Migration in the Southern Balkans: From Ottoman Territory to Globalized Nation States

Abstract

The idea for the current volume emerged in a working group on migration of the Via Egnatia Foundation (www.viaegnatiafoundation.eu).1 This working group was es- tablished during a conference the Foundation held in Bitola in February 2009. One of the purposes of the Foundation is to promote communication and understanding between the countries belonging to the ‘catchment area’ of the Via Egnatia—that is, Albania, the (former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. In this book the term ‘Southern Balkans’ refers to these five countries. In the early nineteenth century the Southern Balkans was still part of the Ot- toman Empire. This started to change when the small Greek state was founded in

Almost 50 years later the region saw the birth of another new nation state—

Bulgaria (1878). In the period up to the Balkan Wars both states gained new terri- tory, but the Ottomans still controlled a broad corridor from the Albanian coast on the west to Istanbul in the east (Fig. 1). This corridor or belt—consisting mainly of Albania, Macedonia and Thrace—might be called the Via Egnatia region since the Via Egnatia runs straight through it from Dürres in the west to Istanbul in the east. The countries of the Via Egnatia region share a memory of a fairly recent Ottoman past involving at least part of their national territories. It can be considered a distinc- tive region especially in terms of the population movements during and following the Balkan Wars (1912–1913).