Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment

by Δημήτρης Τζιόβας

Greece and the Balkans explores the cultural relationships between Greece and other Balkan countries in the domains of language, literature, thought, translation, and music, and examines issues of identity and perception among the Balkan peoples themselves. The essays bring together scholars from across a range of historians, anthropologists, linguists and musicologists with specialists on literature, translation, the history of ideas and religion. By raising issues of cultural hybridity, and nationalist or pre-nationalist interpretations of culture and history it lays claim to a place in the context of studies on nationalism and post-colonialism. Greece and the Balkans also contributes to a recognition of the Balkans as a site, like some postcolonial ones, where identities have become fused, orientalism and eurocentrism blurred and where religion and modernity clashed and co-existed. By approaching cultural encounters between Greece and the Balkans from a fresh and informed perspective, it makes a substantial contribution to the study of a rather neglected aspect in the history of a region which has suffered in the past from narrow-minded, nationalistic arguments.

290 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

Dimitris Tziovas



I taught at the University of Birmingham for over thirty five years and have supervised many research students. Their research has been disseminated internationally through publication in books or peer-reviewed journals and the standard of my supervision has been recognised by a University Award for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision (2010). In 2022 I received the Grand Greek State Award for my contribution to scholarship. My book Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity (Bloomsbury 2021) won the European Society of Modern Greek Studies Book Prize.

One of my aims in teaching and research is to test Lawrence Durrell’s claim that studying Greece and its culture allows you to discover yourself.

(source: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/pr...)