Balkan soundscapes: (Re)constructing Balkan identities through popular music

The area known as the Balkans and its definition have been a problem to geographers ever since August Zeune mistakenly described the area south of the Balkan mountains in Bulgaria as the Balkan peninsula in the early 19th century.The term peninsula has widely become accepted in scientific and popular literature, even as the spatial dimensions of "the Balkans" varied with changing social and political circumstances, and its semantic burden steadily increased over the years. Through art, literature and film, the Balkans have become enriched with symbols and meanings, and through such reproduction the general perception is being shaped for a wide audience.

Such a concept is not new in geography, but the link between geography and music surprisingly has not been widley explored, even though music as a means of cultural communication has a major role in evoking the sense of a place, as well as creating it. In the last two decades over a hundred songs in the Serbian/Croatian language have been released which specifically mention the term Balkan and use it as a metaphor. This research is based on these songs and the analysis of the lyrics in an attempt to answer not the question "Where are the Balkans?", but rather "What is Balkan?" on the mental map of the musicans and the audience of the region.