At once an emblem of modernization and a repository of Europe's ancient cultural heritage, a center of economic dynamism and an arena of profound political strife, the city in the Balkans remains the region's most enduring enigma. Ever since the publication of Nikolay Todorov's The Balkan City, a sweeping analysis of urban transformation in southeastern Europe over five centuries of Ottoman rule, scholars have attempted to provide a synthetic urban-historical account of this incredibly diverse and geopolitically significant region.
The edited volume Cities in the Balkans: Spaces, Faces, Memories understands itself as the spiritual successor to Todorov's pioneering account. It charts the trajectory of the modern city in the Balkans—not necessarily Todorov's site of capital accumulation and class stratification (per Maria Levkova-Muchinova), but an amorphous compound of sounds, memories, experiences, and policies that resonated and clashed with each other as national elites sought to emulate west European urbanization patterns (Roumiana Preshlenova). The turn of the twentieth century, with its competing ideological commitments, proved especially cacophonous to the urban dweller of the Balkans, exposed to western cultural achievements (Alexandra Milanova, Joanna Minkova Spassova-Dikova) and technological developments (Alexandre Kostov), as well as stubborn remnants from a disavowed Ottoman past (Andreas Lyberatos).
In this context, one of the most consistent themes weaving this volume together is that of the contested nature of modernization in southeastern Europe: As elites tried to impose western mores, urban grids, and rhythms on local denizens, they inadvertently unleashed powerful resistance from below that turned modernization attempts into disastrous (and oftentimes farcical) undertakings (Kalina Peeva). The comparative perspective shows the remarkable degree to which these modernization attempts and popular resistance tactics mirrored and influenced each other across national and urban contexts. It also amplifies the striking, and insufficiently understood, degree to which modernization advances and setbacks of the early twentieth century literally left their mark on the urban landscape, creating sites of contestation (Taksim Square) that continue to be of high political and cultural relevance in contemporary discussions around the meaning of neoliberalism and globalization in an ostensible geopolitical “periphery.”
These sites of political contestation are particularly evident in Yura Konstantinova's and Malamir Spasov's examinations of Thessaloniki, which emphasize the crucial role of minorities in the shaping of the modern Balkans in a period of mass displacement, nationalist ferment, and diasporic activism. As the Ottoman empire's most transnational city, Thessaloniki became a veritable political arena on which competing idea(l)s of the nation and the state clashed with oftentimes unpredictable and tragic outcomes. As Zorka Parvanova shows, the waves of nationalist ferment that engulfed the Balkans at the turn of the twentieth century did not necessarily portend the end of the Ottoman empire, but instead channeled political imaginations toward surprisingly inclusive and multinational conceptualizations of the state decades before such imaginaries became commonplace in western Europe. For the first time, minorities and women (as demonstrated by Georgeta Nazarska) became powerful agents of democratization and modernization, even if the constrained political parameters of the nascent liberal regimes following WWI limited marginalized groups’ agency.
Throughout the volume, the paradigms of Europeanization and modernization reign supreme, whether in the urban designs of national city planners or in the (much less-studied) experiences of urban dwellers (per Dobrinka Parusheva's observation). Though Europe certainly proved to be the Balkans’ most enduring modernization paradigm, the volume does not problematize what exactly “Europeanization” meant in the Balkan context, how it developed over time, and how competing visions of it cleaved the region amid nation-building, revolutionary activism, and international warfare. To be sure, the majority of the contributions suggest that “Europeanization” was as much an imagined process of creating and contesting elite allegiances as an actual process of transferring west European financial, technological, and symbolic capital into a continental periphery, yet the lack of differentiation between the different valences of this term risks obscuring who advocated becoming “European,” who implemented it, and whose interests it served.
Another point for further deliberation concerns the volume's geographic and national focus, which definitely falls on Bulgaria and the eastern Balkans (excepting Elmira Vassileva's and Antoaneta Balcheva's articles). In this way, too, it echoes Todorov's similarly oriented study, yet the fact that the western Balkans underwent quite a different trajectory due to the early nation-building process in Serbia and the growing influence of the Austro-Hungarian empire renders a more detailed integration of this part of the region within the overall framework of the study particularly desirable. Despite this deficit, the sustained attention to a variety of provincial towns as well as capitals, the recurrent emphasis on the Ottoman legacy throughout the region, and the intriguing entanglements between the Balkans and Asia Minor (Zorka Parvanova, Alexandre Kostov, Kalina Peeva) are considerable accomplishments of the volume, which further emphasizes the need to integrate the Balkans into non-European (and even global) frameworks.
Taken together, these contributions highlight the multifaceted history of the modern city in the Balkans while also charting new venues for academic research, particularly in terms of transnational developments, the role of non-governmental actors, and the relationship between the city and the village. At any rate, this volume provides an important contribution to an ostensibly well-understood phenomenon, urbanization, in a notoriously overlooked region, and this alone signals the necessity for expanding upon its stimulating, if at times tentative, propositions. While complementing our understanding of urbanization or modernization as extremely heterogeneous phenomena, this volume also jettisons the notion that the process of Europeanization unfolded osmotically without accounting for the agency of Balkan elites, citizens, and subjects. As new western ideas, technologies, and institutions continue to permeate the Balkans at a pace comparable with the early twentieth century, the region's citizens are making these innovations their own while also acknowledging the fact that the deep roots of the ongoing process of “Europeanization” lie precisely within the region they call home.
