This intriguing edited volume is the outcome of a collaboration between two research units, namely THALIM (Théorie et Histoire des Arts et des Littératures de la Modernité), based in Paris (CNRS – Sorbonne Nouvelle – ENS) and HETEROTOPOS, based at the French Department of the University of Bucharest. The collaboration resulted in a conference held in April 2021, from which we now have, in book form, ten papers on “Le voyage dans les Balkans” from researchers based in France, Switzerland, Romania, Greece and Turkey. The papers published are grouped into three sections, under the titles “Entre réel et imaginaire”; “Ethnographie de la frontière” and “Regards croisés”.

There is inevitably some overlap between these interrelated thematic areas, but the reader can discern some approaches specific to each section. The first, “Entre réel et imaginaire” is perhaps less concerned explicitly with this announced problem but with ones of genres of representation. The late Venera Achim examines the writings on the Balkans authored by reputed geologist Ami Boué from the 1840s, and which became authoritative for later travellers and scholars in the nineteenth century. Boué’s œuvre crosses various genres from scientific papers on geology to practical guides to travel within the region. He played a major role in debunking stereotypes and geographical misconceptions about the so-called “Balkan peninsula” and in fact avoided using the term “Balkan” in general. Also focusing on the 1840s, Nicu Diaconiuc gives an interesting rereading of the travel books of French author Stanislas Bellanger, which are among several in this period to lie at the intersection of authentic reportage and narrative romance. We then jump to the late twentieth century with Danielle Meaux’s study of Swiss international news photographer Gilles Saussier, whose images of late socialist Romania and the revolution of 1989 proved influential in framing interpretations of the events of the time. Anne-Marie Monluçon brings us into the twenty-first century with her analysis of French traveller Emmanuel Ruben’s Sur le route du Danube (2019), a text which is somewhere between a travelogue and an autobiographical novel.

Part Two, “Ethnographie de la frontière” has a tighter temporal focus and looks at travellers concerned with ethnicity and boundaries in the period roughly from 1850 to 1914. Arzu Etensel Ildem offers a rich comparative study of the texts of Madame de Gasparin and Edmond About, who travelled to Constantinople across the Balkans in 1867, respectively in 1884, and made many observations, not all of them kind, about the peoples they encountered along the way. Vassiliki Lalagianni looks at the theme of Hellenic and other identities in the writings of Dora d’Istria (pseudonym of Elena Ghica). Then, Odile Gannier considers the anthropological but also political purposes of British writer Edith Durham, who first wrote sympathetically about Serbia and Montenegro but ended up aligning herself most closely with the Albanian cause.

The third part, “Regards croisés”, also consists of three chapters. Daniel Lançon compares representations of (mainly Romanian and Bulgarian) women by western travelllers over the long nineteenth century. Liliana Anghel surveys some of the travel writings of two Romanian authors from the turn of the twentieth century, Alexandru Vlahuţa and Nicolae Iorga, in relation to their views on national identity. Finally, Corinne Fournier Kiss analyses the well-known texts of contemporary central European authors Claudio Magris and Péter Eszterházy, enabling a consideration of how the Balkans are imagined not from a western but from a central European vantage point.

I found all the contributions to be readable and informative, and many of them introduce and analyse little-known material. The introduction by Moussa and Pârlea consists mainly of an extended commentary on Maria Todorova’s influential work Imagining the Balkans, itself inspired by Said’s Orientalism. Numerous additional theoretical perspectives are adduced, including from the writings of Marianne Mesnil, Dolores Toma, Milica Bakić Hayden, James Clifford, Zygmunt Bauman, Homi Bhabha, Tzvetan Todorov, Marie Louise Pratt, Yuri Lotman, Larry Wolff and Serge Gruzinski. This supplies useful orientation without being methodologically ground-breaking. However, while the volume has at times the feel of a miscellany, it serves a valuable purpose as a series of case studies shedding light on a number of less frequently examined authors on the Balkans, including not only ones writing in French and English but some in Italian, German, Hungarian and Romanian too. This offers a corrective to the methodological inertia of simply assuming an east-west divide. In reality travel writing, while often constructing cultural boundaries, has much in common across them.