While recently travellers are more and more obsessed with literary trips - popular, following The DaVinci Code, or more sophisticated, remaking Byron's journey around Europe, - the Balkans stood away from this trend.

One of the reasons is that the local languages - Slavonic, Greek, Romanian, Albanian or Turkish, - are not widely spoken, and a few books, written on them, have been translated.

There was no Dante, there was no Migel Servantes, nor was there Astrid Lindgren in the Balkans. Writers of European fame could in the past be counted on the fingers of one hand, Ivo Andrić, Ismail Kadare and Nikos Kazantzakis amongst them. Yet even they were not broadly popular, but rather known to savvier literature lovers.

The first real breakthrough was achieved only recently by Orhan Pamuk. His melancholic novels, offering an authentically local, but also understandable to foreigners look at Istanbul, became truly popular, especially after their author received a Nobel Prize for literature in 2006.

Reading Pamuk's novels is, we think, appetizing. This is why BalkanTravellers.com decided to offer further reading. It compiled a list of books on the Balkans, selected by journalists, translators and literature aficionados. We asked our colleagues which are the books, that made them fall in love with places in the Balkans, rediscover spots they thought they knew, or make them feel they've been to the places they read about, but had never visited. Such a list, we understand, can not be comprehensive. This is why our intention is to keep adding titles to it (in chronological order).

Yordan Yovkov, Légendes du Balkan. 1927. A magical prose by one of the best storytellers in the Balkans. The title may seem at first misleading, as the book contains not legends, but short stories. Amongst the main characters are a young gypsy, a freedom fighter, a shepherd. But the power of their passions, building up in just a couple of pages, is sweeping and of truly epic size. Link to Amazon.


Ivo Andrić. The bridge on the Drina. 1945. This novel is a lengthy history chronicle, developing in Eastern Bosnia. Tens of human stories evolve around an Ottoman bridge, built across Drina in the town of Višegrad, where East and West often clash through the centuries over the Balkans. The author is a Nobel prize for literature winner (1961). Link to Amazon.


Meša Selimović. Death and the Dervish. 1966. The book is cherished as an exquisite social portrait of Bosnia under Ottoman occupation. The dervish of the title is a moral monster, whose internal monologue is the spine of the narration. Link to Amazon.




Milorad Pavic. Landscape, painted with tea. 1988. Intense prose, in which every sentence is a piece of art, this is one of the most fascinating novels, written by a Balkan writer in the last several decades. Milorad Pavic, who came across as a controversial personality for its somewhat nationalistic behavior during the Yugoslavian wars, remains one of the best writers of the region. This imaginative novel, which allows its readers to choose in what sequence to read, combines Pavic's powerful imagination with his encyclopedic knowledge of Balkan history. A story of an architect, searching for his long lost father, evolves into several realities in different times, one of which offers a peak into the mysterious monastic life on Athon, Greece. Link to Goodreads.com

François Maspero, Balkans transit, Paris, Seuil, 1997. This French writer browsed the Balkans for five years - in search of another Europe. At a leisure pace that allowed him to meet people, he traveled from the Adriatic coast to the Black sea and from Kosovo to the border of Ukraine. The tale of his voyage, revealing both the misery and the grandeur of people, places and events, allows the reader to better understand what he calls a "vast cancerous network of borders." The book is richly illustrated by the photography of Klavdij Sluban.

Maria Todorova. Imagining the Balkans. 1997. This provocative work is based on a vast research of documents - from diplomatic records to journalistic travelogues. Walking along the line between reality and collective imagination, the author, who is of Bulgarian origin, traces the history of the ideas, which make the Balkans spinning around. Link to Amazon.

Jasmina Tesanović. Diary of a Political Idiot. 2000 (Cleis Press, San Francisco, California, 2000) Looking at the bright side of a war, this book celebrates humanity. Written by a Serbian journalist, opposing war in Kosovo, it is considered to be one of the most powerful books on the recent Yugoslav wars. Link to Amazon.

Ismail Kadaré. The Successor. 2003. Written as some kind of a social detective, the novel is a realistic, often adorned with black humor description of the Albanian society during the late years of Enver Hoxha's regime. The dictator, present in the book as The Guide, dominates over the criminal story as some kind of a Stone guest. The author received the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. Link to Amazon

Dubravka Ugrešić. The Ministry of Pain. 2004. This novel by the most famous contemporary Croatian writer is dedicated to post-Yugoslavian dilemmas, which tens of thousands of people in the Balkans were facing at the end of Milošević's regime. Taking place in Amsterdam, the book extrudes melancholy and feeling of belonging nowhere, experienced by many intellectuals, forced to emigrate from their native countries in the region in the 1990s. Link to Amazon

Patrick Leigh Fermor. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. 2004
This book is considered one of the most important travelogues of the twentieth century by many critics. Although it is now often described as a ‘companion text’ to the author’s later account of travels in Northern Greece, Roumeli (1966), the author reveals that he originally meant it to be ‘a single chapter among many’ that would cumulatively encompass his long travels and experience throughout Greek lands. Read the review by Christopher Deliso.

Orhan Pamuk. Istanbul: Memories of a City. 2003 This melancholic portrait of Istanbul reconstructs the city from about half a century ago. Retelling memories from his childhood and adolescent years, Pamuk builds a slow motion portrait of one of the most fascinating cities in the world. While the place is always seen as connecting East and West – geographically, as well as culturally, Pamuk family is described as caught between the two, its Western and liberal lifestyle in continuous struggle with conservative and aggressive Eastern currents in the society. Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2006, a year after this book was translated to English. Most of his novels describe in enchanting way contemporary Turkey, New Life and Snow most prominently. Link to Amazon


Elif Shafak. The Bastard of Istanbul. 2007. Lively, colorful and pleasant to read, this vibrant novel is one of the latest additions to your ultimate Balkan collection. Via the story of its passionate and rebellious main characters - 19-year old Asya and her American-Armenian cousin Armanoush, the book breaks one of the gravest taboos in Turkish literature, discussing the historical prosecution of Armenians. Link to Amazon


Kapka Kassabova. Street Without a Name. 2008. Kapka Kassabova is one of the internationally most renown Bulgarian writers. This is one of her latest books, written in English, for non-Bulgarian readership. Read the review by Nicholas Lezard for The Guardian.


Garden, Ashes. Danilo Kiš. 1975. Danilo Kis was one of the most striking writers of Former Yugoslavia, a daring artist with a pronounced ambition for artistry in his literary work. This is a piece of fiction that draws on the author's own experiences of childhood during WWII - a Jewish family migrating through Eastern Europe trying to avoid persecution. His detailed descriptive writing is velvety soft, the beauty of the nature counterpointing the off-key tones of the events, the discordant undercurrents in the plot. His writing is haunting and elegiac. In his introduction, another important writer, Aleksander Hemon, describes the book as 'an unmitigated masterpiece'. Link to Amazon

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Saša Stanišić. 2008. Writing on Visegrad after Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric is a great challenge, and Sasa Stanisic takes it by turning away from the perspective of a chronicler. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is a very personal story, written from the immediacy of personal involvement. The novel involves, but also goes beyond the author's personal experience in the recent Balkan wars. The child's viewpoint is also our own, for who can truly make sense of brutality? This is a moving and wonderfully written book that encompasses love, loss, fragmentation of place and identity, and portrays memorable characters. You can read a more detailed review here .
Link to Amazon


The Lazarus Project. Aleksander Hemon. 2009. The Lazarus Project mixes times and places – the death of an immigrant (Lazarus), in the USA over a century ago, and the travelling of a present day immigrant, the narrator Brik, back to his native Bosnia to research Lazarus' history. The story follows the journey of Brik and his friend photographer, and what begins as road narrative turns into an account of a nightmarish trip, as the two friends start encountering traces of the recent Balkan war. The main character increasingly comes to feel he is living in a world of violent hallucinations, composed of irresolvable paradoxes. Hemon's prose is disturbing, passionate, and sometimes very funny. Link to Amazon

BalkanTravellers.com thanks Atanas Chobanov, Borislav Stoyanov, Boyko Vasilev, Boyko Todorov, Dimitur Kamburov, Marie Vrinat, Matthew Brunwasser, Marina Karakonova, Polina Slavcheva, Rumyana Chervenkova and Vesela Cherneva for participating in this selection.