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spat with another anthropologist, Maurice Bloch. But both Fabian and Bloch operate within the same spectrum, both accepting that time is relative, to varying degrees, depending on the character of an individual culture. See Fabian, Time and the Other, and Maurice Bloch, “The Past and the Present in the Present,” in his Ritual, History and Power, pp. 1–18. His foreword describes his disagreement with Fabian. Both these approaches are extremely important in the kind of myth-history with its own time structures that emerged in the Balkans.

8. See Franjo Tudjman, Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy, New York: M. Evans and Company, 1996. The original version was entitled Bespuća povisjesne zbiljnosti: Rasprava o povijesti i filozofiji zlosija (Wastelands of Historical Reality: Discussion on History and Philosophy of Aggressive Violence) and was published in May 1989, and the second edition in November 1989, then a third and fourth in April and October 1990. On each occasion, Tudjman changed the emphasis of the book, often using his own neologisms to present his ideas. The English-language text published in 1996 was, in the words of his translator, “substantially revised” to appeal to a U.S. audience. I am very grateful to my colleague Dr. Dejan Jović for talking to me in detail on the issues embodied in this chapter, and letting me see the text of his own book prior to publication.

9. See Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania. The Balkans’ relationship to Europe was essentially detached, sandwiched between West and East, or even between the West and Africa.

10. Harry de Windt, Through Savage Europe, Being a Narrative of a Journey Undertaken as Special Correspondent of the “Westminster Gazette” Throughout the Balkan States and European Russia, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907, pp. 15–16. His book was a considerable success, with the first edition sold out in less than a month.

11. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, New York: Vintage, 1994, pp. 33–4.

12. Creagh observed that the “very pretty girl of about nineteen” who came to his room at Neusatz “was not the least abashed at my Highland costume.” See Creagh, Over the Borders, p. 52.

13. Ibid., p. 15.

14. Ibid., p. 38.

15. Ibid., p. 82.

16. Ibid., p. 88.

17. Ibid., pp. 124–5.

18. Ibid., pp. 274–5.

19. Ibid., p. 276. Creagh misunderstood or misread a Montenegrin tradition. It was considered among the mountain warriors dishonorable to die “in bed like a woman.” To the news of a tribesman’s death the proper response was, “Who killed him?” If he had not died honorably at the hands of an enemy, the euphemism was “God, the old executioner.” See Alan Ferguson, “Montenegrin Society 1800–1830,” in Clogg (ed.), Balkan Society, p. 209.

20. Sam Vaknin, www.balkanland.com/index.html, December 20, 2001.

21. From the German Balkanhalbeiland, used by the German geographer August Zeune in the first decade of the nineteenth century. See Todorova, Imagining, pp. 25–6.

22. In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova cites Jobus Veratius, who believed that mountains stretched in a chain from Mesembria on the Black Sea to the Pyrenees. See ibid., pp. 26–7.

23. Four-fifths of Italy is taken up by mountains or hills. See Stuart Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change, London: Methuen, 1986, p. 15.

24. W. G. Blackie, The Comprehensive Atlas and Geography of the World, London: Blackie and Son, 1882.

25. Cited in Todorova, Imagining, p. 22.

26. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 15.

27. The Scottish wilderness where John Buchan set his novel The 39 Steps was not some barren northern glen but the bare and desolate mountains of Galloway, just north of the English border.

28. Armatoli were a form of occasional militia; hajduks were bandits.

29. Cited in Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia, p. 50.

30. For example, Spain’s bloodthirsty “El Cid,” or the murderous Celtic anger of Rob Roy MacGregor’s vengeful wife, as described by Sir Walter Scott