: The collective nerve endings and emotions of the people remain "raw," even across generations.

In terms of volatility, the socioeconomic and political grid of multiple ethnicities, religions, races, and cross-generations grievances, the Balkans remains without a rival, as subsequent events were to prove most devastatingly.

Although it is not as theoretically sweeping or as gritty as "The Coming Anarchy," this was a deeply thoughtful and timely book, coming out just before the region exploded into the very chaos that Kaplan had so presciently predicted. It certainly put Kaplan on the map, as well it should have. Five Stars.

In this book Robert Kaplan describes his travels in the 1980s and early 90s throughout the Balkan region, and with his insights into the area's politics and ethnic struggles, he correctly predicted the coming catastrophe that would engulf the area. Kaplan was one of the few western journalists who knew anything about the Balkans at the time, and nobody seemed to be very interested in this European backwater. Thus, the world was surprised by the orgy of war crimes and ethnic cleansing that erupted here in the 90s, but Kaplan wasn't. In the more recent introduction to the current edition, Kaplan gets rather big-headed talking about how his timely predictions came true, but not without justification, as his gifts for insight and observation gave him the prescience that nobody else had or wanted about this region.
While most travel writers stick to colorful (and western-oriented) descriptions of people and places, Kaplan instead focuses on history and politics, and their deep influences on the dynamics of the regions he visits. While traveling through Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he describes the deep historical and ethnic roots of these closely related countries. Here, events of 600 years ago still cause deep resentment. A history of small ethnic groups repeatedly conquering each other through the centuries, then being destroyed by outside invaders, has led to severe racial hatred and periodic outbursts of incredible violence. Kaplan provides great insight into the perpetual desire of these peoples to return to their periods of greatest historical strength and largest territories. A disturbing example of this is Macedonia, which both Greece and Serbia would like to annex because it contains populations of their kinsmen. Meanwhile the ethnic Macedonians think they are entitled to all the lands and peoples conquered by their native son Alexander the Great back in ancient times. There is a similar problem in Kosovo, coveted by Serbia and Albania for the same reasons. Also of note is Kaplan's section on Greece, which proves without a doubt that this nation is not the classical stereotype that the West thinks it is. Greece is far more similar to Turkey and the Middle East than to the mythical realm of Socrates and Aristotle. And they have the same insane and hateful politics and ethnic resentment as their neighbors Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia.
The main problem throughout the region is that all these peoples live interspersed among each other, and would just love to force everyone else out and build their own pure kingdoms. The logistical impossibilities of this never stopped anyone though, resulting in many occurrences of mass genocide, which most of the ethnic groups in the region have both committed and suffered from at various points in history. For many miserable decades, the Ottoman and Soviet empires forced everybody in the region to shut up, which merely redirected the people's resentment toward these outside rulers. Nobody in the West should have been surprised when the people turned back to destroying each other when these empires collapsed. The most disturbing realization in this book is that (except for the Turks) these small, self-destructive, and murderous ethnic groups are not that different from each other, but that has not stopped them from a thousand years of back-and-forth enslavement and genocide. For those who think the world is destined to become a happy melting pot in which everyone drops their differences and lives in harmony - we could learn a lot from this region.

Before reading this book, I had thought that the situation was pretty clear and that we knew who the bad guys were (the Serbs) and who the good guys were (everybody else). The take away from this book is that at one time or another (usually at the height of their respective power) each ethnic group took turns slaughtering the other ones with the result that hatreds are so embedded and crossed that it is hard to be optimistic about the future this region. To do so would be almost naive. In fact Kaplan's book reminds of just how little it takes for war to break out when religion and ethnicity are put into the mix.
Robert Kaplan does an excellent job of describing the history and mindset of each of these individual peoples in a way that leaves the reader sober about the prospects of this region even ten years after the book was written (and a couple of years after the war.) With the EU having already indicated it will admit some of the former countries of Yugoslavia for now, to be followed by potential hotbeds Romania and Bulgaria, it is definitely worth reading this book if one wants a better idea of what the EU may be getting itself in to.

I picked up Balkan Ghosts because I was interested in the subject matter, and I hadn't read anything by Robert D. Kaplan before this. It's interesting that this book was published in the "Vintage Departures" series because it might not have occurred to me that this book is a travelogue, even though Kaplan does spend much of the book on rickety trains and in decrepit hotels throughout the Balkans. So unmethodical are his travels that "travelogue" seems a misnomer. Nonetheless, Kaplan's descriptions of the Balkans just months after the fall of Communism are illuminating. At every turn, he is digging up hidden details unseen by Western eyes during the decades of communism. Through the shattered republics of Yugoslavia he travels, then on to Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Kaplan imbues the book with an impressive amount of historical context, going to great lengths to avoid the generalizations that are more typically employed to explain the seemingly perpetual strife of the Balkans. The book was published in 1995, the mid-point of a bloody decade in the Balkans, and it contains a good deal of forewarning of what was to come to pass in the region in the coming years. In this sense the book is impressive in a third way. Beyond a travelogue, beyond a regional history, Balkan Ghosts is the rare "current events" book that will not soon become obsolete.

The author is an American of Jewish origin. The motivation for writing the book was, most probably, to cash in on his previous knowledge and exposure to the region.

The main thesis of the book is that "longue durée" history matters and that the Balkan countries are different in a fundamental way from Western European ones, which is hardly an original thesis.

His travel in the region is a pretext to provide evidence for that thesis and, in addition, to present the ethnic animosities that existed (and still exist) between the Balkan nations.

He also likes to bring an outsider's point of view when he investigates the history of the persecution of the Jews in the region, especially in Greece and Romania, and how that history is remembered, or in fact ignored. (The situation has been redressed now in Romania and the history of anti-Semitism and the genocide of the Romanian Jews is taught in schools.)

His depiction of Romania of the year 1990 is fairly accurate by my recollections. He got the taste of the country right! It is also fascinating to notice how similar is his subjective experience of Romania with those of other Anglo-Saxon travel writers of the past. It seems that countries have a "form" that is very slowly changing (if changing at all).

However, he does not have the talents of a scholar and his account of the history of the countries visited is deeply flawed in the details. The broad picture is correct however, at least in the case of Romania.

Nevertheless, he conveys the impression that interwar Romania was a viciously anti-Semitic country, which is, of course, untrue.

His account is not complete because he neglects to mention the over-involvement of members of Romanian Jewish minority in Romanian Communist Party and the post-WWII communist regime.

I suspect that most natural born citizens of the United States of America rarely give thought to the tremendous good luck of having emerged from the womb in that country. I admit that I number among them. BALKAN GHOSTS inspires me to get on my knees every night and give thanks that my homeland is the US of A.
Author Robert Kaplan's book, first published in 1993, is part travel essay, part historical narrative, and part social and political commentary as he examines the past and present of Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Unfortunately, it's nine years outdated and fails to address the most recent eruptions of ethnic violence in a disintegrated Yugoslavia. However, having said that, BALKAN GHOSTS dispersed much of the ignorance and confusion with which I'd regarded the region. A primary thread that runs throughout is the presence of long-standing, tribal animosities lurking just below the surface in each country, and which periodically erupt into spasms of violence and genocide that make the worst recorded treatment of Native Americans and Blacks in the U.S. almost tame by comparison. Serbs versus Croats. Serbs versus Albanians. Bulgarians versus Serbs. Bulgarians versus Romanians. Bulgarians versus Greeks. Macedonians versus Bulgarians. Macedonians versus Greeks. Macedonians versus Albanians. Romanians versus Russians. Romanians versus Hungarians. Roman Catholic Christians versus Eastern Orthodox Christians. Communists versus everybody. Rightists versus leftists. Everybody versus the Turks, i.e. the Muslims. And, when it's slow on a Saturday night, mount a pogrom against the Jews. As Kaplan puts it:
"As always in the Balkans, bare survival provides precious little room for moral choices."
Perhaps the most revealing chapters are the last three on Greece. Since the author lived there for seven years rather than just pass through, he strongly suggests that the country Westerners revere as the "cradle of Western civilization" has perhaps long since disappeared into the unfathomability of the East. Even the sunny tourist posters are suspect. (Say, honey, let's cancel that Greek Isles cruise and go to New Jersey instead.)
If you're looking for instruction rather than light entertainment, BALKAN GHOSTS is just the ticket.

Wonderful. Top marks. I officially detest this author for writing so beautifully and well and forcing me to seriously consider buying all of his other books regardless of topic. Full of information and sentences that strike deeply.

While Balkan Ghosts can be more suitably refered to as a guide to Balkan history than as a travel guide, it is a wonderfully written book in which the author (Robert D. Kaplan) narrates the history of the Balkans through the stories of friends and aquaintances from each of four regions: Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. Although not a long book, Kaplan efficiently describes the events that have shaped the region, from its occupation by the Ottoman and Habsberg empires to the falling of the Berlin wall. Particularly well covered is the struggle for and historical claims to Macedonia, the holocaust and Nazi occupation of Romania during WW2, and the rise and fall of Causescu.
It is an excellent history lesson of the Balkans written in a manner that is highly readable.
Great book.

One of the most tragic, yet needless, legacies of the Clinton administration is America's continued involvement in the former Yugoslavia. The bombing campaigns against Serbia represent a dark chapter in American history. As Patrick Buchanan recently wrote, "This small nation did not attack us, did not threaten us, did not seek war with us. Yet, we smashed Serbia as horribly as Hitler had, for defying our demand for an unrestricted right of passage through their land, to tear off the cradle of their country, Kosovo."
Prior to the military actions, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, and Kosovo were as familiar to most Americans as the dark side of the moon. George Bush, as a candidate for President, inadvertently summed up American ignorance when he confused Slovenia with Slovakia. Yet when the Clinton administration decided to wreck havoc on these ancient countries, few reasoned proposals were put forward, little debate was offered in Congress, and no historical perspectives were provided by the media. Instead, the great simplifiers labeled the opposing sides with white hats and black hats. The Serbs were "bad" and the Bosnian Muslims and Albanians "good." There was no room for gray.
Was this the whole truth? Are the conflicts and protagonists in the Balkans so easily classified into the moral code understood by most Americans?
In Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, reporter Robert D. Kaplan explored the incredibly complex mosaic of Balkan politics, intrigue, and ethnic warfare. Published in 1993, years before the first bombs were delivered by the U. S. Air Force, Kaplan showed that while good and evil certainly existed in the Balkans, the conflicting claims and tangled histories of the various parties made outside intervention by meddling outsiders a very risky proposition.
Written in part as a homage to Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and John Reed's The War in Eastern Europe, Balkan Ghosts is part travelogue, part historical analysis, and part polemic. Having lived in the Balkans for several years and traveled extensively in its "backwater" countries, Kaplan combines an extensive knowledge of the region with a clear and forceful narrative style. His brief description of his trip down the Danube to the impoverished town of Sfintu Gheorghe, for instance, better illustrates the hopelessness inherent in Romanian communism than volumes of comparative economic statistics and diplomatic wires. The reader can almost taste the plum brandy, see the peeling paint, and smell the cigarettes and unwashed bodies.
Several key dynamics influenced the course of recent Balkan history. The first is the legacy of centuries of savage Islamic rule under the Ottoman Turks, a veritable Dark Age that was only erased from the overwhelmingly Christian populations of the Balkans in the first decades of the twentieth century. Appended as a monstrous coda to this period was the communist domination of much of the peninsula after World War II, which increased the period of subjugation by more than forty years. After having been held down for centuries, these nations are experiencing both a positive resurgence of Christian faith and a negative resurgence of murderous nationalism.
The second key dynamic is the persistence of historical memories in which each population - Serb, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian - seeks to recover land they once ruled. Serbia and Bulgaria, for instance, were both great empires at different times during the Middle Ages. Kaplan calls it the "Balkan revanchist syndrome" in which "each nation claiming as its natural territory all the lands that it held at the time of its great historical expansion." Unfortunately, these claims all overlap and there's not enough land to satisfy each and every claim. At times the results are absurd, such as the competing Greek and Bulgarian claims to Macedonia, not to mention the Macedonians' claims to Macedonia. On the other hand, the results can also be deadly, including the Balkan Wars, the Hungarian and Romanian conflict over Transylvania, and the current fighting in the former Yugoslavia that's still making headlines.
The third great dynamic are the unresolved issues from World War Two, in which pro- and anti-Nazi puppet regimes and resistance groups staged infamous massacres of Jews, ethnic minorities, and each other. In Croatia, great debates continue to rage over whether or not the fascist Ustashe regime slaughtered 700,000 Serbs or "only" 60,000 Serbs. During the war, the Serbs were considered the "good guys" and the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were among the "bad guys."
Added to this tremendous historical mess are the major and minor personalities profiled by Kaplan: Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac of Croatic, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Bulgarian media flack Guillermo Angelov, Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, and the malevolent ghost of Josip Broz Tito, whose legacy has further poisoned the Balkans. Romania itself had a whole galaxy of grotesque leaders including King Carol II and his mistress Magda Lupescu, fascist leader Corneliu Zelea-Codreanu, military dictator Ion Antonescu, and the hideous President Nicolae Ceausescu and his infamous wife Elena. The only American to come off well is David Funderburk, the courageous ambassador to Romania who blew the whistle on American appeasement of the Ceausescu regime.
Balkan Ghosts is a readable and entertaining introduction to Europe's most infamous morass. While Kaplan refuses to propose any specific policy objectives, his whirlwind tour of the Balkans makes it clear that it is a most complicated region. It's to America's everlasting shame that her senior policy makers didn't heed this insightful analysis prior to choosing sides and dropping bombs.

This book, purporting to understand the Balkans as a "journey through history", is full of generalizations and misinformation. I think it's a lovely book if you're looking for that species of "current affairs" or "travelogue" that focuses more on the thrilling story at the expense of fact.
What one does with the following hyperbole, I leave to others who are more susceptible: "Nazism, for instance, can claim Balkan origins. Among the flophouses of Vienna, a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously" (p.xxvii).
The book is an homage of some sort to (Dame) Rebecca West's, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. This alone should indicate the tone of this highly stylized portrait cast in broad, impressionistic strokes of a region that, ultimately, does more to occlude understanding than shine any meaningful light.
If you're looking for an easily digestible book on the Balkans, look to Mark Mazower's, The Balkans: A Short History. Or at least read it as a corrective to Kaplan's thriller.
The back of my copy of Kaplan's book (Vintage Departures) describes the book as "History/Travel". Delete "History" and maybe I'd give it another star.

It is incredibly biased book written by a full bigot! I think he swore not to tell any good thing about Ottomans and Turks. At the end of the book you think oh my god he is saying something good like "everyone was quiet and polite, adopting a complacent, dignified air in Adrianople. Turks have no hate for others" but your relief only continued a few milliseconds because his following phrase "Turks had no chips on their shoulders, because they had done the oppressing"!!! This book was the most prejudiced book I have ever read about East and especially about Turks. I think this book can be very useful for Chetnisks or Ustasha for legitimize their last Cruelty in Balkans. I am speechless about this illiteracy and hatred dominant in every sentence of this book.

A number of reviewers of this book have complained of bias, and others have said things like this: "Everyone has bias. So what?" and "If he offended so many people he must have got it about right." Well, everyone has bias at the start, but you can deal with it well or badly. Kaplan is spotty. He lives in Greece and has a confessed pro-Greek bias, which no one can blame him for. He deals well with this bias in his chapters on Greece, which are some of the most interesting in the book, but whenever he mentions the Turks, all the virtues of his thought and writing disappear.
For Kaplan, Turks are the same as Tolkien's orcs. Consider the following: he refers to "the long, dark night of [Turkish]servitude" (44)and "the living death of Ottoman Turkish rule" (38), while a Macedonian rising "collapsed under Turkish whips and rifle butts" (56). Turks are purely destructive: after setting out (fairly enough) the accomplishments of Byzantine art and architecture, he baldly writes "But the Turks smashed it all" (246). They are mysteriously bloodthirsty: pictures of Kemal Ataturk are gratuitously compared to "an Aryan Dracula" (283). Indeed, his character is elsewhere summed up as "ruthless and charismatic" (247). Turks are dirty, dark and ugly. There is a reference, for instance to "liver-hued suburbs of Istanbul and Ankara" (41), and this phrase serves to sum up all that is unpleasant about Prishtina. Any unpleasant characteristic of any people or place is measured against the heart of darkness that is for Kaplan (or was at the time of writing) the Turkish character. For instance, he writes that the Phanariot Greeks who ruled Romania "equalled the Turks in their ability to bleed the peasants" (91). Even their language, it seems, is ugly. Speaking of "Adrianople," he writes, "The town appears on international maps under the Turkish name of Edirne, a word that holds no charm for the ears of English-speakers" (285). Kaplan's Turks speak the Black Speech, live in squalor, and take a squealing delight in tormenting Christians. Tolkien would have felt at home.
Well, I live in Istanbul, and my neighbours are not orcs. People are friendly, are helpful with my limitations in the rather beautiful language of Turkish, and so on. Discussions of history with Turks do sometimes take on a rather Balkan character: some people are unduly positive about the Ottoman Empire as a staunch outpost of tolerance, while others say it was a bad thing and Ataturk is to be thanked for smashing it.
What was the real situation under the Ottoman Empire? Well, it died the death after World War One, so there's not much to be had from eyewitness testimony. To understand the Ottomans based on Balkan family legends on their fifth and sixth generations at least, is to build a house in sand in an earthquake zone. Historians tend to push their own ethnicity, sure, so that is why you have to know the primary documents yourself.... It's not that understanding is not to be had. It's just hard to get.
If you really want insight into the Balkans, you'll have to use your time and your wetware. You'll have to get some experiences of your own on the ground, and also read serious history and geography: yes, the brick-like kind with masses of footnotes, and yes, you have to read the footnotes. Kaplan doesn't even tells us what grounding he has for his factual assertions. It's not that he ought to, in a journalistic book, but rather that if you want actual understanding, you have to know this.
Kaplan is a single, intelligent, engaged observer, and he has written a travel book. Between descriptions of his own experience, he gives bursts of potted narrative history, with no analysis or qualification. On these terms, the book is interesting. An appropriately skeptical reader who knew nothing about the Balkans might use it for a first introduction, before going on to something more serious. A person who already knows about the Balkans is likely to find Kaplan's unsystematic flashes of insight rather interesting.
Some reviewers want this book to be an open door, revealing the truth about the Balkans, but it's not. It's a good read with some real moments of understanding, and moments of ignorance and just racism.

I found Balkan Ghosts mildly enjoyable, and it accurately describes many of the unfolding trends that exploded in the 1990s in the region.

Stylistically, there are reasons for pause. It is somewhat schizophrenic, darting between history and travelogue. Others may be more fond of this hybrid history / travel genre, but to me it seemed forced.

I also found the book overly fanciful and stereotypical at times. Kaplan finds much of what he sees alien, but to the extent that this is a travel book, Kaplan is entitled (and expected) to convey his Western sensibilities to his Western audience.

Overall, I suspect there are better choices for many readers.

Since Robert Kaplan lived in the Balkans for six years, and is well read scholastically, I find him solidly qualified to bring an accurate interpretation of the compendulum of Balkan history in a "living history" sense with characters quoted and activities described. This makes reading what could be otherwise a dry read more compelling.

I read BG while still living in Slovenia during the time of the 1999 NATO campaign in Kosovo. I heard stories of the actions of the Serbian paramilitary in Kosovo mainly from a horrified Serbian co-worker whose uncle had been pressed into service in the Serbian army. (He ran around Kosovo with a rifle, trying to not shot anyone and trying to not get shot by KLA or his own officers). I found consistency in Kaplan's writing, even through he wrote it in 1990, nine years before Kosovo.

I witnessed the action in Kosovo as a private citizen on personal professional business making many personal connections with many individuals of the various ethnic and national identities involved. I even asked one close friend, a young Serbian woman, to take me to a Serbian Orthodox Church service so that I could better "drink in" the meanings of the culture. As a philosophical atheist, this was a venture done for its own cultural value as an inquisitive observer. Contrary to what one prominent reviewer remarks, I found that the Serbian Orthodox Church is mostly about Serbia as a holy land. In this myth Kosovo is the Serbian Jerusalem, connected by the powerful story of a falcon that flew from Jerusalem to King Lazar and challenged him to choose between a heavenly kingdom or an earthly one. The King was so "holy" that he choose the heavanly kingdom and so had to sacrifice himself on the field of Kosovo to acheive entry. King Lazar occupies a place both physically and emotionally that Jesus does in other Christian churches. He is positioned across from Mary Magdalene, as her spiritual husband. (Yes, this is evidence of an actual marriage!) He died for his people, just as Jesus mythically died for "his people." When we realize that the Serbs were among the first Slavs (no, the first) to be converted to Christian Orthodoxy you have to appreciate how deeply is the Serbian sense of God-given place. The Cyrillic alphabet and language was created by "Saint" Cyril for the express purpose of converting the Slavs. The myth of King Lazar was invented of course, after the betrayal and defeat of the hapless king on the field of Kosovo by the Ottoman Turks in the 14th century. No matter, the region is a cauldron of national feeling with the Serbs at the center of the hubris, propelled by Orthodox Christianity against oppressive Islam. (Not long after reading BG, I was surprised to learn that there was an Al Queda cell in Srebrenica as early as 1990). But for all its supposed indictments of the Serbs, the book finishes in a balanced way, hoping for the eventual solution through a gradual opening up of the Balkans that had the additional blow of being frozen by communist totalitarianism. I support and encourage the Crown Prince Alexander, who returned to Belgrade from exile in Britain in 2000, and whose office provides those mutilated by their own history and myth a light of continuity without fanaticism. I would be interested to know if Mr Kaplan does as well.

Kaplan is not only a thoughtful and entertaining writer, but a concise one. But one must know that the locals (all those of of former Yugoslavia) don't like outsiders writng about them. The fear that they will not tell the side of the story which they feel will vindicate them, whether they are Croatian, Albanian, Bosnian or Serbian, etc., drives them to resent any opinion however well informed or not - made upon them. Who would want to be reminded of how the actual genocide against the Jews in WW2 began in the Balkans? Croatians don't like being chastised for their history as German/Habsburg allies and for fighting for the Catholic Church and the Nazis as the notorious Chetniks in WW2. (Catholics would like to forget it too, but Pope John Paul none-the-less conferred sainthood on a Chetnik war criminal in 1999!)

The Serbs in particular feel that the world is against them and will never understand them. And this may be true, but we must attempt it. Regardless of that, Serbs still are struggling between their pride and humility, resenting any interferrence from the outside - because outsiders have betrayed them again and again throughout history. I only wish them success, even if they are very much living in their own world. Robert Kaplan's work is invaluable and for what I known, an accurate and reliable introduction to Balkan history. Read Rebecca West's "Black Lamb, Grey Falcon - A Journey Through Yugoslavia" next. But don't stop there!

If you have read scholastic histories such as "The History of the Habsburg Empire" published by the Berkeley University Press, you will find these two great books supported less than deconstructed. Kaplan is a renowned writer on this region's history and in general. Books like his are great for people who don't like reading dry history, but can learn history through a consise journalistic read.

I would also advise the reader of BG to follow up with some of Kaplan's further books. What I came away from my time in that part of the world was the sense of active insanity that grows as one travels east, deeper into Islamic dominated lands. The Western mind must come to grips with the mind of fundalmentalist Islam. Nothing is more important at present and Kaplan is one of the best informers we have.

Since Balkan Ghosts appeared in 1993, a tremendous body of literature about the Balkans and particularly the Balkan wars of the 90s has appeared. Robert Kaplan's jaunt through the deep, dark Balkans seems sorely old and plain bleak.
Supposedly this was the book Bill Clinton read that convinced him the problems of the Balkans were beyond control since it was all about ancient hatred, etc, etc. a popular conception during the media-heavy Bosnian war.
Balkan Ghosts is...depressing. There are some truly depressing chapters, in particular the parts about Romania and the legacy of Ceaucescu's madness, as well as the bits on Kosovo and its Alabanians. I'm not sure what the purpose is through all of it. The essence that Kaplan seems to have about the Balkans is that its dark in every way, it's a world we can only watch but never learn. It's a bit offensive, is what the book is. There is a detached arrogance to the observations, but it's tinged with distain.
There are plenty of serious books on the history of the Balkans that focus on more than the rusted effects of Communism or the same old ancient hatred and distrust lores that continue to spin and spin as excuses.

I read "Balkan Ghosts" at least four or five years ago, so many of the details are vague in my mind. But the book greatly impressed me. It was not only prophetic of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, but it has more than a little applicability to the current War on Terror.
Quite a few negative reviews I see here were written by natives of the Balkans who think their homelands have been slandered. I note with amusement the American reviewer who pegs them correctly as "tribal" (especially Serbian) types utterly convinced that *they* are the "true" victims of history, profoundly bewildered how any outsider could sympathize at all with their enemies. (Of course, this attitude isn't limited to that part of the world, or even to the poorer parts of the world; Germany has recently been making noises about how it was the "real" victim of WWII.)
Then we have the usual suspects: the politically correct types who decry Kaplan's "racism" or "Eurocentrism" or whatnot, and blame the East's troubles on "colonialism," "imperialism," etc...never on Communism, or local tyrants, or the peasantries only too happy to slaughter Jews and Gypsies. Because, of course, all cultures are equal, and $DEITY forbid anybody pronounce one culture superior to any other!
Inevitably, one such reviewer trots out the old line about how "in 800 A.D., for instance, the Byzantines and Arabs and Chinese were producing great works in art, architecture, and astronomy, while the Europeans were wallowing in feudal primitivism." Well, that's nice, but it's currently 2003 C.E. What have they done lately? We've been hearing that argument about the Islamofascists ad nauseum since September 11th, 2001, and I'm tired of it. What they've done lately is cut out the clitorides of young girls, stone adulteresses, force women into identity-obliterating garments, declare fatwas on "heretics," reprint Nazi literature, blow themselves up in pizzerias full of teenagers, and fly airplanes into skyscrapers.
While one Balkan titled his review, "This book is no longer accurate," I think it's actually become a hell of a lot more relevant to world politics since 9/11. What's past is always prologue, as our 21st-century enemies with their seventh-century mindsets dismayingly prove.
Back in "sophisticated" Europe, the age-old hobby of antisemitic violence has been re-discovered with a passion. While this has been most in evidence in the West (for example, the thugs who seized a young Jewish woman in Paris and carved a Star of David into the flesh of her wrist), I didn't miss this comment from a Romanian reviewer: "[Kaplan's] book is biased because he is Jewish, so he portrays the Jews as great saints while the Romanians are tyrants and unworthy of anyone's attention." The implication, of course, is that Jews victimized Romanians as much as vice versa. Would someone please send me a link to a story in which Jews dragged Romanians to slaughterhouses and strong-armed them onto conveyor belts that ended in sharp blades?
Kaplan may indeed be biased, and I'm giving the book four stars on the presumption that the reviewers pointing out simple factual errors, such as those of spelling and etymology, are correct. But other writers validate much of what Kaplan writes -- such as Andrei Codrescu, of that oh-so-right-wing media outlet NPR, who is a Romanian Jew. There's also a highly engaging P.J. O'Rourke article on Albania in which the tribalism comes off even worse than it does in Kaplan's book.

Kaplan takes an indepth view into the mentality and history of the firey republics of the Balkans. Approaching the region as only a schooled traveller and historian can, Kaplan covers the roots of the emotion and the hatred from their basis in the clash of eastern and western philosophy to the collapse of Communism. A must for any military personnel studying to understand the basic logic of the peoples of this region.

Kaplan provides a very good, very enjoyable, and somewhat informative account of his experiences travelling through the Balkans. His historical references and background explanations are somewhat random and given mostly where they are relevant to the narrative of his own travels. However, he must be read with considerable caution, for two reasons. The first is his tendancy to generalize about entire countries and regions from his own unique experiences. I was in the same countries he was in at the same time, and my experiences were very different from his, as every travellers experiences are. Thus he needs a little more objectivity. Secondly, he shows a few prejudices, such as the idea that the Balkan region, which happens to be, conveniently, his own area of study, is the cauldron of all human history; that the Romanians are automatically endowed with "Latin" passion simply because their language is distantly related to French and Italian; and finally his unspoken but very strong anti-Turkish stance, which he undoubtedly, and understandably, absorbed in his many years in the area controlled by the Ottomans. All in all, though, it is well worth reading, as long as you keep in mind his need for more objectivity.

Kaplan's book is very is extremely well-written, and easy to read. It's also easy to get drawn into the author's narrative and take everything he says as given. However, Kaplan is not as well-informed on his subject (basically the entire Balkan peninsula) as he thinks he is. With the exception of Greece, where he spent a lot of time, and perhaps Bulgaria, he doesn't know a whole lot about the region and fills in the gaps in his knowledge with stereotypes drawn from other authors or by transposing the opinions a few people he talked to onto entire populations--often giving distorted impressions of e.g. the Serbs, Croats or Romanians. Nothing is more indicative of Kaplan's essentially unscholarly approach to such a complex topic than the reading materials he says he used to prepare himself for his journeys: for Yugoslavia he depends on Rebecca West's pre-World War II travelogue "Black Lamb and the Grey Falcon," a biased book itself, and based on her rather short (3-4 week) sojourn in Yugoslavia; even more troubling is his use of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" as a guide for Romania. Stoker was never in Romania (or rather Transylvania) nor did he ever intend his book to be taken as an accurate view of southeastern Europe; he was simply trying to provide some atmosphere for his novel, and his portrayal of Transylvania draws heavily on Victorian-era prejudices about the Balkans as an eerie and savage place. Yet Kaplan repeatedly cites Stoker as though he is a legitimate authority on Romania. This is, to say the least, irresponsible. As other reviewers on this page noted, the most disturbing thing is that this book's popularity ensured that it helped formulate opinions among broad sections of the public, including policy-makers.

This book is both a travelog and history lesson. Kaplan's observations can sometimes be as subjective as his travel plans, but I've read this book twice (the second time after the NATO action in Serbia/Kosovo) and it holds up as a good primer (albeit subjective and incomplete) of Balkan history. If you want start learning about the Balkans, you could do a lot worse than to start here. Recommended.

Reading previews reviews may change my point of view... they are all valid. Academic views aside, all I know is that Kaplan has an incredible way with words, making the story of the Balkans a much more fascinating and accesible read. Most Americans in the mid 90s didn't even know where the Balkans were located. I remember vividly Peter Jennings explaining the war walking through a huge map of Europe painted on the floor inside an ABC studio. It was a very graphic way of reminding us all how close this area is to most of our ancestors. Unless you know a WWII veteran (like my father) who insisted the Germans didn't even know how to deal with that region, Kaplan brings it home to the rest of us.

17 Feb 2001
Near the start of last decade's Bosnian war of independence, I read "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" by Dame Rebecca West (mentioned earlier), followed immediately by Mr. Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts: a Journey through History," which retraces her steps where possible on a similar sojourn. I think the author makes clear his caveats in the Preface, that this is a personal pilgrimmage partially along a pre-traveled route while interviewing locals about their opinions or histories as they understand them, and not a judicial tally of who started what when where and why? Stories of what the locals say <think>.
How Dame West managed two eve-of-WW2 sojourns through an increasingly more violent Yugoslavia and write such voluminous detail while traveling with a near-hysterical Serbian host is pathological. Even if she used shorthand. It would be funny if one didn't know WW2 was about to begin and nobody in the book is in a good situation except Mrs. West. I kept thinking, "these were real people; this really happened."
Now, we have the opportunity to retrace some of those steps on the eve of fin-de-siecle destruction (like walking the Via Dolorosa in Old Jerusalem with modern crowds of 'believers' / 'infidels') with a similarly intrepid, opinionated author with anglophonic sensibilities with regard to public toilets and 'age-old ethnic hatreds.'
Mr. Kaplan shouldn't be scolded for providing a House of Horrors on a Disney Balkanland tour to bring We the Masses up to speed on at least what popular opinion is in some areas about people and/or events in other areas and/or times. I purchased two detailed, relief-colorized Michelin autoroute road maps of ex-Yugoslavia and opened them end-to-end with opposite sides showing so I had a huge, double-size wall map of the former country's republics with lots of detail (back roads, mountain/ridge tracks).
As I read "BL&GF" I used a red marker to trace the often obscure, but always traceable, route with red push-pins (pink for girls) to indicate Dame West's stopping points; and a blue marker and blue push-pins to trace Mr. Kaplan's route. (I later added a yellow highlighter and transparent push-pins to the map as the author of "Road to Kosovo"(I think) bribed Serbian border guards on his way across Montenegro and drove across a Kosovan 'steppe' just prior to the round-ups, killings & deportations of ethnic Albanians. Fortunately he left the province in time.
All I can say is, "Hey, Dood! Surf's up! I'd have done it too if I could, and also written a book to pay for it." My copy sits proudly next to Misha Glenny et al. A good non-fiction reaching back to medieval kingdoms & heretics of a curious Bulgarian origin: "Bosnia - a Short History" by Noel Malcolm ; and best fiction: 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature winner: "The Bridge on the [River] Drina" by Ivo Andric'. The image of what the provincial Ottoman rulers made the local Roma (Gypsies) do to two Serb nationalists caught trying to blow up the bridge may never leave your mind.
The three (3) books I've mentioned, _The Bridge on the Drina_, _Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_, and Mr. Kaplan's _Balkan Ghosts: a Journey through History_ are my favorite three of my almost two dozen books on Bosnia, Yugoslavia, the Balkans... in that order. Together in that sequence, they provide the reader with a visceral experience of some of the emotions that are bred into Balkan blood and bones.

Though slightly dated now, this work is an interesting and entertaining introduction to the complex political movements in the Balkans. This is not in depth on any one of the myriad of questions needing answers in the Balkans but is simply a quick overview in the form of a travelogue that gives you a feel for travelling through this fascinating part of the world where Ottoman and European cultures met and mingled.

After completing a two month journey through the Balkans, I came to the conclusion that nothing had helped me more to get my feet wet than Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts. His insight into one of the most fascinating parts of the world was the best starting pont to understand it. Not suprisingly, many of the people I talked to in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Kosovo or Croatia, seemd to echo Kaplan's descriptions. I disagree with those who criticize his bias, for overstating the obvious: It is a very subjective book, but it's impossible to come out of the Balkans with an objective impression (perhaps its only sin is to downplay testimonies from Serbian people). The hatred, specially in the former Yugoslavia, is indeed ancient, not just modern inventions to justify a war, and precisely because they are ancient, they remain strong and unwilling to surrender to dialogue and understanding, and that is exactly what gives value to Kaplan's book: it is able to decode the moods in the Balkans.

Wow ! Robert D. Kaplan brought me back to the Romania I left ages ago: personality cult, the "Iron Guard," fear of your neighbor, food and other shortages, "Securitate" caused paranoia, political corruption and graft, Transnistria and local Holocausts, competent and incompetent kings, submissive and non-submissive queens, pro-Nazi and pro-Communist dictatorships etc., etc.

Even long forgotten geographical locations and Romanian expressions came back in a jiffy.

Thank you "Robby." When things seem to go bad here in our U.S. of A., a therapeutic trip to the past helps to better appreciate the present.

This beautifully written but dangerous book offers a simplistic look at the region's history. Kaplan ascribes the recent troubles in the Balkans to ancient ethnic hatreds, making them sound inevitable. This book documents only the region's darker past, ignoring much evidence of ethnic tolerance, or at least co-existence. (See Michael Sells's "A Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia - Hercegovina.") Kaplan's book also neglects the extent to which it was demagogic ultranationalist leaders in the 1990s who manipulated the Balkan peoples into ethnic warfare. The superficial interpretation of Balkan history regurgitated by Kaplan explains why Bush then Clinton refused to act in time to avert the Bosnian genocide. When one sees such crimes as inevitable and the region as filled with people only interested in slaughtering one another, one doesn't try to distinguish perpetrators from victims or intervene to save those victims. This is the most dangerous book of the 1990s.

It is simply bothersome to read something so willfully manipulated through a lens of Western superiority...the book aims to impress, rather than to convey any real historical progression. Unfortunately, many readers' opinions about the Balkans become shaped by sadly misguided pretenders, who will probably remain outsiders, no matter how long they live in a foreign place. The Balkans are quite diverse and the poor writer assumes that extrapolating from their common past under Ottoman rule he can really know them. Oh well.

This was a fantastic book, a wonderful blend of history and travel writing. Reading it I learned a great deal about the Balkans, particularly the lands of the former Yugoslavia as well as Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece.

One of the best aspects of the book was how Robert D. Kaplan tied together some unifying characteristics of the Balkan states, bringing some order, at least conceptually, to a rather chaotic region. I loved how he wrote that whatever has happened in any trouble spot in the Middle East happened in the Balkans first; for instance they produced the first terrorists of the 20th century (the IMRO or Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization). Before there were radical Muslim clerics in the headlines there were radical Orthodox clergy in the Balkans. The dispossessed Palestinians throughout the Middle East were preceded in the early decades of the 20th century by the huge number of Macedonian refugees in Sofia, Bulgaria, the result of the Second Balkan War in 1913. Even the Palestinian Intifada had its predecessor in the Albanian intifada in Serbia beginning in the early 1980s.
One defining aspect of the various Balkan nations that Kaplan noted was that each one desires that its borders revert to where they were at the exact time of its zenith. This was especially clear in the case of Macedonia; many Greeks believe it is theirs since that was where Alexander the Great hailed from; the Bulgarians had it in the 10th and 13th centuries; it was part of the Serbian empire in the 14th century. As he puts it, the principal sickness of the Balkans is "conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory."
This book has often been cited for its excellent coverage of the former Yugoslavia, and rightly so, showing a very diverse land, states so diverse today it is hard to believe they were ever united, countries at times mired in past glories and horrors. In Croatia the debate over the World War II legacy of Cardinal Aloysisu Stepinac serves as the primary symbol of the Serb-Croat conflict. Kaplan vividly contrasts Croatia, which is a fairly western, urbane, and ethnically uniform nation, with Bosnia, a "morass" of ethnically mixed mountain villages, "rural, isolated, and full of suspicions and hatreds." He writes that Serbia, almost from its inception in the 12th century, was among the most civilized states in Europe at the time; in the 14th century an empire so powerful that it challenged the Byzantine Empire itself. Indeed Constantinople was so desperate to fight off the advances of King Stefan Dushan that they invited Turkish armies into Europe, which eventually defeated the Serbians at arguably the defining battle of Balkan history, at Kosovo Polje, the Field of Black Birds, in 1389, destroying the Serbian kingdom and creating a legacy of hatred and revenge from that battle that would continue till today.
I thought his chapters on Romania even better, a nation through which he traveled extensively. He vividly showed that Romania in the past and to a large degree today is a land where one's survival was paramount - understandable in a nation invaded and ruled by so many - where prostitution, informing on others, and black marketeering were commonplace, so much so that Tsar Nicholas II sneered that being Romanian was not a nationality but a profession. This has been true both on an individual level and on a national level, as Romanian history has been one desperate deal after another to stave off doom. Romania he writes in some ways is an odd land, one caught between East and West; seemingly Slavic, its language Latinate, perhaps more similar to ancient Latin than modern Italian or Spanish, its culture a mixture of the Latin bent for melodrama and the Byzantine and Orthodox legacy of intrigue and mysticism.
His portrait of Bulgaria was also quite interesting, a country in the Cold War seemingly squarely under the thumb of Moscow but perhaps more independent than most satellite nations, careful to exercise its policies under the table and covertly, often at the expense of hated Turkey, even involving truly Byzantine plots such as the plan to assassinate the Pope. Kaplan writes that some of its people represent it being dismissed as a mere Communist backwater, as it was once a powerful empire in the 9th and 10th centuries, the first of all Slav peoples to embrace Orthodox Christianity, and it was from Bulgaria that the monks Cyril and Methodius spread the Cyrillic alphabet to Russia and elsewhere, making it the birthplace of Slavonic languages and culture.
Kaplan includes Greece as part of the Balkans, even though many he writes do not regard it as such. Having lived at the time of the writing seven years in Greece, he saw first hand that Greece at times was only superficially a Mediterranean and Western country. Just as in other Balkan countries, there are those in Greece who rage about the fate of lands that were once theirs and of Greek minorities abroad. Though Greece produced the first humanistic culture and art, one that glorified the individual rather than the ruler, Westerners often mistakenly believe that this is the defining characteristic of Greece, rather than seeing it as a battleground between East and West on the very fringes of Europe, and fail to take into account later Greek history as much modern Greek thought owes more to Byzantine and Ottoman legacies rather than to Classical times. Much of Greek history and culture is symbolized by the divide between the Hellene, what the ancient Greeks called themselves, their roots in the West, relying on principle and logic, and the Romios, the Greeks of the Eastern Roman and later Byzantine Empires, relying on instinct, on the miracle working powers of icons, seeing Greece as outside Europe.
I have only scratched the surface of this riveting book here. I highly recommend it, one that really helped me see common threads both with modern events and the past and among the various Balkan countries.

As a writer, Robert Kaplan rates five stars; as an analyst, zero. Balkan Ghosts enforces the West's belief that mass-murder in the Balkans is a tradition, and that this makes the groups there somehow unique in world history. This is a crock, and incredibly unfair to all sides. It is an increasingly common trend for writers to use the Balkans to flex hithero unseen intellectual muscle by quoting West, Reed, and the Mountain Wreath. Writers now do this to gloss over their lack of understanding of the region. Kaplan does this throughout, and he paints a picture of those in the Balkans as animals. Balkan Ghosts should not be included in any "shopping list" of scholarly works. Kaplan's other works are worthwhile, but this one is NOT.

"Balkan Ghosts" is politics, it is history, it is a travel guide. A beautiful descriptive prose, with no ambition for political analysis. Robert Kaplan brings out the typical character in every Balkan nation and society, and writes about the things that innocently clung to the back of his western-world mind and eyes, while travelling through the region. Through his encounters and visions, he manages to show much irony, yet in a respectful manner; it is the freshness and simplicity in his young view that allow an incisive report on old tradition. Kaplan visited tha farther corners of Romania, where Romanians do not go, and he tells about the Jews in Salonika, something Greeks do not talk about. A book that could have only been written by someone who knew the people, and lived by their sides. The result is an excellent journey through fascinating stories, about an exciting part of the world. A must-read for everyone who's been in the Balkans, wants to go, or seeks to understand the developments that took place during the 90's.

If there would have been a possibility to rate this book with zero, it would be too much. It is difficult to say whether it's worse that people write or read books such as Kaplan's. This one is not only prejudicial and biased, but I would almost call it rascist. Kaplan talks about very sensitive and complicated things as if discussing the last Christmas' turkey. True, it is so much easier to believe in one's own moral (etc.) superiority and find the rest of the world, especially if this rest is called "Balkans", pathetic and degrading, portraying people living there as some sort of recently born savages who haven't learned yet how to use the fork and the knife. I wonder if Kaplan had anything else on his mind when writing this book besides deepening some more of the prejudices already existing and earning enormous amounts of money on someone else's misery. It is he who is one of those Balkan ghosts, and we can hardly expect anything better for the region to happen, as long as people educate themselves through this sort of books.

If this had been published in the 1940s, it could be looked upon as a decently entertaining travelogue and its poor understanding of Balkan history could be excused as a relic of a different time (much like a poor man's Rebecca West). However, as this book was the first to come out in the wake of the Yugoslav wars in English, it had a very unfortunate influence on opinions and policies in the West from 1992-1994. Kaplan lacks the ability to distinguish history from mythology, and this book is riddled with factual inaccuracies and conceptual misinterpretations. Readers looking for a good Balkan-history themed travelogue set at the start of the recent wars would do much better to read Brian Hall's The Impossible Country.

The quality of his writing style aside, the book promotes the dangerously deceptive notion that the war in the former Yugoslavia was a distinctly "Balkan" phenomenon. Its romantic and sexy theory of a bloody history that returns to wreck havoc on the region paints people from the Balkans as two dimensional characters who are naturally given to violence. Anyone who has visited the region knows this is not the case. The fact is that what happened in the Balkans can happen anywhere under the right (or wrong) circumstances, and indeed has happened across the world many times before and since. If you buy the book, enjoy the writing, but remain skeptical of his theories and read other words on the subject like Balkan Babel or Love thy Neighbor for a more complete view.

Sure, the book is an interesting read. But it should not be labeled as history nor taken seriously by analysts, scholars, or policy-makers. It is completely uninformed and provides no delineation between fact and fiction. And considering how seriously it was taken by the Clinton administration (which Kaplan himself writes about), I feel he should personally be held accountable for the administration's subsequent strategy of non-intervention in Bosnia. Maybe he wasn't expecting Clinton to buy into his ideas whole-heartedly (and we'd expect Clinton to have done his homework better), but Kaplan is at fault for writing such a distorted book.
Some of the other reviewers recommended alternative sources of (actual) history - Ramet, Gordy, Wachtel, or Woodward.

The seriousness of Kaplan's opinion is evident from the choices of the "historical" sources he consulted for "understanding" the region. Stoker, the 19-th century irish author of Dracula is to him a major source of information about Transylvanian history and for the 20-th century he adds some english lady lost in the Balkans and known for her mellodramaitzed vision of reality. 10000 words do not reach to shead some light in the mess up he makes babout Balkan hisotry. But he is, like Stoker, a master myhtigation and he hepls the unadverted redear confirm his most vile presumtions and prejudice. Like so many reviews of this book confirm it, he will feel proud that a smart writer (and Kaplan is one), confirms what he always supsected and lends arguments to his clean prejudice, helping keep his black and white world in order. DISGUSTING, but EFFICIENT.

I love to read history books. This one has taught me a lot. I have recommended it to so many people. We all have to keep learning and growing and this book really shows the the highlights of history in the Balkans.

Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts" is a flawed book, but certainly worth reading in order to understand, if nothing else, the prevailing Western attitudes towards the Balkan region of Europe.
The books clear strength lies in the author's lucid, fluid and descriptive writing style - it truly makes the book, from the literary point of view, a joy to read. The reader is given a vivid picture of the Balkan lands Kaplan visits in a sort of `travelogue from hell' or `anti-travelogue' regarding places that most readers will not yet have visited. Added to this is a good deal of insight and reportage, interviews with locals, and so forth, that lend the book much readability and depth.
Unfortunately, however, the book is marred by the author's own Western prejudices and biases. What we have here is a critique, in many ways, of the `backwards East' and a not-so-subtle head-shaking that the region is not more `Western' in outlook.
The problems surface on two levels: First, Kaplan's descriptions of the local cultural life are off the mark, due in many cases to his lack of understanding of Orthodox Christianity. Many ignorant comments are notable regarding Orthodox religious art, piety, liturgical life, church organization, etc. Kaplan is right that the Orthodox tradition has had a profound influence on the region, but his conclusions as to the nature of this impact are nothing more than a perpetuation of the common and long-held Western stereotypes about the Eastern Orthodox part of Europe - in particular, the myth that Eastern Orthodox Christianity is a dangerous brew of mysticism, austerity and nationalism. Not only is this an incorrect summary, but the impressionistic conclusion is false -- the reality of the impact of the Orthodox Church on these countries in the twentieth century is much more complex and nuanced than Mr. Kaplan leads the reader to believe. Kaplan would have been better served to study more about Orthodox Christianity before repeating so many tired stereotypes about it in this book. But, alas, many Western readers are not in a position to correct Mr. Kaplan, and will accept what he writes as true, thereby experiencing a convenient confirmation of their existing stereotypes.
Second, Kaplan's `program' for the region is unabashedly biased towards the 'enlightened' Western approach. According to Kaplan, the post-Enlightenment West is the paradigm that the world (or at least this part of it) must follow, and he accords much of the problems of these countries to their non-Western, Byzantine, Slavic, Eastern Orthodox Christian background - in a vast, vast overstatement and oversimplification of the real situation in the Balkans and in Europe in general. The fact that the Enlightenment itself led to the drastic decline of ethical life in the `West', and the development of the political ideologies that are the real cause of the tragedies of the Twentieth Century seems lost on Kaplan, who would solve the problems of the Balkan region by imposing the full-blown developments of Western Enlightenment ideology on these Southeastern Europeans.
The story of the Balkans is simple enough - it is a region that has been `put upon' by outsiders for centuries, each with their own designs for the region - the Venetians, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the Austrians, the Nazis, etc. In the act of being downtrodden, rivalries developed and these have in some cases developed into ethnic hatreds. These hatreds are easily manipulable by local political powers to engage the population in one or another act of internal or external agression (read: scapegoating). The influence of outsiders on the region has been profoundly negative historically, and in my opinion, Kaplan is mistaken to assume that yet another `design' for the region would meet with any greater success than the previous ones have.
Read `Balkan Ghosts' for a great travelogue and an excellent portrayal of the present Western stereotypical view of the Balkans. But don't take his strereotypes to heart - the truth is much more complex and nuanced, and the region needs to be understood from the `inside out' rather than the view from the `outside in' that Kaplan presents here.

I have previously heard about Robert D. Kaplan from my guests. That's right I am running a small hostel in Suceava Romania and I have seen Balkan Ghosts and talked about it with my guests. I actually wanted to read it for a long long time but it wasn't really possible as the store was not distributing to Romania until very very recently.

I have managed to read only the chapter about Romania in the 90's and I was simply amazed with the genius with which Kaplan combines opinions of people he met at that time and his knowledge on history of this part of the world. I will definitely read it all and I can't wait to get more of this combination.

Very well covered issues, and great insight into the Balkan mind. I've spent 14 years in the Balkans, and his descriptions are almost uniformly accurate. Kaplan is, as with his other works, a great historical narrator, a reasonably good travel agent, and a reasonable advocate for his ideological views. The only issue I took was his plot line, which matched his itinerary; he'd have made his work more enjoyable by using time, geography, or ideology as his framework for interpretation.

I bought this book because I needed a crash course in Balkan history. I am married to a Macedonian and we were getting ready to visit together for the first time.

This book is recommended for anyone planning to travel to the Balkan Peninsula. It is well-written and delivers loads of historical perspective, and is comprehensive in its coverage of the many cultures that coexist begrudgingly there.

Similarly, even if you have just have an interest in the Balkans or are doing an academic paper, this book will provide a great source and intellectual foundation.

Kaplan understands an often-lost key to writing about current affairs: knowing the past is vital to understanding the present. While you may not agree with all of his conclusions, there's an admirable amount of thought behind them and top-notch writing skill. This is a valuable resource to understanding the Balkans, past and present, and a gateway to other similarly valuable works. Highly recommended.