Balkanology  ::  Explore Southeast Europe

Overview of the Balkans | Links

There aren't many websites specifically about the Balkans, so most of the sites listed below are useful for planning travel in Europe generally. Of all the sites in this list, the Thorntree deserves a special mention, as Balkanology would be a lot smaller without it. Over the last few years I have found it a great source of ideas, answers to specific questions, and pointers to more detailed information. It was particularly useful in helping me to realise that travel to places like Bosnia and Serbia was feasible a few years ago, at a time when there were no guidebooks to these areas. This is probably a good place to thank the many contributors from whom I have learned, especially those who patiently answer endless questions about their own countries.

• General Travel Information - find out about potential destinations with these guides and forums.
• Transport - how to make your way around Europe.
• Practicalities - not very exciting, but very useful: information about money and safety.
• Background - keep yourself informed with these non-travel-related sites.
• Individual country pages - more specific information.

General Travel Information

• Lonely Planet Thorntree

  The Thorntree discussion forum is almost certainly the best place to ask questions about the Balkans and to learn from both other travellers and residents. Although LP may still have something of a backpacker image, the Thorntree is frequented by all kinds of independent travellers, so don't worry if you prefer hotels to hostels.

  Sadly the Thorntree disappeared in 2021. As far as I can tell, no usable archive has been preserved anywhere.

• In Your Pocket Guides

  Guides to a range of cities in Central and Eastern Europe, well-written and packed with useful information. In the Balkans they have regularly updated guides to Bucharest, Sofia, Tirana, and Zagreb. A guide to Pristina was launced in 2006, and a Podgorica guide is expected very soon. Will they manage to make Podgorica sound interesting? Balkanologists await with bated breath. The downloadable guides are particularly convenient if you want to take a printed guide with you; in some cities they are also available from news outlets. You can find links to individual IYP guides from the country-specific pages of Balkanology.

• TimeOut City Guides

  Guides to sightseeing, eating, sleeping, and going out in a variety of cities worldwide. Destinations in Southeast Europe include Athens, Belgrade, Dubrovnik, Istanbul, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Thessaloniki, and Zagreb.

• Lonely Planet Destinations

  Brief introductions to almost every country in the world, including all the Balkan countries.

• Rough Guides - Europe

  Rough Guides make a lot more of their text available online than Lonely Planet, so these pages form a useful introduction to Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, and Slovenia. The Romania section is very limited and they have no coverage of much of the Western Balkans.

• Wikitravel - Europe

  Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide. It's still in its early stages, and the information available for most Balkan countries is fairly limited, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

• Hidden Europe Magazine

  Hidden Europe is a print magazine, but you can view some sample articles on their website, and they also have a free newsletter. The editors clearly love the experience of travelling in Europe - not just the places you visit but also the trains, planes, and buses you take to get there. As a result their magazine presents an attractively quirky view of the continent.

• Tabibito's Balkan Guide

  A personal website about travel in the Balkans (and other parts of Eastern Europe). Sounds like a familiar idea, doesn't it? I had already done quite a lot of work on this site before I discovered that someone else had already created something very similar, and done it very well too. Not only that, his site is in both German and English. Between his site and mine, you have absolutely no excuse not to visit the Balkans.

Transport

• Die Bahn European Rail Timetable

  The Germany Railways website is possibly the most useful thing on the entire Internet - at least for obsessive European travellers. You can plan almost any European rail journey, international or domestic, at this site; even if getting from A to B involves six changes of train it will probably manage to come up with an itinerary. (Admittedly an itinerary with six changes is probably a hint that you would be better off getting the bus). Fares are not normally shown unless part of the journey is through Germany. Enter station names in the local language (Beograd, Bucuresti). Although it is believed by some people to be omniscient, there are a few gaps. Trains between Greece and Turkey are rarely included in the database, and there are some shortfalls in the Serbia/Montenegro/Bosnia area. This has improved recently, but the last time I checked some services in this region were still not shown, and some stations were missing from the included services.

• The Man in Seat Sixty-One...

  How to see the world by rail and sea. If you've ever wondered if it would be feasible to travel from London to Albania without flying, or where to go next when you get off the Trans-Siberian in Vladivostok, have a look at this site. If it doesn't have the answer it will point you towards someone who does. Although the European sections work best if you are starting your journey in London (or Paris or Brussels), there is plenty of useful information for everyone else, including details of the various types of sleeping accommodation and rail passes. You can also find the story of the real Orient Express. This site was something of an inspiration to me in demonstrating how good a personal website can be.

• Balkanviator

  Information about bus timetables and tickets in various countries in the Balkans.

Practicalities

• Universal Currency Converter®

  Figure out how many Croatian Kuna you should expect to get for your leftover Bulgarian Leva. More realistically, find out what you will end up with after changing your leva to euro and then to kuna. You may need to click "see all currencies" for some of the more obscure Balkan currencies.

• Travel and living abroad

  Safety advice from the UK Foreign Office. The governments of the USA and Australia produce similar advice for their travelling citizens. These sites can be useful provided you bear in mind that they tend to err on the side of caution (this may be particularly true of the US State Department). I tend to view them as indicators of relative rather than absolute safety. Ideally you should read the advice for a country you know well before reading about your potential destination. You may find that much of the text is identical - the few differences are probably the things you need to be aware of.

• HostelWorld

  Information and online reservations for a wide variety of hostels, pensions, and small hotels. Some Balkan countries still have very limited listings.

• Booking.com

  One of the most useful hotel reservation sites.

• Travlang Foreign Languages for Travellers

  Basic phrases in a variety of languages, complete with sound files and links to more language resources.

Background

• European Stability Initiative (ESI)

  ESI is a research institute dedicated to producing in-depth analyses of issues facing countries in Southeast Europe; if you are looking for some detailed background reading this could be a good place to start.

• Transitions Online

  Journalism from the post-communist world, including Southeast Europe. A subscription is required to access much of the content, but the free section sometimes has interesting articles.

• SummitPost: the Dinaric Alps

  Much of the character of the Western Balkans derives from the presence of the Dinaric Alps, a fearsome mountain barrier running parallel to the Adriatic. Whether your interest is in geology or mountaineering, you should find something to interest you in these pages.

• Invention and Intervention: the rhetoric of Balkanization

  A look at the sorry history of attempts by Western authors to describe the Balkans - in particular the use of lazy metaphors to obscure rather than clarify the truth. Similar themes are dealt with at greater length in the books by Todorova and Ježernik.

• Slovio: Simplified Universal Slavic Language

  Slovio is an artificial language which is supposed to allow communication with the 400 million speakers of the twenty or more Slavic languages. I'm not qualified to say whether it works, but it is an intriguing idea.

• The Balkan Butler

  An introduction to the Balkan writings of the Irish essayist Hubert Butler, with links to two of the essays available online. See also the Books section.

More links: individual countries

• Albania
• Bosnia & Herz.
• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Greece
• Kosovo
• Macedonia
• Montenegro
• Romania
• Serbia
• Slovenia
• Turkey