Words matter. These are the best Balkans Quotes from famous people such as Alan Furst, Ismail Kadare, Boris Trajkovski, Todor Zhivkov, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I love the combination of the words ‘spies’ and ‘Balkans.’ It’s like meat and potatoes.
Guidebooks used to write the name of my city in two ways: Gjirokaster in Albanian, and Argyrokastron for foreigners. The classical-sounding name somehow gave it better credentials, because people in the Balkans famously exaggerate and often call their villages cities.
Remember all those references to Macedonia as the oasis of peace in the Balkans. You only really appreciate it when you have lost it.
There are some common problems in the Balkans in the settlement of which Bulgaria should also participate.
I’ve worked behind counters serving food, and I’ve lived on the circus train, and I’ve led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I’ve been a key liner for a newspaper, I’ve done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.
Let’s make a deal with the Serbs. Neither history nor emotion in the Balkans will permit multinationalism. We have to give up on the illusion of the last eight years… Dayton isn’t working. Nobody – except diplomats and petty officials – believes in a sovereign Bosnia and the Dayton accords.
I will always fight for peace. But, unfortunately, it is war that drives us forward. It is war that makes the major turns. It makes Wall Street function; it makes all the bastards in the Balkans function.
The people of the Balkans are like a dysfunctional family. We may fight and argue, but in the end we are family.
Romanians are culturally European, very close to the French. Socially, they are now building a society that is emotionally closer to the Balkans, Turkey and Greece.
Well, let’s assume the world is linear. If we required a certain amount of troops per 25,000 population in the Balkans, if the world is not radically different, something of the same extent is going to be needed in Iraq.
If this war is not fought with the greatest brutality against the bands both in the East and in the Balkans then in the foreseeable future the strength at our disposal will not be sufficient to be able to master this plague.
There a lot of occasions when Albanians cause trouble, but then we are also very nice people. People sometimes forget that there are good people from the Balkans as well.
I did a gig for the Red Cross during the Balkans conflict, but we couldnt land in the city as they were trying to shoot the planes down. We had to land in Budapest and make the seven-hour car journey on bumpy roads instead, and when we finally arrived, a riot almost broke out in the venue.
We are not only talking about waves of refugees coming to Greece, to Italy, and elsewhere. Destabilizing the Balkans means Lebanonization, and that means destabilizing all of Europe.
Historically, the Balkans have been an incubator of war.
