Balkan??

What is definitively Balkan? Cheese? The spongy, white kind that is sharp as it is flavorless? On that train of thought, did falafel form its scrumptious scrotum-like balls in Turkey before Lebanon?

Regionalism is a vainglorious inquiry.

Really. Is there a defined literature of the Pacific NW or rap genre in the Mid-West?

Balkan attribution is equally ambiguous. For an area the size of Minnesota-state, how could it cause the world so much grief and yet be so unknown? And for good measure, at the cost of billions of dollars in international cooperation--albeit reticent and ineffectual—why do we not understand its existence?

There are two signatory dates in history.

For Serbs: the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which was lost at the hands of the Turks and thereby ended the short reign of the Kingdom of Serbia for the Ottoman Empire.

For Westerners, it is 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian terrorist thus crumbling the Austro-Hungarian borders and beginning the drum roll for WWI.

Proportionately, there are two histories written to this day. It lapses throughout history, entering all spheres, even space!

For Westerners, Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon.
For Serbs, a dog or a Soviet was the first man in space/moon.

We are living very different histories, indeed…

For a curveball, it is not unordinary as much as dubious that the latest Hollywood blockbuster, The Sentinel, starring our tired hero, Michael Douglas, is dueling with a Serbian assassin…