Nawet po wytyczeniu granic pieśni pozostały

At a wedding in Sarajevo, a melody rises that my grandma would have recognized without being told its name. She never visited Bosnia. She was from somewhere I have never been — Şumen, in Bulgaria, and before that Selanik, before Selanik became Thessaloniki and the map changed below the family’s feet. But the melody would have been hers too. It was everyone’s, and no one’s. It existed before the borders did.

This is the quiet secret of the Balkans: the maps changed, the anthems changed, the textbooks changed — but something underneath all of it refused to be rewritten.

The separation that was not complete

The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 transformed the political map of Rumelia and the wider Balkan region. fresh states drew fresh lines across the same hills, river valleys, and marketplace towns where Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Roma, Albanians, Bosniaks and others had lived beside 1 another for generations. The lines were sharp. The separations were meant to be final.

What followed was not only political reorganization, but besides a cultural reclassification. Each fresh nation-state needed a clearer communicative of itself, and shared layers of past were frequently renamed, narrowed, or selectively remembered. Music, language, cuisine, dress, and ritual were increasingly sorted into national categories.

The logic was simple: if we share besides much, the borders make little sense.

But culture does not obey this logic. It never did.

The same fire

Every year, in early May, something happens across the Balkans almost simultaneously.

In Turkey it is called Hıdırellez. In Serbia and North Macedonia, Đurđevdan. In Romania, Sângiorz. In Bulgaria, Gergyovden. The names drift across languages like translations of a word that has no single origin. Bonfires are lit. Wishes are made. Branches of willow are hung on doors before dawn. Young people jump over flames. Spring is welcomed with akin gestures, in the same season, under different flags.

No 1 coordinated these events. No global body decided that the Balkans would share a spring ritual. It simply survived — in each country under a different name, wearing a different costume, but recognizable to anyone paying attention.

Goran Bregović’s “Ederlezi”, drawn from Romani musical tradition, made this shared ritual visible to the world. The song has been claimed by many listeners, but it cannot be reduced to a single nation. It belongs to the ritual itself, to the season, to the minute before culture was divided into ownership.

Whose börek is it anyway?

There is simply a peculiar kind of argument that happens across the Balkans, conducted in many languages, about food.

Who invented börek? Whose baklava is authentic? Does sarma belong to Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, or somewhere else entirely?

These disputes appear comic from the outside — and partially they are — but they uncover something real: everyone argues over the same dishes due to the fact that everyone grew up eating them. The argument is proof of a shared inheritance, even erstwhile it tries to deny it.

The Ottoman kitchen was not the kitchen of 1 people. It was a culinary civilization that moved through courts, markets, villages, ports, and household kitchens. It left deep traces in the Balkans — in dough, spices, stuffed vegetables, grilled meats, sweets, and tiny cups of coffee drunk slow at any hr of the day.

You can draw a border through a valley, but you cannot draw it through a recipe that has already entered thousands of homes.

The body remembers what authoritative narratives sometimes forget.

The music that kept coming back

In many Balkan countries, there is simply a form of popular music that cultural elites frequently distrust and average listeners proceed to love.

Chalga in Bulgaria. Turbofolk in Serbia. Tallava in Albania and Kosovo. Manele in Romania. The names differ, but the structure frequently feels related: Romani rhythms, Turkish and Arabic melodic colours, local languages, electronic beats, wedding energy, heartbreak, exaggeration, humour, and longing.

Critics may call it kitsch, foreign, vulgar, or excessive. Yet people dance to it anyway.

This music is not simply foreign. It is simply a shared historical layer continuing to resurface through sound. erstwhile authoritative cultural narratives tried to contain it, it frequently moved elsewhere — into weddings, cafés, cassette tapes, nightclubs, cars, and private memory. It returned due to the fact that it had never full disappeared.

The melody that travelled from an Istanbul tekke to a Macedonian village, from a Romani brass band to a Serbian wedding hall, did not halt at the borders drawn in 1913, 1945, or 1991. It simply continued.

What past could not undo

It would be sentimental — and incorrect — to propose that shared culture softened the force of Balkan history. It did not. Shared songs did not prevent violence, and cultural proximity did not defend the region from tragedy. The Sarajevo siege and Srebrenica, among another wounds, stay part of the region’s hard memory. The closeness of the region’s cultures made no of this little painful.

But here is what is besides true: after the wars ended, the music came back. After borders hardened, recipes crossed them anyway. After flags were raised and anthems written, the spring ritual continued in different countries under different names, with the same fire.

Culture is not a consolation for history. It is simply a different kind of evidence — evidence that the separations people imposed on themselves were never as complete as the maps suggested.

The Balkans did not full divide due to the fact that any things cannot be full divided: a melodic mode the ear recognizes before the head can name it, a way of folding pastry dough, a shared rhythm at a wedding, a peculiar quality of grief in a insignificant key.

A region inactive entangled

The political borders of the Balkans are real. The wars that shaped them were real. The suffering they caused, and the memories they left behind, are real. no of this is minimized by noticing that the cultures on either side of those borders stay profoundly entangled.

What this entanglement tells us is more complex than a communicative of simple unity or simple division. Identity in the Balkans has always been layered, multiple, and internally contradictory. A individual may reject a political past while inactive loving a melody, a dish, or a rhythm shaped by that same history. 2 families may inherit akin recipes and tell different stories about where they came from. A traveller may arrive in Thessaloniki, Skopje, Sarajevo, Plovdiv, or Prizren and feel an inexplicable familiarity — a designation without a name.

My great-grandparents left Şumen, left Selanik, and carried something with them that had no simple name in the fresh language of the fresh country. In Turkish, we call it tanıdık — something known, something already yours before you can explain why.

The Balkans, for all its wars, borders, losses, songs, kitchens, and rituals, remains tanıdık to those who carry it.

Not due to the fact that it was peaceful.

Because it was shared.

Tunacan Tuna is an Istanbul-based culture writer, journalist, radio host, and postgraduate investigator in Culture and Arts Management. His work explores cultural memory, cities, music, diaspora, museums, and the emotional afterlives of images.

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