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The Balkans or Bust

All Around This World Eastern Europe Map featuring the Balkans

This week in our online class we visited the now-independent countries on Southeastern Europe’s Balkan peninsula that used to compose the nation of Yugoslavia. Though many people from the former Yugoslavia share history, culture and language, the region is, and always has been, multi-ethnic — home to a mix of European and Asian cultures and peoples who would spend centuries living intermingled, literally as neighbors, until some kind of shift, externally imposed or of their own doing, would tear them apart. Thankfully in class we did much more singing than historical hand-wringing. Over the next week, we’ll learn even more.

Happy Old New Year!

We end this week’s adventure on the Balkan Peninsula with a celebration of Vasilica, an “old new year” holiday, a tradition continued primarily by Orthodox Christians in Serbia and Macedonia, as well as by Muslim Roma. The holiday falls on the 14th of January, which is the date to which the new year on the old Julian calendar corresponds on the now globally accepted Gregorian calendar. The three day holiday actually kicks off the evening of January 13 with a Phari Rat, a “heavy night” feast, and consists of days full of family visits, and, most prominently in the Macedonian village of Vevchani, a raucous masquerade parade.