Ethnicity and National Identity in the Balkans

I've always been thinking about but specifically for the balkans, i think it's very heartbreaking, because the region was divided mainly along religious lines. And that has its root, of course, in circumstances and historical developments. You always get kind of weird nationalists who have ancestral fantasies,. like imagining a pure and valiant people denied their true glory which is rubbish in reality. The colonized people have always struggled to preserve and maintain aspects of their culture.