Chapter 15

Balkan as a Sign:
Usage of the Word Balkan in Language andDiscourse of the ex-Yugoslav People*
Keiko Mitani

The collapse of Yugoslavia and the civil war which followed it in the
1990s have revitalised the word Balkan to move into the foreground ofworld media in an unfortunate way. Not only the word but also the oldstereotypes of the Balkans seemed to have come back from the past. A
good number of publications has surfaced using the word Balkan in its
title: Balkan Ghost (Kaplan 1993), Balkan Worlds (Stoianovich 1994),
Balkan Holocauste (MacDonald 2002), etc. Old works on the Balkans,such as Booth (1905), Fraser (1906) and Ancel (1930), just to name a few,
were taken down from the shelves of library stacks. ‘Balkan
Characterology’ originated by Cvijić (Cvijić [1922] 1987; Cvijić andAndrić 1988) and Dvorniković ([1939] 1990) was recollected as well.
Writers and scholars from the Balkans, too, have not hesitated toundertake tasks to work on Balkan in their own way. Their purposes are to
trace the legacy of Balkan, to ultimately clarify what Balkan is, todescribe how the Balkan world has been produced, or to redefinebalkanstvo (balkan-ness) throughout their history and cultural*

I would like to thank Prof. Nagayo (Waseda University), Prof. Homolac (Tokyo
University of Foreign Studies), and Prof. Ieda (SRC, Hokkaido University) for the
discussion and remarks on my report at the 2005 Winter International Symposium, SRC.

- 289 -KEIKO MITANI

circumstances (Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992; Bakić-Hayden 1995;
Bjelić and Savić 2002; Kitromilides 1996; Labon 1995; Stoianovich 1994;
Todorova 1997, 2004). My study is, however, addressed to an aspect
which has been given little attention in all these Balkan phenomena, viz, I
examine how the word Balkan and its derivatives have been and are being
used in daily verbal performance in the ex-Yugoslav regions, precisely in
SerBoCroatian1 (henceforth SBC) speaking area. In this paper, I use thewords Balkan, ‘the Balkans’ and the ‘Balkan world’. Balkan (in italics) is
a SBC word which corresponds to the English expression ‘the Balkans’.
However, the word Balkan is used in the discourse of the people of theBalkans with different meanings and implications, and its semantic featureis the focal point of this paper. ‘The Balkans’ represent the states on the
Balkan peninsula, i.e. Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Greek and exYugoslav countries (Slovenia may be excluded). The ‘Balkan world’ isused to denote a world with cultural and historical continuity, the borderof which does not directly correspond to a geopolitical map of the Balkan
peninsula but is conceived as a psychological reality for the Balkan people.
The first section of this paper treats lexicographic aspects of Balkan
and its derivatives, and the second section presents semantic and syntactic
features of Balkan in ex-Yugoslav media texts. In the third section, aremark on the meaning of Balkan in a self-identification context ispresented.

1. Balkan and Its Derivatives in Lexicographic Tradition
1–1 A collocation balkanska krčma (the Balkan tavern) has become
popular in verbal activities of political and socio-cultural life in postYugoslav countries. HER (2002), in which this collocation is entered as an
idiom for the first time in the dictionaries ever published in Yugoslav
regions, defines it as follows: loše, primitivno društvo u kojem se ne zna
tko pije a tko plaća; takvo opće stanje u društvu (a bad, primitive society,in which no one would know who drinks and who pays; such a state insociety). It is, therefore, a phrase for a chaotic, irrational circumstancewithout law and order, where someone’s action or reaction to others’
1

As there is no acknowledged notation that blankets the standard languages of Serbia,
Bosnia and Croatia, I use this name because of its succinctness and convenience withregard to the official name of the language used in Yugoslavia: Serbo-Croatian.

- 290 -BALKAN AS A SIGN

deeds may result in fuss and fighting. This collocation has been ascribedto Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981), the most renowned Croatian man ofletters of the twentieth century, with the following sentence: kad se u
balkanskoj krčmi ugase svjetla, onda sijevaju noževi (knives flash when
the lights disappear in the Balkan tavern). An image conjured up with thisphrase of Krleža exactly matches the cut-in illustration of the magazine
Kladderadatsh on 13 September 1903 (Fig. 1),2 a satirical picture of theBalkans at the beginning of the twentieth century just after the so-called
Macedonian revolution (Ilinden uprising) in August 1903.
I have not been able to ascertain when and where Krleža wrote thepassage in question,3 but it is indisputable that the phrase balkanska krčma
can be used as an apt quotation to allude to any historical event whichhappened in the ex-Yugoslav regions. Even in Slovenia, RTV Slovenia
used it as a title of the second episode of a documentary series ‘Dnevnik
nekega naroda’ [A Diary of Certain Nation] when the series was broadcast
at the beginning of 2005.4

According to the captionsin this illustration, two men
in uniform, Russian andAustrian, are directing
another man presented as atavern runner and a
caricature of the Ottoman
Empire, to bring order to
his tavern again and thetavern runner answers themthat the he is too helpless,while in Turk’s tavern,
people (the Balkan people)
are fighting.

Fig. 1: Illustration from Kladderadatch, 13 Sept. 1903
2

Kladderadatch is a satire magazine published in Berlin from 1848 to 1944. The
illustration inserted in this paper was retrieved 10 Nov. 2005 from <http://www.ub.uniheidelberg.de/helios/digi/kladderadatsch.html>.
3
I came across an information that Krleža wrote this in his piece Croatian Rapsodie(Krleža 1918), which turned out to be incorrect.
4
The second episode starts with the dawn of World War I and ends with the foundation of
the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918.

- 291 -KEIKO MITANI

Often reckoned as ‘prophetic’, the lights of balkanska krčma werequenched again ten years after the writer’s death, the mentioned Krleža’s
words and his balkanska krčma have been winning more popularity now
than any other time in the post-war ex-Yugoslav countries. The followings
are some recent examples retrieved from daily media texts:
Kao, da parafraziram Krležu, kao da opet neko u ovoj balkanskoj krčmi
gasi svetlo . . . (As if I paraphrase Krleža, as if someone turns off the light inthis balkanska krča . . .) (Danas (Belgrade, Serbia), 15–16 Mar. 2003)
Ako se ove najave ostvare, Bosna i Hercegovina ce ostati uvezana u čvoru
sa Srbijom i Crnom Gorom, čamiti u posljednjoj balkanskoj krčmi i tu čekati
da putovanje u mracnu proslost zamijeni putovanjem u budućnost. (If theseannouncements are to be carried out, Bosnia Hercegovina will stay boundtogether with Serbia and Montenegro, just to languish in the last balkanska
krčma and to wait there for a trip back to the dark past instead of a trip to the
future.) (Monitor (Mostar, BiH), 17 Feb. 2005)
postoje određene međunarodne političke snage koje usprkos svim povijesnimčinjenicama Hrvatsku žele isključivo u »balkanskoj krčmi«. (certain
international political powers exist, which, despite all historical facts, want
Croatia to be left exclusively in the ‘balkanska krčma’.) (Glas koncila(Zagreb, Croatia), 18 Apr. 2004)

Balkanska krčma is, as the examples cited above show, a metaphor for aplace where the ex-Yugoslav people do not want to be thought to belong
to but are afraid that they might be dwelling in: a dark, disorderly society
with bloodthirsty company. In short, it is an alternative expression forBalkan, a word representing the stigmatised world of conflict and hatred.
As is the case with this balkanska krčma, Balkan and its adjective seem tobe resurrected in the present ex-Yugoslav regions. In the following part ofthis section I treat historical aspects of the word Balkan and connotations
given to this word in lexicographical tradition in (ex-)Yugoslavia.
1–2 Western stereotypes about the Balkan people and their lands havemore than a century of history. As Todorova mentions, for example, when
De Windt depicted an incident of a vendetta in Montenegro andcommented that ‘life is valued here almost as cheaply as in China andJapan’ (De Windt 1907: 45; Todorova 1997: 118), the Balkans were as
East as China and Japan: a different, backward, incomprehensible world- 292 -BALKAN AS A SIGN

for the West. An image of violence had been so unquestionably confirmed
after number of conflicts and battles at the beginning of the twentiethcentury that Rebecca West must have found no difficulty in inserting
episodes of ‘Balkans’ in the introductory chapter of her work Black Lamband Grey Falcon: ‘I have heard the sound of three slashing slaps and awoman’s voice crying through sobs, “. . . Balkan! Balkan!” Once in
Nice, . . . a sailor lurched out of the next-door bar, and the proprietress ran
after him, shouting, “Balkan! Balkan!”’ (West [1941] 1994: 21). Since a
number of works have treated the question of how the Balkan world has
been created in the West (Finney 2003; Todorova 1997, 2004; Bjelić and
Savić 2002, etc.), I confine myself to quote one similar description from
American popular literature. A character in The Head of the House of
Coombe (1922) written by F. Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924), completely
extraneous to the subject of the tale refers to the Balkans as follows: ‘By
the way, somebody important has been assassinated in one of the Balkancountries. They are always assassinating people. They like it. Lord
Coombe has just come in and is talking it over with grandmamma’.
These writings thus affirm that the stigmatised stereotypes of theBalkans and the Balkan people had been widespread throughout theWestern world by as early as the 1920s. How, then, have the word Balkan
and its derivatives been used in (ex-)Yugoslavia? Contemporary with
West’s ‘Balkan! Balkan!’, as quoted above, D. Radić used the wordbalkanac (inhabitant of the Balkans, a man from the Balkans) in his work
as following (Radić Kroz život 1935: 57, cited in RSHKNJ 1959: 273):
Želeo sam . . . da ne budem balkanac, već budem ispravan drug, koji shvata
brak kao ravnopravnu zajednicu. (I wanted to . . . not to be a Balkan, but
to be a righteous man who accepts marriage as an equal partnership.) Ten
years earlier than Radić, Prohaska describes ‘balkanac, na prijelazu ka
evropskoj civilizaciji (the Balkan, on his way towards European
civilisation)’ as ‘poluobraznovan, nesavjesni inteligent . . . vulgaran, aopet delikatan’ (a half-educated, unconscious intelligentsia, vulgar, butalso a delicate man) (Prohaska 1921). If a balkanac ‘on his way toEurope’ is a half-educated, vulgar but a delicate man, then a balkanac
staying in his homeland should be an uneducated, vulgar and animpertinent man. As these examples illustrate, the nucleus of the stubborn
image of balkanac was ingrained and lexicalised in the language of the
Yugoslav people at just about the same time that stereotypes for theBalkan people were built in the Western world.

- 293 -KEIKO MITANILet us turn to how Balkan and its derivatives have been treated as
constituents of the SBC lexicon in lexicographical history and verbal
practice in the Yugoslav period. Table 1 shows the entry distribution ofBalkan and its derivatives, the adjective B/balkanski and the person noun
B/balkanac, B/balkanka (female form of Balkanac) in the dictionaries of
SBC from the first Serbian dictionary of Vuk Karadžić (1818)5 to the mostrecent HER.
As Table 1 shows, Balkan and its derivatives are all entered in the
dictionaries of SBC after World War II, with lexicographical tradition of
distinguishing the derivatives of Balkan with uppercase B and those withlowercase b, the former referring to the geopolitical area, the latter being areflection of pejorative meaning of Balkan. All these words are, as withthe case of balkanska krčma (cf. Section 2), found with a certain
frequency in various contexts of daily discourse, papers and journals in
ex-Yugoslavia countries today, and therefore, we might think that they
have always been used as often as today in daily political and cultural
discourses. Linguistic practice in the Yugoslav period was, however, quite
different. The data given in HČR (1999) are quite unexpected from thepresent-day view point (see Table 2): in the corpus consisting of five typesof sub corpora with different genre (prose, verse, newspapers, drama andschool textbooks), each of which comprises 200,000 words from texts
published between the 1950s to early 1970s in Croatia, only 7 examples ofbalkanski are attested, and of these seven none occurs in the newspaper
corpus. B/balkanac and B/balkanka aren’t attested at all.6 The occurrence
5
In Karadžić’s ‘Srpski rječnik’ (Serbian dictionary) none of these words including theword Balkan, are entered. This is not strange, at least for the first edition published in 1818,
as it was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century when this word was selected by aGerman geographer to denote the geographic area which we call ‘the Balkans’. That
Karadžić’s successors continued to ‘omit’ the word Balkan and its derivatives in the later
editions must be interpreted otherwise (maybe because their idiolect was such that they
were not aware of the geopolitical significance of what these words designate, or merely
because they were reluctant to alter Karadžić’s original edition), but it does not mean that
Balkan was not used in the nineteenth century. Gjalski (Ksaver Šandor, 1854–1935), a
Croatian writer, for instance, uses Balkan in his Pod starim krovovima (1886): Kud ćeš dase prevarimo pored činjenica, da se od Urala do Balkana širi jedna ista krv, ori ista riječ iista pjesma. (What is the use of being mistaken, when the fact is that there spread one andthe same blood from Ural to Balkan, same language and same songs echo throughout
there?)
6
Data for Balkan cannot be obtained as proper nouns are excluded in this frequency
dictionary.

- 294 -BALKAN AS A SIGN
Table 1 Entry distribution of Balkan and its derivatives in the dictionaries of SBC
BalkanBalkanski

balkanski

Balkanac/
Balkanka

balkanac/balkanka

Karadžić (1 izd., 1818)

*

*

*

*

*

Karadžić (4 izd., 1935)

*

*

*

*

*

Broz and Iveković (1901)

*

√

*

*

*

RSHKNJ (1959)

√

√

*

√

√(1)

RSHKJ (1967)

√

√

√

√

√(1)

RHJ (2000)

√

√

√

√

HER (2002)

√

√

√

√

√

RMJ (1961)

*

*

*

*(2)

*

SSKJ (1994)

*

√

√

*(2)

*

(1)

Only the masculine form balkanac is entered.
(2)
Macedonian and Slovenian forms are B/balkanec.

Table 2 Occurrence of balkanski and other related adjectives in HČR
corpus genres
entry (type)

prose

verse

drama

newspaperschooltextbooktotal
occurrences

balkanski

√

√

√

*

√

7

evropski(European)

√

√

√

√

√

106

jugoslavenski(Yugoslav)

*

*

*

√

√

208

hrvatski(Croatian)

√

√

√

√

√

133

srpski(Serbian)

√

*

*

√

√

35

- 295 -KEIKO MITANIof other related words underscore the total low frequency of balkanski:
Evropski (European) is found 106 times, Jugoslavenski (Yugoslav) 208
times, hrvatski (Croatian) 133 times and srpski (Serbian) 35 times.
That balkanski is not attested in the newspaper corpus should beremarked, too, for the adjective in question occurs rather frequently inpresent-day media texts. As the newspaper corpus of HČR is compiled
from five Croatian daily papers in 1975, as listed in the Table 3, the issuesof the same newspapers still published in Croatia on 1 December 2005 are
examined and compared with the data presented in HČR.
As listed in Table 3, balkanski is found 6 times in three newspapers
issued on 1 December 2005. We cannot compare the data of Balkan as
proper nouns are not included in HČR, but it is hardly conceivable that anoun (in this case Balkan) would occur frequently while its adjectives are
rarely found in one and the same corpus.
Summing up what has been noted above, we cannot help agreeing
with Todorova, who describes the strategy the Balkans imposed onthemselves after World War II as such that ‘the feeling of Balkan
commonality was pushed aside’ (Todorova 1997: 140). The rareoccurrence of balkanski attested in HČR is to be understood as anindication that Tito’s Yugoslavia, likewise the other Balkan states,
institutionalised its linguistic practice in such a manner that the word
Balkan together with its derivatives, as well as its memory, was removed
from daily use as if they were obsolete ones.

Table 3 Occurrence of balkanski in the Croatian daily newspapers used in HČR
Newspaper Title(1)Issuessurveyed

Vjesnik(Zagreb)

Slobodna
Dalmacija(Split)Novi List(Rijeka)Glas
Slavonije(Osijek)

Borba(Zagreb
edition)Total
occurrences

1975(2)

0

0

0

0

0

0

1 Dec. 2005

2

0

3

1

(1)

6

In the parentheses are given the city names indicating where each title is published. Borba ceased tobe published in Croatia after the Croatian independence from SFRJ.

(2)

Searched issues are: 21 Apr., 21 June, 21 Sept., 21 Dec. of 2005.

- 296 -BALKAN AS A SIGN

Obviously, the resurrection of the word Balkan and its derivatives is
not accidental but is due to the fall of the communist regime and thecollapse of Yugoslavia which was followed by civil war in the 1990s. The
Western world began to use the word Balkan to refer to (ex-)Yugoslav
turmoil and the post-war clean up of this turmoil, and the ex-Yugoslav
countries, as if keeping step with the West, started to recruit the word
Balkan. But it was not only the frequency that has changed as the shade ofmeaning appears to have changed as well. The word balkanac was alreadycharged with pejorative meaning in the dictionaries of the Yugoslav period
and was defined as ‘surov, primitivan čovek (coarse, primitive man)’(RSHKJ 1967), surov, neuglađen čovek (rough, rude man)’ (RSHKNJ
1959), but it is specified with more concrete representation as ‘onaj koji seu društvu ponaša sirovo, koji ne usvaja stil i vrijednosti života u Europi7(one who behaves rude in society, who does not acquire the styles andvalues of European life)’ in the post-war HER. The word Balkan, which
was defined solely as a geopolitical name in previous dictionaries, isexplicated in addition to neutral geographical meaning as surova iprimitivna sredina (o kulturnom i političkom životu) (coarse, primitive
surroundings, about cultural and political life). The relentless, rather
masochistic way HER defines Balkan and its derivatives 8 may partly
indicate a Balkanophobic ozračje (atmosphere) characteristic of the
Croatian intelligentsia, but represents, I presume, the overall feelings of
ex-Yugoslav regions, which experienced war at the end of the twentiethcentury and were imposed to think that they fall far short of avowing that
7

In Croatia, the word for Europe is Europa, not Evropa.
The other derivatives of Balkan are: balkanizacija, balkanizam, balkanstvo, balkanština,
and the verb balkanizirati. All these derivatives have unfavourable meaning in definitionof HER: balkankzacija, a direct loan of ‘balkanisation’, initially used in the Western
geopolitical discussion in the early twentieth century, is defined as ‘stanje teritorijalne
rascjepkanosti među državama na nekom području i nesposobnost postizanja minimalnog
dogovora da bi se zaštitili zajednički interesi (a situation in which a certain region isdivided into small countries and these are not possible to cooperate for reciprocity),balkanizam is, besides as a linguistic term, described as ‘ono što je balkansko (poshvaćanjima ili preduvjerenjima u Zapadnoj i Srednjoj Europi)’ (what is assumed to be
Balkan, understood or prejudiced as such in the Western and Middle Europe). The words
balkanstvo and balkanština are ‘ukupnost primitivizma i nečasnih postupaka u javnom,
kulturnom i političkom životu što se po preduvjerenjima u Zapadnoj i Srednjoj Europi
smatra tipičnom za Balkan’ (all what is uncivilised and discreditable behaviour in public,
cultural and political life, deemed as typical for the Balkans by the prejudice of the West
and Middle Europe).
8- 297 -KEIKO MITANI

they are a part of Europe. In fact, it is worth noting that a Balkan-Evropa
contrast that could be sensed already in Prohaska (Balkanac ka Evropskoj
civilizaciji, as previously quoted) has become more conspicuous. Nabalkanski način (in a Balkan style) is, for example, contrasted with na
evropski način (in a European style); the following passage by Svetozar
Marović, the incumbent president of Serbia and Montenegro,
transparently illustrates how this contrast should be used: —nama ovdje
treba da se pitanje sudbine Crne Gore riješi na evropski, ne na balkanski
način, da riješimo ne iracionalnošću nego razumnom, sporazumom, a nesvađom, konfliktima, podjelama, već dogovorom koliko je to moguće.
(Here, it is necessary for us to resolve the future course of Montenegro ina European style, not in a Balkan style, not irrationally but with reason
and agreement, not by fighting, conflicting and breaking up, but by
negotiating if at all possible.) (Vijesti, 15 May 2005)

2. Semantic and Syntactic Feature of Balkan
If ‘word’ is a conventional term for a ‘sign in a language system’, and asign consists of a combination of ‘signifiant’ and ‘signifié’ in Saussurian
terms, it can be stated that Balkan as a ‘sign’ is frequently used in exYugoslav media and other discourses but it’s ‘signifiant-signifié’combination pattern is not univocal. In addition to the original geopoliticalmeaning, Balkan is used to refer to a particular part or parts of the Balkans.
It can also be a ‘signifiant’ for an imaginary Balkan world. Thus, at least
the following four definitions of Balkan are discernable in scrutinising
ex-Yugoslav media texts:9
1. A geographic or geopolitical area where the Balkans are located:tržište na Balkanu (market in the Balkans); Makedonija želi biti
sljedeća zemlja sa Balkana koja će početi pregovore o članstvu sa
EU (Macedonia hopes to be the next country which will start
membership negotiation with EU from the Balkans) (Slobodna
Bosna); zona slobodne trgovine na Balkanu (the Free Trade Area of
the Balkans); problemi država na Balkanu (problems of the Balkancountries) (Novi List (Croatia))
9

Examples, of which sources are not given, are expressions found elsewhere in the media.

- 298 -BALKAN AS A SIGN

2. A part or parts of the Balkans; certain (which may be but notnecessarily all) states on the Balkan peninsula: okupilo se prekošezdeset pisaca, izdavača, prevodilaca i novinara sa Balkana (morethen 60 writers, publishers, translators and journalists frommany/some Balkan countries are gathered together) (Slobodna
Bosna); nije porijeklom sa Balkana (He is not from somewhere in
the Balkans), mi djevojke sa Balkana (we, girls from the Balkans)(Slobodna Bosna)
3. ex-Yugoslav regions (Slovenia is excluded in general): ratni zločin
na Balkanu (war criminals in the Balkans); ključna godina zaBalkan (Key year for the Balkans) (Vreme (Serbia)); brzog ijednostavnog rešavanja za Balkan nema (there is no quick andsimple resolution for the Balkans) (Vreme); Al kaida je još prisutna u
BiH i na Kosovu, a njeni članovi sa Balkana učestvuju uterorističkim napadima u Evropi (Al kaida is still in BiH and on
Kosovo, and their members from the Balkans are taking part in
terrorist attacks in Europe) (Vreme); izbijanijem rata na Balkanu(with the blow-up of war in the Balkans) (Novi List)
4. the Balkan world, which is a historical and cultural continuity andwhich can be discerned by the people from, and in the Balkans, as‘theirs’: Ne znam da li još prihvataju mitologiju o Balkanu kao
prostoru na kome . . . sukobi i ratovi izbijaju u redovnim
intervalima . . . (I don’t know whether they (i.e. representatives from
Europe) still accept the mythology on Balkan as a space where . . .
conflicts and wars break out at regular intervals) (Vreme); sav ovaj
Balkan, to je ludo, to je nevjerojatno, od Hrvatske do Rumunjske i
Makedonije, svi su isti!) (All this Balkan, it’s insane, it’s incredible;from Croatia to Romania and Macedonia, all are the same!) (Feral
Tribune (Croatia))Thus, to use the word Balkan means to select at least one of thesesignifiés: especially notable is the usage of Balkan in the sense of 3; it is a
usage of synecdoche, a type of metaphor that functions in whole-part
alternation; a word which otherwise denotes an entity, which is used torepresent its part, and vice versa. That ex-Yugoslav people often rely on
this synecdoche of ‘whole in lieu of part’ even when they could use proper,
individual words that would precisely denote the part in question, such as- 299 -KEIKO MITANI(ex-)Yugoslavia or Bosnia, should be attended to, since it suggests that theusage of Balkan has been incorporated in the verbal behaviour of thesepeoples’ self-identification process. We will return to the relationshipbetween Balkan and the self-identification in section 3.
Let us now turn to the syntactic aspect of Balkan and examine if its
polysemic feature depicted above is relevant to the syntactic behaviour.
Table 4 below shows the syntactic distribution of Balkan attested inthemedia texts from ex-Yugoslav countries (for the details of sources seenotes under Table 4).
The second line in Table 4 gives total tokens of Balkan in each
corpus: it should be noted that all types of occurrences of Balkan are
included, namely, the usages of bare Balkan (i.e. without modifier),
usages in proper nouns (ex. enterprise names, festival names),organisation names such as Međunarodna komisija za Balkan (TheInternational Committee on the Balkans), ICG za Balkan (TheInternational Crisis Group (ICG) Balkan Projects), and Balkan with amodifier such as zapadni Balkan (the Western Balkans) are counted．

Table 4 Syntactic distribution of Balkan (clause subject and locative)
BallkanSlobodna Bosna

Vreme 1

Vreme 2

Total tokens: number (per cent)536 (100.0%)307 (100.0%)377 (100.0%)

Clause subject: Balkan
Locative: na Balkanu

15 (2.8%)217 (40.5%)

16 (5.2%)
158 (51.5%)

12 (3.2%)
64 (17.0%)

corpora10:
Slobodna Bosna: weekly, Sarajevo (Bosnia Hercegovina), No. 386 (8 Apr. 2004)–No. 464 (6 Oct.
2005): online PDF versions acquired from <http://www.slobodna-bosna.ba/>
Vreme: weekly, Belgrade (Serbia): DVD ‘Elekronska arhiva: 1997–2005’
Vreme 1: No. 430 (16 Jan. 1999)–No. 480 (18 Mar. 2000)
Vreme 2: No. 708 (29 July 2004)–No. 757 (7 July 2005)
10
These journals are chosen for their availability as corpora but the choice is not sheerily
arbitrary: the journals are from different parts of ex-Yugoslavia, one from Bosnia
Herzegovina and the other from Serbia, so that they could reflect the different verbal
practice in relation to the usage of Balkan; My aim to select the period from 1999 to 2000
(Vreme 1) and 2004 to 2005 (Vreme 2) is to observe the verbal practice of the period when
Serbia and Montenegro (Yugoslavia, at that time) was in the most critical situation with the
Kosovo war and NATO air attack, and that of the recent time of Serbian recovery after the
Milošević regime. Croatian media should be included but in fact there was no paper-media
available to serve as a corpus.

- 300 -BALKAN AS A SIGN

As is displayed in Table 4, the usage of bare Balkan as a clausesubject is very low in frequency: it is not higher than 5 per cent in each
corpus.11 The low frequency of Balkan in the subject position contrasts
with the evidently high occurrence of bare Balkan in the locative
prepositional phrase na Balkanu. It is the most frequent syntagma in all
types of usage of Balkan, with and without the modifier; the number of
prepositional na Balkanu accounts for about 50 per cent of all tokens ofBalkan in Vreme 1 and Slobodna Bosna. Vreme 2 shows a lower
proportion but its frequency is still the highest in all occurrences ofBalkan in this corpus. For reference, the distribution of main prepositional
phrases with bare Balkan is presented in Table 5.
The data from the corpora suggest that the primary function of bare
Balkan is, whatever its signifié may be, to indicate a space for some action
or event to take place, and that the function as a clause subject is rather
peripheral. Why does Balkan behave like this? Is this idiosyncratic forBalkan? In order to answer this question, I examined how the word
Evropa is used in the same corpora. Evropa has a good reason to becontrasted as, like Balkan, it is a geopolitical term, it can be as ambiguous
in relation to its signifiés as Balkan, and as we have surveyed in theprevious section, there is a tacit understanding in linguistic practice in
SBC that Evropa is as an antonym of Balkan. The result is listed in Table 6.

Table 5 Occurence of main prepositional phrases in the corpora:
Vreme 1

Vreme 2

Slobodna Bosna

na Balkanu (on the B.)

158

64

za Balkan (for the B.)

15

5

32

sa Balkana (from the B.)

5

2

28

na Balkan (onto the B.)

5

3

8

217

Table 6 Syntactic distribution of Evropa (clause subject and locative)
EvropaTotal tokens: number (per cent)

Slobodna Bosna
1548 (100.0%)

Vreme 11168 (100.0%)

Vreme 21039 (100.0%)

Clause subject: Evropa

70 (4.8%)

92 (7.9%)71 (6.8%)

Locative: u Evropi

295 (19.0%)

202 (17.3%)

153 (14.7%)

11

Examples of subject Balkan with a modifier, such as zapadni Balkan, are attested 5
times in S.B., 7 times in Vreme 2, none in Vreme 1.

- 301 -KEIKO MITANIAs is the case with Balkan, all occurrences including proper nouns,
organisation names (ex. Vijeće Evrope Council of Europe), and usages
with modifiers such as zapadna Evropa (West Europe), istočma Evropa(East Europe) and jugoistočna Europa (South East Europe, which actuallydenotes the Balkans) are included in the total tokens. The proportion ofbare Evropa as a clause subject in all usages of Evropa is under 10 per
cent in each corpus, which is not significantly yet slightly higher than thesubject proportion of Balkan in total usages of Balkan. To add to it,
Evropa is different from Balkan in that the locative prepositional u Evropi
is not so remarkably frequent in the total occurrence of the word as is thecase with na Balkanu.
Thus the data seem to support the idiosyncratic feature of Balkan inthat it is primarily used in the locative, i.e. to denote a place for something
to take place, but it is difficult to serve as a clause subject. As for a subject
function, Evropa does not appear significantly more frequently than
Balkan, and in this respect these two words do not differ so much. An
important difference is found, however, in subject feature of these twowords. The Data from the corpora show a clear tendency that Balkan isused as a subject of a sentence which includes a copula (see 1–5 below),
BECOME sentence (6–7), REMAIN sentence (8–9) and a subject of asentence which includes a passive form of the verb (10–12), but it cannot
function as an agentive subject of sentence with an active verb12 (V. is for
Vreme, S.B. is for Slobodna Bosna):(1) Balkan je u krizi. (Balkan is in crisis.) (V. 465, 4 Dec. 1999)(2) Balkan je kudikamo složenija stvarnost. (Balkan is a far morepuzzling reality.) (V. 477, 26 Feb. 2000)(3) Balkan je područje sa najviše ratova u Evropi u ovom stoleću.
(Balkan is a region where battles happened most frequently inEurope in this century.) (V. 461 supplement, 6 Nov. 1999)

12

There is indeed an instance, in which Balkan is the subject of sentence with an active
verb: ‘(Balkan) trpi i nasleđe propalih projekata izgradnje nacija’. (Balkan suffers andinherits failed projects of making nations.) The subject of verbs such as trpjeti (suffer) or
nasleđiti (inherit), unlike that of typical active verbs such as ‘make’ and ‘do’, is not an
active agent but a ‘patient’ in linguistic terms, i.e. one who receives something or get
affected by some other participant in an event. These verbs are therefore active ingrammatical voice, but passive in meaning.

- 302 -BALKAN AS A SIGN

(4) Balkan je mesto gde se interesi i politike EU-a i SAD konačno
susreću. (Balkan is the place where interests and politics of EU and
USA finally meet.) (V. 734, 27 Jan. 2005)(5) Balkan, izuzev Kosova, više nije predmet interesa tamošnje
administracije. (Balkan, except for Kosovo, is no more an object ofinterest of their administration.) (S.B. 428, 27 Jan. 2005)(6) Izgleda da Balkan i njegova istorija polako definitivno postaje
egzotični rub civilizacije. (It looks like that Balkan and it’s history
are slowly but definitively becoming an exotic periphery ofcivilisation.) (V. 462, 13 Nov. 1999)(7) što je Balkan postao višestruki problem Evrope (that Balkan
became a multiple problem of Europe) (V. 461, 6 Nov. 1999)(8) Balkan ostaje posljednji kamen spoticanja na putu jačanja
demokratije i sigurnosti u Evropi. (Balkan remains the laststumbling stone for Europe to enhance democracy and security.)(S.B. 386, 8 Apr. 2004)(9) Balkan će vjerovatno ostati najnestabilniji region u Evropi.
(Presumably, Balkan will remain the most unstable region in
Europe.) (S.B. 428, 27 Jan. 2005)(10) jedinstvena crta kojom se definiše Balkan (sole trait with which
Balkan is defined) (V. 468, 25 Dec. 1999)(11) da se Balkan uključi u procese modernizacije (so that Balkan will
be included into process of modernisation) (V. 461 supplement, 6
Nov. 1999)(12) da će za desetak godina čitav Balkan biti ‘evropeizovan’ (that inten years the entire Balkan will be ‘europeanised’) (V. 725
European forum, Nov. 2004)
In contrast with Balkan, Evropa can be used, not to mention as a subjectof BE and BECOME sentences (13–15), and a subject of other intransitive
verbs (16), as a subject of active verbs, which suggests that it is conceived
as an entity with a will to act and control something (17–20):(13) Evropa jeste u dubokoj krizi. (Europe is indeed in deep crisis.) (V.
756, 30 June 2005)(14) Buš je poručio da je Evropa ‘najvažniji partner’ (Bush sent wordthat Europa is ‘the most important partner’) (V. 739, 1 Mar. 2005)- 303 -KEIKO MITANI(15) da će . . . Evropa postati američki vazal (that . . . Europa will becomea vassal of the USA) (S.B. 407, 2 Sept. 2004)(16) U zaključku izvještaja stoji da se Evropa zagrijava brže negoostatak svijeta (In the conclusion, the report says that Europa iswarming more rapidly than other part of the World) (S.B. 406, 26
Aug. 2004)(17) Evropa je dobila šansu da afirmiše svoju zajedničku politiku na
Balkanu (Europe got an opportunity to affirm its common policy
towards the Balkans) (V. 455, 17 July 1999)(18) izvesno je da će Evropa gledati svoj interes i da će druge, zemlje u
razvoju isključiti sa svog tržišta (it is certain that Europe will see its
interest and will exclude other developing countries from its
market) (V. 431, 23 Jan. 1999)(19) Evropa je imala veoma tešku istoriju obilježenu međusobnim
ratovima, tragedijama (Europe has had a very bitter history marked
by wars and tragedy) (V. 725 European forum, Nov. 2004)(20) zbog čega ga Evropa izuzetno ceni i voli (because of this, Europe
exceptionally appreciates and loves him) (V. 730, 30 Dec. 2004)
Idiosyncrasy of Balkan in syntax and semantics observed in exYugoslav media texts is, to be stated again, that the word can be used todenote a location, or an object which is to be characterised, described andaffected by other participants of event, but is not used as an agentive
subject of an active verb. This feature of Balkan is contrasted with that ofEvropa in that the latter can function as an agentive subject, and thefunction to denote location is less notable than with the case of Balkan(frequency of the locative propositional u Evropi in total occurrence ofEvropa is obviously lower than that of na Balkanu in total occurrence ofBalkan). Cognitive linguists would claim that the word Balkan can beconceptualised as a ‘ground’, or a ‘landmark’ by Lagnecker, but isdifficult to be conceptualised as a ‘figure’ or a ‘trajector’, while Evropa
can be a ‘figure’ as well as a ‘ground’.
What makes Balkan behave like this? What is crucial for the different
behaviour of Balkan and Evropa? Let us try to interpret this in terms ofdifference of saliency in ‘figure-ground’ opposition. A ‘ground’ designatesa space where an event takes place but it does not take part in event as aparticipant. This feature of ‘ground’ is in harmony with its peripheral
position in syntax as an adjunct. It may be enough, then, for a locus of- 304 -BALKAN AS A SIGN

event not to be princely articulated but to be mentioned with its
hypernym; to be represented by an alternative word with wider, more
ambiguous meaning may be sufficient. Balkan in synecdoche of a ‘wholepart relationship’ stands for any part of it, and therefore it can be used as a‘signifiant’ for any locality in the Balkans. Unlike ‘ground’, a ‘figure’, oran agentive subject in a syntactic term, is a core participant of an eventthat must be far more salient than a ‘ground’, and it should be especiallyso for recipients of informative texts. The entity in question is often
requested to be specified. In this regards, the chance for Balkan to appear
as an agentive subject must be restricted. After observing the polysemouscharacter of this word, we are aware that Balkan, whenever used, stands
for either a particular part of the Balkans as a hypernym, or signifies thewhole Balkans as an entity. In either case, Balkan as an agentive clausesubject might be possible only when activity and benefit of some part(s)of the Balkans would be consistent with those other part(s), andcooperation among the members of the Balkans would be secured withrespect to the matter in question. However, such a case is hardly to be
expected in the Balkans at this time, as it is a region with internal conflicts
and opposition: the whole cannot be a consistent entity that acts for its
own good, a part which lacks cooperative relationships with other part(s)cannot be represented by the whole. The specificity of the Balkans
reflected in the syntactic feature of Balkan can be highlighted bycontrasting with the current state of Europe and the usage of Evropa. As
the presented examples with Evropa above reveal, Evropa denotes not
only a geographic scope as is in the example (16), but also a political unit
(ex. 17 as well as 13) and an economic unit or a market in the global
economic context (ex. 18). In instance (19) Evropa is conceived as ahistorical entity and the usage of (20) suggests that Evropa signifies a civilsociety which is understood to have a common cultural value. Evropa is
indeed, like Balkan, a word for a region consisting of many states withdifferent nations and various historical backgrounds, but unlike Balkan, it
can be a sign, the signifié of which is a political, economic and cultural
entity institutionalized as EU.
We should notice, however, that the idiosyncrasy of the word Balkan
so far observed is not inherent in this word. Circumstances that the(ex-)Yugoslav people are living in are transforming, and language changes
along with society. If the time comes when ex-Yugoslav countries willfind common interests among themselves and with other Balkan countries,- 305 -KEIKO MITANI

for example in the future course of EU integration, which is becoming
conceivable, then the word Balkan, as long as it will keep being used, will
have the potential to appear as an agentive subject as Evropa does in thecurrent situation.

3. Balkan in Self-identification
Despite the negative, stigmatised implication attached to Balkan and its
derivatives, as we have observed in the previous section, the ex-Yugoslav
people use the word Balkan when they talk about places where they liveor they are from, and where things related to them happen, videlicet, they
use the word Balkan in self-reference or in self-identification contexts. To
use the word Balkan in self-identification discourse is, stated alternatively,
to articulate (intentionally or unintentionally) the belonging to the world
which is called Balkan. What is then the sense of ‘belonging to Balkan’
like? It is beyond the scope of this paper to deal with this question in full
as it would require an examination from all angles, including historical,
cultural and ethno-psychological. I therefore confine myself to give one
example as a key to address this matter, and present a brief remark in
relation to what is the Balkan identification.
Yugoslav rock songs have been revived recently in ex-Yugoslav
countries. It’s not only the middle aged who remember the dobra stara
vremena (good old times), but it’s also the younger generations without
the clear memory of the time of bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood andunity) who enjoy Yu-rock music from the end of 1970s to the middle of
1980s. An old hit ‘Balkan’ by Azra, a Zagreb-based rock band, has beenplaying the lead in this Yu-rock revival scene (cf. Ugrešić 2003).
Why this song has been revived and favoured by the youth of exYugoslav regions, both in Croatia and Serbia? It may be simply because,
as a member of an amateur rock band in Zagreb told me (personalcommunication), that it is a simple, nice piece and easy to perform, but
may be because what this song describes fits into the circumstances ofpost-war ex-Yugoslav regions. What seems to be the key is the passage:‘We are Gypsy people cursed by fate’. Following this passage, probably
those who have been interested in the Yugoslav cinema recall the Serbian
film Ko to tamo peva/Who’s Singing Over There (Šijan [director] 1980).
The movie is about a band of people including two Romany (Gypsy) boys,- 306 -BALKAN AS A SIGN

who happened to travel together taking a bus bound for Belgrade; the dateof 5 April 1941 is crucial. After a succession of comical and tragicomic
incidents, towards the end of the movie one of travelers who dropped his
wallet out of his trouser pocket while he was outside the vehicle finds his
pocket empty. The Serbian (rather Yugoslav) fellow passengers definitely
think that the Gypsy boys have stolen the wallet and start to violently beatthem. While a scene which looks like a real balkanska krčma continues,
the bus arrives at Belgrade the next morning (6 Apr. 1941), when the city
is destined to be bombarded by the Nazi army. The bus is hit and so is thecity, and the bus explosion indicates the death of the passengers. The
movie ends with a scene of the two Gypsy boys coming out of the fumes
after the explosion into the foreground of the screen, singing their Gypsy
song. It may be not difficult to find an under-the-surface commonality
between the message of this film and what Azra sings in ‘Balkan’, if we
consider what the people in ex-Yugoslavia have gone through in their
twentieth century history. Romanys (Gypsies) are for the Yugoslav people
what the Yugoslav people are for ‘someone’ surrounding them; ‘Gypsies’
are entertaining companions at best, and inferior, second-class citizens
who are often considered to be guilty for any disastrous incident.
‘Gypsies’ are disturbing factors in society which can be dangerous for thestability and order in the communities around them. Let us not enter into
the question of what or who was ‘someone near to come to menace’ theYugoslav youth at the time when Azra released this song, but it can be‘Balkan’ (Štulić 1979, performed by Azra)
jednog dana nema me da nikada ne dodjem
prijatelje koje znam ne poznajem kad prodjem
kao da me nikada na svijetu nije bilo
kao da me njezino tijelo nije htjelo
Balkane, Balkane, Balkane moj
budi mi silan i dobro mi stoj
mi smo ljudi cigani sudbinom prokleti
uvijek netko oko nas dodje pa nam prijeti
ni bendovi nisu visee kao sto su bili
moj se amaterski priprema da sviri
Balkane, Balkane, Balkane moj
budi mi silan i dobro mi stoj

one day I do not exist as if I had never comefriends I know I don’t recognise as I pass by
as if I have never existed in this world
as if her body didn’t want me at all
Balkan, Balkan, my Balkan
be mighty and stand strong
we are Gypsy people cursed by fatealways someone near comes and threatens usrock bands are no more as they weremy amature band is preparing to play
Balkan, Balkan, my Balkan
be mighty and stand strong- 307 -KEIKO MITANI

stated that the message of ‘Balkan’ of Azra jibes with circumstances thatthe people of ex-Yugoslavia think they are condemned to live in: they areteasing their ‘Gypsies’—internal enemies—when suddenly they findthemselves at the mercy of ‘fate’ or some bigger power from outside.
Exposing the feeling of being ‘prokleti sudbinom (cursed by fate)’
appears to be a popular manner for the Balkan people when they want toexpress themselves: Azra sang it, another public figure from the Balkans,a Greek-born film director, Theo Angelopoulos tried to express it throughhis film work; he revealed it in his interview of Vreme, saying that he ‘isconcerned about the Balkan matters’ since he was going through ‘Balkan’as one body, and ‘He, i.e. a Greek-Albanian refugee boy in the film Mia
Aioniotita kai mia mera/Eternity And A Day (Angelopoulos [director]
1998), is a symbol for cursedness (ukletstvo) of the Balkan space and its
terrifying future’ (Vreme, No. 432, 30 Jan. 1999).
I do not maintain that people from and in the Balkans incontemporary Balkan societies are haunted by an old myth of Balkan, that
it is a world cursed by fate, destined to be everlastingly bloodstained, nor
do I assume that the Balkan world is identical for all those who identify
themselves as ‘from the Balkans’. For example, in his talk as the first Man
Booker International Prize winner, Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré (1936–)
is reported to present himself as ‘a writer from a peripheral part of theBalkans which have been a long while proclaimed exclusively as
notorious for all sort of malice: armed crash, civil wars, ethnic cleansing’(Slobodna Bosna, No. 448, 16 June 2005). While describing himself as‘one from the Balkans’, Kadaré must have been aware that once heexpressed his solidarity with Albanian people, supporting NATO’s
intervention in the Kosovo War to cease ‘the tragedy of Albanian
inhabitants on Kosovo’, which inevitably disclosed his political position
against Serbia. Thus, despite that he had been conscious of the fact thatthe Balkans are not unanimous but consist of disparate communities, eachwith a different make-up, he articulated the word Balkan to identify
himself. The Balkan world in Kadaré’s mental representation must havebeen different from that in the mind of Angelopoulos; there may be as
many Balkan worlds as number of people who are from the Balkans.
None the less, there seems to be ‘a sense of Balkan commonality’, toquote Todorova’s expression again, restored, or to state correctly,
developed anew throughout the 1990s and the first few years of twentyfirst century, since the fall of communism and Yugoslavia through the- 308 -BALKAN AS A SIGN

Yugoslav war to the present-day situation in which the ex-Yugoslav andother Balkan people are presented with a selection of their future, whether
to stay in balkanska krča or to go forward to live together na Evropski
način.
Articulation of a word with negative implications, such as Balkan, in
self-identification discourse may be interpreted as irony, mingled with aprotest against the Western stereotype and a touch of self-derision as well.
It is possible to understand the strategy of the people from the Balkans toactively use Balkan in terms of what I would like to designate ‘acollective feeling of resignation’. A Bulgarian playwright, Hristo
Boytchev precisely describes this feeling in his play ‘The Colonel Bird’(1996): after UN humanitarian aid, meant for the occupied zone in Bosnia,
was dropped accidentally five hundred kilometres away from Bosnia, aperson who found it elucidates this incident, stating that ‘they (i.e. The
UN) don’t know the difference. It’s all the Balkans to them. They weretold to drop the stuff over the Balkans and they’ve done’. This view of‘it’s all the Balkan’, which is primarily an external one that lumps
everything in the Balkans under the term of ‘Balkan’ and which has been
incorporated into the self-identification procedure of the Balkan people,
may partly explain why people from the Balkans, among which are exYugoslav people, use the word Balkan in their self-identification.
All factors so far mentioned may account for the recent popularity of
Azra’s ‘Balkan’ and the Balkan self-identification; a sense of belonging to
a community ‘bound by fate’, an irony intermingled with frustration and atouch of self-derision, and a feeling of resignation. Yet I should like tonote that Azra’s ‘Balkan’ carries another, positive implicature of Balkan, afeature of a robust, solid man who never emerges in political discourse nor
in refined talks, which the ex-Yugoslav intellect is fond of engaging in.
The message of ‘Balkan’ sounds to claim that however negatively
nuanced, Balkan is a stronghold for those who are living in it, after all andabove all, to be mighty and stand strong like Balkan, that is to be a Balkan.

Concluding Remarks
In this paper, we have observed the feature of the word (sign) Balkan inlexicographical tradition, in syntax and semantics in contemporary media
texts and in self-identification contexts of the ex-Yugoslav people. Balkan- 309 -KEIKO MITANI

is, as an example quoted in the section 2 (2) tells, kudikamo složenija
stvarnost (far more puzzling reality). As is stated at the end of the same
section, circumstances of the ex-Yugoslav countries are changing.
Language and verbal performance change along with the changes in thereal world. Usage and occurrence of Balkan will be a clue to understandthe change of language performance and of the society which uses it, andto keep up with Balkan will be our future task.

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