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from Italy; others learned their Catholic liturgy in Church Slavonic in the Glagolitic script; still others read it in a Bosnian variant of the Cyrillic. In Bosnia there also was (in Catholic eyes) a “heretical” Bosnian church. In many areas there were pockets of Orthodox believers. Thus, western Balkan Christendom contained not merely the binary division between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, but a bewildering variety of dialect and scriptural forms, all fiercely defended by their adherents. Farther east, in Serbia, Orthodoxy dominated, but even there there were still many subtle dialectal differences.32 Among the Slavs, national labels like “Serb” or “Bulgar” did not adequately denote identity.33 Placing strangers as friend or foe meant knowing which village or town they came from, of which community or kin they were part.

The extreme diversity is difficult to relate to the clearly defined “homelands” presented by nineteenth-century nationalist historians and propagandists.34 A similar fragmentation existed outside the Slavic populations. The land that became Albania in 1913 had never been occupied by the Slavs. The native Illyrians who lived there successfully maintained both a distinct culture and a Latinate language incomprehensible to the Slavs. Within the ethnic category of “Albanian,” there were marked divisions, both in religion and social structures. In the south, close to the Greek lands, Orthodox Christianity predominated, while in the north some of the tribes were Catholic. But the Albanian communities were further divided between southern lowlanders (Tosks) and northern high-landers (Ghegs). After the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, the Tosk and Gheg communities still retained Christian and Muslim enclaves. But despite these Christian communities, being Albanian soon became almost synonymous with being Muslim. In Bosnia, too, there was an additional religious mélange, with numerous conversions to Islam among local Slavs, so that they called themselves “Turks” (Turci). They continued to use their Slavic mother tongue, but with a distinctly Bosnian tinge. Other Muslims, “true Turks,” whether from Anatolia or Circassian Tartars settled by the Ottoman rulers in the Balkans, were always distinguished from local “Turks” and called Turkuse.35

Any map of the Balkans that truly showed the extraordinary diversity of languages and religious faiths and ethnic distribution in the region looked nothing like one of the twentieth-century frontiers. If anything, the pattern resembled more closely the maritime chart of an archipelago, such as the northern Aegean or the Cyclades. So, rather than “peninsula”—the traditional description of the region—perhaps a better metaphor for the Balkans is an archipelago, a pattern of separate islands, some large, others small. An archipelago society, however, especially one set in an ethnic and linguistic landscape as convoluted as the Balkans, will of necessity become acutely aware of local differences, and will not take easily to the ordered structures of more traditional polities.36 Edith Durham, traveling in Macedonia in 1905, was surprised that in some isolated areas Christian customs seemed strongly tinged with ancient folk beliefs.

I do not think I ever saw a picture of a saint in any of these houses. The icon and the lamp, so conspicuous in the houses of the Serbs, the Montenegrins and the Orthodox Albanians, was wanting. Nor did the people invoke Christ or the saints, or cross themselves at mealtimes, or before going to rest for the night. They seemed to possess none of the religious fervour that is so marked a characteristic of Orthodox peasants. They had more faith, it seemed, in the amulets they wore than in anything else. Some of these were very odd. One was a green glass heart, two pink beads, and an English sixpence.37

She quickly realized that easy generalizations in so idiosyncratic a land were meaningless. People saw themselves as possessing multiple loyalties and identities. Ascribing hatred to ethnic origin was too limiting a classification: as everywhere, antipathy had