"Balkan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into the ranks of the militant and aggressive powers. But Russia took no interest in the more distant quarters of the world. Nor did Austria, though during these years her old ambition to expand south-eastwards at the expense of Turkey and the Balkan peoples revived under German encouragement. Italy, having but recently achieved national unity and taken her place among the Great Powers, felt that she could not be left out of the running, now that extra-European ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... feeling therefore prevails while this large force is kept under arms, as at any moment the Sultan may take it into his head to try and reconquer the Balkan provinces which he lost in the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 44, September 9, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... has taken place in the general slippery coalitions of these capricious provinces! Every Potsdammer, a little while ago, was counting on Roumania!... The breaking up of the confederation of the Balkan States under Russian influence was what the Central Powers required; while the Allies desired a broken Turkey and a strong Balkan federation under Russian sway able to throw a million men into the field against ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... almost his home, he had rambled where he listed through the lands of the Near and Middle East as leisurely and thoroughly as tamer souls might explore Paris. He had wandered through Hungarian horse-fairs, hunted shy crafty beasts on lonely Balkan hillsides, dropped himself pebble-wise into the stagnant human pool of some Bulgarian monastery, threaded his way through the strange racial mosaic of Salonika, listened with amused politeness to the shallow ultra-modern opinions of a voluble ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... that she was letting her thoughts run again on disputable lines; and she made a remark about the Balkan crisis so abruptly that Mrs. Baxter looked at ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... was crossed and the Russian host entered Bulgaria, the Turks retiring as they advanced. But the march of invasion was soon arrested. The Balkan Mountains, nature's line of defence for Turkey, lay before the Russian troops, and on the high-road to its passes stood the town of Plevna, a fortress which must be taken before the mountains could safely be crossed. The works were very strong, and behind ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the wife of the Wizard of Finance and eight years younger than himself. And she, too, was in the papers and the public eye; and whatsoever the shops had fresh from Paris, at fabulous prices, that they sold to mother. They had put a Balkan hat upon her with an upright feather, and they had hung gold chains on her, and everything that was most expensive they had hung and tied on mother. You might see her emerging any morning from the Grand Palaver in her beetle-back jacket and her Balkan hat, a ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... The Balkan situation is considered to have undergone a change for the worse owing to the purchase by Turkey of the Dreadnought Rio de Janeiro. For ourselves we cannot subscribe to this view. Is it likely that the Turks, after paying over L2,000,000 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... vales, of dingles, chasms, and springs. It is connected with the Cumbric bal, a protuberance, a springing forth; with the Celtic beul or beal, a mouth; with the old English welle, a fountain; with the original name of Italy, still called by the Germans Welschland; with Balkan and Vulcan, both of which signify a casting out, an eruption; with Welint or Wayland, the name of the Anglo-Saxon god of the forge; with the Chaldee val, a forest, and the German wald; with the English bluff, and the Sanscrit palava—startling assertions, no doubt, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... excellent stories by lady-writers, not all that usual at the date of publication. Of these we would particularly commend "An Adventure on the Black Mountain", by Frances Wilbraham. The Black Mountain is Montenegro, a Balkan country, and this is the first time your reviewer has been offered any insight into that country. Well worth reading—a must, in fact, in the light of recent events (Chapter Four, in ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... occupied by Macedon and the other states of Greece is now Turkey in Europe. In the northern part of it is a vast chain of mountains called now the Balkan. In Alexander's day it was Mount Haemus. This chain forms a broad belt of lofty and uninhabitable land, and extends from the Black Sea to ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Alps, continued on the west by the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian mountains, and carried eastward to the Black Sea by the Balkan range, form an irregular line, that separates the three peninsulas of Spain, Italy, and Greece from the great plain of central Europe. On the north of this plain, there is a corresponding system of peninsulas and islands, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... a system of private property. Communities such as the American colonies and as many of the newly settled states, may consist almost entirely of self-employed owners of land. Bulgaria, before the Balkan wars called the peasant state, presented this organization (tho of course with some wage-payment), as did also its neighbor Serbia. But given the institution of private property with competition (freedom to buy and sell), let manufactures and commerce develop to any ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... only salvation for the Jews lay in becoming a nation once more. A yearning for a new fatherland and a new country seized young and old. The times were auspicious. Cosmopolitanism was everywhere giving place to nationalism. The little Balkan States had broken the yoke of Ottoman rule, and become self-governing nations since 1878. In Poland, Hungary, and Ireland, home rule was advocated with fervor that threatened a revolution. Italy and Germany became united under their own ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... of the last Balkan War in 1912. Is it possible today, from a six years' perspective, to establish with any degree of certitude the reasons for its outbreak and determine without hesitation the responsibility for it? Can ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... which he has been so successful. "Count Zarka" is a strong, quick-moving romance of adventure and political intrigue, the scene being laid in a fictitious kingdom of central Europe, under which thin disguise may be recognized one of the Balkan states. The story in its action and complications reminds one strongly of "The Prisoner of Zenda," while the man[oe]uvring of Russia for the control in the East strongly suggests the contemporary history of European politics. The character of the mysterious ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... been published in English describing from original sources how the Balkan States, out of which the world conflict arose, resolved, in Kipling's phrase, to "stand up and meet the war." The following documents, taken from authoritative Balkan sources, show for the first time the purely Balkan aspect ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... can't expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return. Another darling weakness of the Academy is that none of its luminaries must 'arrive' in a hurry. You can see them coming for years, like a Balkan trouble or a street improvement, and by the time they have painted a thousand or so square yards of canvas, their work begins to ...
— Reginald • Saki
... "copy" telling in graphic style of the Balkan War poured into the "city room" of the newspaper plant at the Columbia University School of Journalism yesterday. The reason was that moving pictures had been adopted as a means of giving to the students an opportunity to exercise ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... great financiering projects would no doubt give us some of the main clews to the present diplomatic relations of nations to one another. If we take into account the various intrigues in connection with the building of the Bagdad route, the financing of the Balkan States in their wars, the bargaining of the Powers in Turkey for financial concessions, the great business interests involved in the Russo-Japanese war, the loans to China and all the rest of the financial history ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... attention, I threw it aside and went on with my notes and reading. Within five minutes, however, it was back at me again. That restless thing called "between the lines" fluttered about my mind. My interest in the Balkan States—political article that had been "ordered"—faded. Somewhere, somehow I felt disquieted, disturbed. At first I persisted in my work, forcing myself to concentrate, but soon found that a layer of new impressions floated between the ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... Petersburg, he passed by carriage through the interior to the Crimea and to Sebastopol, soon to be the storm centre of war. In the marts of Syria and Asia Minor, he witnessed the contact of Orient and Occident. In the Balkan peninsula he caught fugitive glimpses of the rule of ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... that hour near her, on the chance of seeing her or, failing that, of hearing her play. At night in the Cafe Hungaria he sat for hours at a time, his elbows on the table, a bottle of native wine before him, and dreamed of her. He was very fat, the little Georgiev, very swarthy, very pathetic. The Balkan kettle was simmering in those days, and he had been set to watch the fire. But instead he had kindled a flame of his own, and was feeding it with stray words, odd glances, a bit of music, the curve of a woman's hair behind her ears. For reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of feuds there was something almost Balkan or Moroccan about Ulysses Budlong Junior. Nearly every day he had come charging into the house with bad news in some form or other. Some rock or snowball he had cast with the most innocent of intentions had gone through a window or a milk wagon or somebody's ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... through Labor Day Oliver bluffed and manoeuvered like the head of a small but vicious Balkan State in an International Congress for Ted and Elinor, and towards tea-time, decided sardonically that it was quite time his adopted infants took any further responsibilities off his shoulders. There was no use delaying conclusions any longer—Oliver ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... increasingly active transshipment point for Southwest Asian opiates, hashish, and cannabis transiting the Balkan route and - to a far lesser extent - cocaine from South America destined for Western Europe; limited opium and growing cannabis production; ethnic Albanian narcotrafficking organizations active ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... other. There were also many other causes, as the ambition of the Russian Czar, supported by his country's vast though imperfectly developed resources and practically unlimited supply of men, one phase of which was the constant ferment in the Balkan Peninsula, and another Russia's schemes for extension in Asia; another was the general desire for colonies in Africa, in which one Continental power pretty effectually blocked another, and the latent distrust inside ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... Balkan Peninsula, the expansive tendency is much more complicated and of very ancient date. The Russo-Slavs who held the valley of the Dnieper from the ninth to the thirteenth century belonged to those numerous ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... at the end of the table the Hon. Geoffrey Winlow was telling his hostess of the Balkan Provinces, from a tour in which he had just returned. His face, of the Norman type, with regular, handsome features, had a leisurely and capable expression. His manner was easy and pleasant; only at times it became ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... various grain crops, oilseeds, vegetables, fruits, and tobacco; more than one-third of the arable land devoted to grain; world's fourth-largest tobacco exporter; surplus food producer Illicit drugs: transshipment point for southwest Asian heroin transiting the Balkan route Economic aid: donor - $1.6 billion in bilateral aid to non-Communist less developed countries (1956-89) Currency: lev (plural - leva); 1 lev (Lv) 100 stotinki Exchange rates: leva (Lv) per US$1 - 17.18 ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Germany has feared and has always been loath openly to quarrel with, is Russia. Through the setback she received in the Far East in 1905, her influence steadily decreased in the Balkans and the recent fiasco of Russian machinations during the Balkan war, has made her become a secondary factor for decades to come. Germany, through her keen Intelligence Department, foresaw the result of the Russo-Japanese conflict and immediately set about to undermine and destroy Russian influence ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... a legal form to a schism which had been long in preparation. But in one respect it was disastrous. The defence of the Danube frontier was divided between the two governments; and that of the East, rating the impoverished Balkan peninsula as of secondary importance, and envisaging the problem from a wholly selfish point of view, left unguarded the great highways leading from the Danube into Italy. Stilicho, the great general who administered the West in the name of Honorius, ventured to ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... on the grey autumn rack of clouds. There was a pleasant and flattering intimacy in the invitation: pleasant because it came from a pretty woman; flattering because the woman was a princess, widow of a younger son of a Royal Balkan house. She lived at Chetwood. Park, on the other side of Morebury, and was one of the great ones of those ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... December, 1914, when he was dying: "Originally written for Christmas, 1912, and referring to the first Balkan War, this poem contains in the last speech of Christ words that ring like a prophecy of events that may occur very soon." As I am copying his Note, December, 1917, the English army is ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Slav. There are so many varieties of him that he is confusing. He comes from the various provinces of Russia, from the conglomerate empire of Austro-Hungary, and from the Balkan states. In physique he is sturdier than the Italian and mentally he is less excitable and nervous, but he drinks heavily and is often murderous when not sober. The Slav has come to America to find a place ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary and the incorporation of the Slav elements in part into her own vast empire, in part into a vassal and subordinate Balkan Confederacy. ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... but what Rumania's watchful eye will yet sound the bugle note which at the psychological moment will unite the Balkan thrones?"—Shanghai Mercury. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... Stilicho could not have been sure that the agreement would be carried out. What this secret compact was can only be a matter of conjecture; but I would suggest that Stilicho had already formed the plan of creating his son Eucherius emperor, and that he designed the Balkan peninsula to be the dominion over which Eucherius should hold sway. His conduct becomes perfectly explicable if we assume that by a secret agreement he secured Alaric's assistance for the execution of this scheme, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... Yougoslavija, is of the first importance. The Southern-Slav state will number about fourteen millions of inhabitants. This state will be the very gate of the East. Yet Serbia is not only the nucleus of the united Southern Slavdom, but the very nucleus of a Balkan Federation also, in which the Greco-Roumanian element should be a good balance to the Slav element in it. I repeat I like my little country just because it is so comparatively little. But by necessity it ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... planned by Charles. Michael's son and successor Andronicus entirely repudiated the agreement made at Lyons; but the misfortunes of Charles in Sicily removed the serious danger of invasion from the West. Overtures for ecclesiastical union were not renewed until the conquests of the Turks in the Balkan peninsula forced the ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley |
