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of the Ottomans as if they had overlain the Balkans like an incubus. Anything that was misbegotten could, in one way or another, be traced back to their presence. An Orthodox nun, Mother Tatiana, one of his main informants, told him, “We [the Serbs] would have been even greater than the Italians, were it not for the Turks.” Kaplan himself added: “That was a refrain you heard throughout the Balkans, in Dame Rebecca’s day [Dame Rebecca West, author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon] and in mine. Dame Rebecca writes, ‘The Turks ruined the Balkans, with a ruin so great that has not yet been repaired.’ ”3

For Kaplan, the Balkan past could be mobilized to explain the dark and harrowing events of the Balkan present. I had admired the quality and insight of his writing for many years; I liked his capacity to present nuance, light and shade. But in Balkan Ghosts, those qualities were absent: he now wrote of a world that contained only horror and atrocity, without nuance, always haunted by a sanguine past. Even his vocabulary had darkened. It was still compelling; and yet, at the same time, he brought back fearful memories of the garlic-scented Albanian of my childhood.

The reasons for his deepening gloom grew from the times in which he wrote. Here was a man seeing places, which he had known in happier days, that had suddenly become murderous and savage. He discovered the origins of this bleak transformation wholly within the region’s long (and dark) history. Past was present, with metaphors of atrocity drawn from the 1870s being attached to the atrocities of the 1990s. The Bulgarian massacres of 1876, when Ottoman bashibazouks killed thousands with their lances and yataghans, were the point at which, for Robert Kaplan, we could say, “In modern times, it all began here.”4 He was creating a special type of history for the Balkans—what the social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein later called “TimeSpace,” where “the meaning of time and space in our lives is a human invention … time and space are irremediably locked together and constitute a single dimension.”5 Wallerstein used one Balkan example, that of Kosovo, and one from Northern Ireland, to show that two completely divergent versions of the past could exist simultaneously within the same area, visions that no amount of evidence could alter or disprove.6 This is what anthropologists used to call the anthropological present—a kind of TimeSpace particularly suitable for “primitive” peoples, in whose world “time had frozen, and where there was no possibility of change or alteration.”7 This style of history of the Balkans is exemplified by Franjo Tudjman, scholar and first president of independent Croatia after 1991.8

But later, as I read more widely, it became clear that Kaplan was not alone in adopting these conventions. He stood in a long tradition of writing about Balkan malevolence and darkness.9 Some eight decades before Kaplan’s Journey through History, another writer, Harry de Windt, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, author of The New Siberia, A Ride to India, and From Paris to New York by Land, visited the Balkans as a special correspondent of the Westminster Gazette. His book was entitled simply Through Savage Europe. He explained why:

“Why ‘Savage Europe’?” asked a friend who had recently witnessed my departure from Charing Cross for the Near East.

“Because,” I replied, “the term accurately described the wild and lawless countries between the Adriatic and the Black Seas.”

For some mystic reason, however, most Englishmen are less familiar with the geography of the Balkan States than with that of Darkest Africa. This was my case and I had therefore yet to learn that these same Balkans can boast of cities which are miniature replicas of London and Paris. But these are civilised centres. The remoter districts are, as of yore, hotbeds of outlawry and brigandage, where you must travel with a revolver in each pocket, and your life in your hand, and of this fact, as the reader will see, we had tangible and unpleasant proof before the end of the journey. Moreover, do not the