This is a cursory look at the countries that have been arbitrarily grouped together since before WW1. He focuses mainly on Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and what used to be Yugoslavia. Even though the grouping of “The Balkans” is largely one of convention, Kaplan argues that the suffering and tragic histories act as a glue that makes their stories inseparable from each other. Instead of writing a full review, I’ll relate a story that I found illustrative of the complexities of the region.

Transylvanian Saxons

Transylvania is a region formed by the Carpathian mountains, which ring the area in central Romania. It is, of course, best known for Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, as well as the historical figure who inspired him, Vlad the Impaler.

Back in the 12th century, Transylvania was under the control of the King of Hungary. He faced a problem: nomadic raiders threatened his eastern frontiers, and there wasn’t much built out there to act as a buffer to slow invading armies before they reached Hungary. So the solution he came up with was to sponsor waves of immigrants from western regions of Europe near modern-day Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. At that time, those areas were overpopulated and underemployed, so the King sent out recruiters to convince people to move over one thousand miles east to Transylvania. As an aside, the term “Saxon” is something of a misnomer—few of these settlers actually came from the region known today as Saxony yet the name stuck. The King made various promises, including the ability for the Saxons to govern themselves and be exempt from local Transylvanian taxes, instead remitting taxes directly to the King of Hungary. As a result, so many people made the move that it supposedly inspired the folk tale of the Pied Piper, because for the people who were left behind, it was as if a large group of them had disappeared overnight.

These groups of migrants refused to integrate with the locals, instead opting to create their own enclaves of communities in a similar fashion to the Amish in the US. Unfortunately for the newly founded Saxon settlements, the Mongols swept through the area in 1241, destroying the new settlements without completely wiping out their residents. As a result, the Saxons rebuilt villages around fortified churches known as Kirchenburgen, which would eventually be surrounded by stone walls. The Saxons are said to have founded 300 such villages, but 7 of them would become quite large and now represent some of the biggest cities in Romania. In fact, the German name for Transylvania, “Siebenbürgen,” translates to “Seven Fortresses” in reference to these cities.

Mostly due to their refusal to integrate with the Romanian peasantry, they created a tight-knit group that was treated as a separate entity by the law. But as history kept moving, their privileged place in Romania began to show signs of weakening. This led to reluctant support of the unification of Romania by the Saxons after the end of World War 1. Although they supported the unification on paper, the loss of property in the land reforms and the reduced political power in the region played a large role in the popularity of the Nazi party in the buildup to World War 2.

The Saxons in Transylvania always managed to think of themselves as Germans, and Hitler’s message of Aryanism resonated so strongly that 95% of able-bodied men in the region ended up in military service for Germany during World War 2. This was approximately 63,000 people, of which only a few thousand would ever return to Romania. The loss of the Germans in the war meant that Romania was almost instantly occupied by Soviet forces. The hatred between Germans and Russians fostered by the Eastern Front was so intense that around 100,000 Germans fled before the arrival of the Soviet forces. The Russians proceeded to arrest more than 70,000 of those who had stayed and shipped them off to labor camps in Ukraine, where most were never heard from again.

The population decline didn’t stop there. During the communist era, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime struck a uniquely cynical bargain with West Germany—effectively selling ethnic Germans for hard currency. Between 1969 and 1989, approximately 220,000 people were “purchased” in this way, with West Germany paying per head for the privilege of repatriating them. When these Saxons finally arrived in Germany after 800 years away, many found that native Germans viewed them not as long-lost kin but as Romanians, making their integration into German society an unexpectedly lonely experience. The Transylvanian Saxons are now about 4% of their peak population.

Conclusion

The Transylvanian Saxons is a unique story in the Balkans, but take the shifting populations, negligent foreign governance, corrupt and hostile local governance, rags to riches and back again, then finally mix in a sprinkle of disgust for your neighbors and you have all the essential ingredients to any Balkan story.