The most popular walking tours in London include strolling by known plague pit sites, where the hundreds of thousands of Londoners who died during the numerous outbreaks of plague are buried. The Black Death killed between 1/3 and 2/3 of Europe’s inhabitants over the course of its random and terrifying outbreaks. The impact of the …
Prince Eugene of Savoy was relentless. With few exceptions he swept through the Balkans and set the Ottoman Empire, formerly the terrifying ascendent power galloping relentlessly through Europe, back on its heels. And so it was on 5 August 1716 when the Prince, with significantly fewer forces than those of the Ottoman Grand Vizier, managed …
The Vojvodina town of Petrovaradin, now part of Novi Sad, Serbia, was first settled in 4,500 BC during the Stone Age. Since that time, it was the scene of battles between great and regional powers over a dozen times. In a way, it exemplifies the fortunes of the Balkans themselves, caught between shifting alliances and …
When Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain on 31 July 1492, they were welcomed with open arms into the Ottoman-ruled Balkans. Thus the Balkans, and particularly Sarajevo, came to be populated with Sephardic Jews to the extent that at the height of the community’s population, 20% of Sarajevo was Jewish and 10% of …
Empires have to begin and end somewhere, and in Europe the Balkans are the beginning and ending of East and West, and North and South. Within the Balkans, it is Bosnia where everything comes crashing together. As Saint Sava said in the thirteenth century, “…we are doomed by fate to be the East in the …
“At first we were confused. The East thought that we were West, while the West considered us to be East. Some of us misunderstood our place in the clash of currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, and others that we belong exclusively to one side or the other. But I tell …
Throughout Europe the Middle Ages are synonymous with kings and courts and conquest. Every king in the medieval history of Great Britain was proven on the battlefield. Charlemagne rode over huge swathes of continental Europe and added it to his empire – including parts of modern-day Croatia and Bosnia. Frederick I Barbarossa fought through no …
War produces monuments and detritus; which is which often depends on which side of the line you are standing on after the end of the war. The Greek and Italians famously repurposed old monuments, treating them as detritus which went into building their homes. Many old villas are built from the remains of older monuments …
The oil portraits don’t really do him justice. Prince Eugene of Savoy was short, even for the seventeenth century. He had buck-teeth. His nose overpowered his face, he looked sickly, and people remarked on how ugly he was. Also, his mother was booted from France for poisoning people. Despite his appearance and rumors of participation …
In 1917 a man died, and a few years later the marching army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia destroyed his grave. The West knew this man, but they knew him as a woman and only by applying a Western structure to the well known and codified Albanian practice of being a Burnesha, related in a …
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