Balkans

History of the Balkans - Every year (1000 - 2016)

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• published: 29 Apr 2016
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MUSIC (I DO NOT OWN THE MUSIC IN THIS VIDEO,THE AUTHORS ARE CREDITED IN THE VIDEO AND DOWN BELOW): Loki - Victory The Balkan Peninsula and the Balkans is a peninsula and a cultural area in Southeast Europe with different and disputed borders.[1] The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch from the east of Serbia to the Black Sea at the east of Bulgaria. The Balkans meet the Adriatic Sea on the northwest, Ionian Sea on the southwest, the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea on the south and southeast, and the Black Sea on the east and northeast. The highest point of the Balkans is Mount Musala 2,925 metres (9,596 ft) on the Rila mountain range in Bulgaria. From Antiquity through the Middle Ages, the Balkan Mountains had been called by the local Thracian[2] name Haemus.[3] According to Greek mythology, the Thracian king Haemus was turned into a mountain by Zeus as a punishment and the mountain has remained with his name. A reverse name scheme has also been suggested. D. Dechev considers that Haemus (Αἷμος) is derived from a Thracian word *saimon, 'mountain ridge'.[4] A third possibility is that "Haemus" (Αἵμος) derives from the Greek word "haema" (αἵμα) meaning 'blood'. The myth relates to a fight between Zeus and the monster/titan Typhon. Zeus injured Typhon with a thunder bolt and Typhon's blood fell on the mountains from which they got their name.[5] The earliest mention of the name appears in an early 14th-century Arab map, in which the Haemus mountains are referred to as Balkan.[6] The first attested time the name "Balkan" was used in the West for the mountain range in Bulgaria was in a letter sent in 1490 to Pope Innocent VIII by Buonaccorsi Callimaco, an Italian humanist, writer and diplomat.[7] The Ottomans first mention it in a document dated from 1565.[8] There has been no other documented usage of the word to refer to the region before that, despite the fact that other Turkic tribes had already settled earlier or were passing through the Peninsula.[8] There exists also a claim about an earlier Bulgar Turkic origin of the word popular in Bulgaria, however it is only an unscholary assertion.[8] The word was used by the Ottomans in Rumelia in its general meaning of mountain, as in Kod̲j̲a-Balkan, Čatal-Balkan, and Ungurus-Balkani̊, but especially it was applied to the Haemus mountain.[9][10] In Turkish Balkan means "a chain of wooded mountains" (balkan),[11][12] while in Bulgarian language the word balkan (балкан) means "mountain".[13] Another possibility to its etymology is related to Persian bālk meaning "mud", and the Turkish suffix an, i.e. swampy forest.[14] The name is still preserved in Central Asia with the Balkan Daglary (Balkan Mountains)[15] and the Balkan Province of Turkmenistan. A less popular hypothesis regarding its etymology is that it derived from the Persian Balā-Khāna meaning big, high, house.[citation needed] English traveler John Morritt introduced this term into the English literature at the end of the 18th-century, and other authors started applying the name to the wider area between the Adriatic and the Black Sea. The concept of the "Balkans" was created by the German geographer August Zeune in 1808.[16] During the 1820s, "Balkan became the preferred although not yet exclusive term alongside Haemus among British travelers... Among Russian travelers not so burdened by classical toponymy, Balkan was the preferred term."[17]