The Balkan Peninsula

THE Fates were unkind to the Balkan Peninsula. Because of its position, it

was forced to stand in the path of the greatest racial movements of the

world, and was thus the scene of savage racial struggles, and the

depositary of residual shreds of nations surviving from great defeats or

Pyrrhic victories and cherishing irreconcilable mutual hatreds. As if that

were not enough of ill fortune imposed by geographical position, the great

Roman Empire elected to come from its seat in the Italian Peninsula to die

in the Balkan Peninsula, a long drawn-out death of many agonies, of many

bloody disasters and desperate retrievals. For all the centuries of which

history knows a blood-mist has hung over the Balkans; and for the

centuries before the dawn of written history one may surmise that there

was the same constant struggle of warring races.