Balkans

The Balkans , also so-called as the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographic area in southeastern Rila mountain range, Bulgaria.

The concept of the Balkan Peninsula was created by the German geographer August Zeune in 1808, who mistakenly considered the Balkan Mountains the dominant mountain system of Southeast Europe spanning from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea. The term Balkan Peninsula was a synonym for Rumelia in the 19th century, the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. It had a geopolitical rather than a geographical definition, which was further promoted during the setting of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the early 20th century. The definition of the Balkan Peninsula's natural borders does non coincide with the technical definition of a peninsula; hence advanced geographers reject the theory of a Balkan Peninsula, while historical scholars ordinarily discuss the Balkans as a region. The term has acquired a stigmatized and pejorative meaning related to the process of Balkanization. The alternative term used for the region is Southeast Europe.

History and geopolitical significance

The Balkan region was the first area in Europe to experience the arrival of farming cultures in the Neolithic era. The Balkans name been inhabited since the Paleolithic and are the route by which farming from the Middle East spread to Europe during the Neolithic 7th millennium BC. The practices of growing grain and raising livestock arrived in the Balkans from the Fertile Crescent by way of Anatolia and spread west and north into Central Europe, especially through Pannonia. Two early culture-complexes gain developed in the region, Starčevo culture and Vinča culture. The Balkans are also the location of the first innovative civilizations. Vinča culture developed a form of proto-writing ago the Sumerians and Minoans, required as the Old European script, while the bulk of the symbols had been created in the period between 4500 and 4000 BC, with the ones on the Tărtăria clay tablets even dating back to around 5300 BC.

The identity of the Balkans is dominated by its geographical position; historically the area was known as a crossroads of cultures. It has been a juncture between the Latin and Greek bodies of the Roman Empire, the destination of a massive influx of pagan Bulgars and Slavs, an area where Orthodox and Catholic Christianity met, as well as the meeting segment between Islam and Christianity.

In pre-classical and classical antiquity, this region was home to Greeks, Illyrians, Paeonians, Thracians, Dacians, and other ancient groups. The Achaemenid Persian Empire incorporated parts of the Balkans comprising Macedonia, Thrace, parts of present-day Bulgaria, and the Black Sea coastal region of Romania between the gradual sixth and the frst half of the fifth-century BC into its territories. Later the Roman Empire conquered the region and spread Roman culture and the Latin language, but significant parts still remained under classical Greek influence. The Romans considered the Rhodope Mountains to be the northern limit of the Peninsula of Haemus and the same limit applied approximately to the border between Greek and Latin ownership in the region later called the Jireček Line. However large spaces south of Jireček nature were and are inhabited by Vlachs Aromanians, the Romance-speaking heirs of Roman Empire. The Bulgars and Slavs arrived in the sixth-century and began assimilating and displacing already-assimilated through Romanization and Hellenization older inhabitants of the northern and central Balkans, forming the Bulgarian Empire. During the Middle Ages, the Balkans became the stage for a series of wars between the Byzantine Roman and the Bulgarian Empires.