Marred by centuries of cruel outside domination, it is all but meaningless. No one can understand what a Balkanist has to say. Both syntax and grammar are tortured into incomprehensibility. Evasion dominates, a profusion of obscurantist verbal veils - twists and turns hiding a vacuous deposition. The intellectuals' love affair with a mostly fabricated past, their future-phobia and the ensuing culture shock all naturally follow from the premises of their disconsolate uniqueness.
Balkan intellectuals are all paranoid.
This is the Greek tragedy of this region. Nature here is more clever than humans. All over the world, intellectuals represent or act as the vanguard, the fifth column of new ideas, the resistance movement against the occupation of the old and the banal. Here in the Balkans, intellectuals preach conformity and do things the old, proven way, instituting protectionism against liberal trade. True, all regimes had their fig-leaf intellectuals and, with a few exceptions, the regimes in the Balkans are not hideous.