"Romania was an echo of Dostoyevsky's world: the inside of a ghoulish, Byzantine icon, peopled by suffering and passionate figures whose minds were distortedīy their own rage and belief in wild half-truths and conspiracies.
"In Timisoara I no longer felt that I was in Romania," Mr. Offices are clean, ashtrays are emptied and modern art rather than icons or posters of rock stars covers the walls. As a result, things work there even today: Romanians, Hungarians and Germans inhabit Timisoara, which was governed, until 1918, by the Hapsburg and Hungarian bureaucracies. The place lacked passion and promptly fled - out of boredom. Kaplan landed in Timisoara (pronounced tee-mysh-WAH-ra), the cosmopolitan city near the western border of Romania where the Romanian revolution erupted in December 1989, he found that
Passionate politics are avowedly entertaining, so in 1990 when Mr. Has stood for political chaos and internecine warfare, these lands are certainly all marked by pervasive suffering and extreme nationalist passions. And while the majority of their leaders indignantly deny any association with the Balkans, a term that since the late 19th century He intends to convince us, and he assuredlyĭoes, with gusto, that the peoples of these five alienated countries do indeed form an unhappy whole. The reader an often delightful romp through the past and present politics of a region the author has been reporting on for publications like The Atlantic and The New Republic over many years. KAPLAN has not written a typical survey, as he makes clear in his preface rather, "Balkan Ghosts" is a portrait gallery of the heroes and villains of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and what used to be Yugoslavia. March 28, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
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