Balkan Mountains

People have strong connection to it as a marker of their local identity because we build cities, we build villages.

All the ecosystem is focused on rivers in the Balkans and the Stara Planina and several other issues across the region.

Even in EU countries like in Slovenia, The water issues has been always something that mobilized locals, but also on a national level, much more than anything else, even more than air pollution as such.

But the thing is, we go back to the argument about green transition.

They talk about micro powers.

which are literally putting a river into a pipe, sometimes several kilometers long, up to one place I think I saw it, 18 kilometers, in order to accelerate the speed of the water, creating more energy, that's the logic behind it, but actually at the same time completely destroying the local environment because what has always been there disappears as such.

And this has caused major protest in the area called Stara Planina in southeastern Serbia, close to the border to Bulgaria, which is actually part of what we call Balkan mountains, that gives the name to the region as such.

And in this area, local population has organized as early as 2018, if I remember right, they were also in the closest, largest city niche, even like hip-hop bands and a lot of the local population organizing against these protests because there is, again, completely the same thing as with the other.

It looks very Bavarian, although when we get inside, it is heavily implied that this is somewhere near Yugoslavia.

Yes, in the Balkan Mountains.

Yes, they say on the inside.

And although they make it clear that it is within the Iron Curtain because they have to pass through the Iron Curtain in order to get here on the inside.

Yes, it's Bulgaria.

You knew that was the national anthem, didn't you? Proud Balkan Mountains, it's

called.

Yes, Bulgaria won in Vienna with Dara's Bangaranga.

... like these, these double perspectives here, where it's not just the Venetian perspective, it's also the Greek, but how on earth do I structure that? So I started drafting a version of the introduction that was basically going through like a, a macro view of Greek history being pretty constantly like one entity, um, since Rome shows up.

Okay, so you have like the city-states in Ancient Greece, and then Macedon shows up and it's very briefly one giant empire under Alexander from, you know, like the north Balkan Mountains all the way to, you know, the Indus River, and then it shatters immediately, and then it's a whole bunch of disparate kingdoms for 300 years, and then Rome shows back up, and then basically the entire Greek world is under the Roman Empire and it kind of transitions into the Byzantine, and then, you know, parts of it start to kind of fall away.

But that core in the Aegean basin, you know, Greece and Anatolia and Constantinople, are all kind of in this same world, and there's this, this kind of one Greek sphere going on.

And then Venice shows up and shatters that for the first time in like, you know, 1,500 years almost.

And then if you go further south, um...

So Rose Valley is separated from the Thracian Valley, which is the fourth region, by the Bal- the Balkan Mountains.

Okay.

And so you have, like, Thracian Valley right underneath Rose Valley.

And Thracian Valley is also called Thracian Lowlands, and, um, it's a warm continental clime, uh, climate.

And you have, like, the Balkan Mountains that create a rain shadow effect that keeps this region, like, hotter and drier than many regions, including Rose Valley, which doesn't have the, the, the, the rain shadow effect.

And they are mostly known for full-bodied red wines, uh, with basically two main grape varieties.

So you have the Mavrud, which is, as you said, in Greece, it's the Mavrudy.

In the northern part of it is a vast chain of mountains called now the Balkan.

In Alexander's day it was Mount Haemus.

This chain forms a broad belt of lofty and uninhabitable land and extends from the Black Sea to the Adriatic.

A branch of this mountain range, called Rhodope, extends southwardly from about the middle of its length, as may be seen by the map.

The name of this river was the Hebrus.

All this may be seen distinctly upon the map.

The Balkan, or Mount Haemus, as it was then called, formed the great northern frontier of Macedon and Thrace.

From the summits of the range, looking northward, the eye surveyed a vast extent of land, constituting one of the most extensive and fertile valleys of the globe.