Защо и как бе измислен „балканският град“?
The “Balkan City” as a Historiographical Concept

Summary/Abstract: Geographical and historical studies usually present different types of cities in the Balkans: Greek, Roman, Byzantine, German, Slavic, Turkish/Oriental, etc. During the last decades, a number of studies tend to present the “Turkish” or “Oriental” cities in the region as “Balkan cities”. They insist that there are major differences between the cities in the Balkans during the Ottoman period and the so-called Islamic cities, and point fi rst and foremost to the rich and influential pre-Ottoman urban heritage. According to this view, Balkan cities were subjected to important oriental infl uences but preserved their most important characteristics and were modernized according to the European pattern (i.e., re-Europeanized) in the 19th-20th centuries. The present article attempts to examine the inner contradictions of this interpretation. It demonstrates that everything considered specifi c to the Balkan cities is in fact valid also for the cities in Anatolia and, in many cases, for a larger area. As a whole, the concept of the “Balkan city” results from an artifi cial retroactive “Europeanization” of the region’s history, which might be misleading with regard to the study of its urban past as well as the evaluation of its urban heritage.

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