Through Another Europe: An Anthology of Travel Writing on the Balkans

This anthology is the first attempt to compile in a single volume a representative sample of travel writings on South-East Europe. Taking the seventeenth century as a starting point, the volume comprises over fifty passages from some of the most interesting and exciting British and American travelogues, many of which are long out of print. The collection includes the staple ingredients of the genre - market scenes, mountain treks, military escapades, audiences with kings, meetings with bandits - and eye-witness accounts of some of the major events of the last 400 years, from the Ottoman atrocities to the communist uprisings, the Eastern Crisis to the 1989 revolutions, the First and Second World Wars to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. While placing the extracts in historical context, the volume also examines the kind of stock images (both positive and negative) that travellers have relied upon to construct their portraits of Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the countries of the former Yugoslavia. In this way, the book offers a comprehensive introduction to British and American representations of the region.