Balkanology :: Explore Southeast EuropeDisclaimer: These pages are not actively maintained, and some of the practical information on the site is out of date. I am working on a new version of the site that will focus more on my photos and memories of travel in Southeast Europe, and less on practical details that too easily become obsolete. In the meantime, please treat the information here with caution.
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
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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. All the Balkan countries are conveniently included in the Eastern Europe Branch, with the exception of Greece which is somewhat mysteriously exiled to Western Europe.
If you intend asking a question on the Thorntree, start by browsing the recent posts and using the search function - it is quite possible that your question was recently asked by someone else. Almost all questions about train timetables can be answered using the European Rail Timetable or the websites of the various national rail operators, all of which are listed on this site. I have also tried to answer some of the most common questions in the FAQ pages. If you are asking people to recommend an itinerary, mention the time of year you will be travelling, how much time you have, and above all what kind of things you are interested in. Finally, pay particularly close attention to posts by the erudite, witty, and devastatingly handsome contributor known as "alan1972".
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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.
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Balkan Travellers
"The first e-magazine about travelling in the Balkans" is a collaborative effort by a group of journalists and photographers based in the region. The site includes travel advice, news, blogs, and articles about the food and culture of Southeast Europe.
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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.
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Lonely Planet Destinations
Brief introductions to almost every country in the world, including all the Balkan countries.
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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.
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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.
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VirtualTourist
Another site at which you can benefit from the experience of locals and other travellers. Unlike the Thorntree it is not restricted to a simple question-and-answer format - contributors set up their own pages with tips and photos. The results are very unpredictable - some people have contributed wonderfully detailed information about places you might not have thought of visiting, but it can take a long while to find these. The pages have rather a lot of advertising relative to content, and the forums get much less traffic than the Thorntree and are therefore less useful.
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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.
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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.
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Rob-Rah!
A personal website including travelogues from several Balkan countries, with some useful information for independent travellers, especially in Serbia and Montenegro. Again there is some overlap with Balkanology, but Rob's site has added folk music.
Transport
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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.
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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.
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Skyscanner
Skyscanner is currently my favourite search engine for flights within Europe, thanks to its wide range of both low-fare and traditional airlines and ability to look for flights to all airports in a particular country.
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Eurolines
Information about international bus routes is rather fragmented, and many operators have no Web presence at all. Eurolines has a well-organised site and a network covering much of the continent, but as yet they have few routes to the Balkans.
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ViaMichelin
Driving directions between (almost) any two towns in Europe.
Practicalities
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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.
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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.
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HostelWorld
HostelBookersInformation and online reservations for a wide variety of hostels, pensions, and small hotels. Some Balkan countries still have very limited listings.
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Balkans Best Hostels
This site promotes hostels in four countries (so far) in the Balkans, with a small discount on offer to travellers who stay in more than one of the included hostels.
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Booking.com
One of the most useful hotel reservation sites.
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MasterCard ATM Locator
Visa ATM LocatorIf you are worried that you won't be able to find a cash machine in the Balkans, these sites should reassure you.
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Travlang Foreign Languages for Travellers
Basic phrases in a variety of languages, complete with sound files and links to more language resources.
Background
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Southeast European Times
Regularly updated summary of news from the Balkans, with a focus on political and diplomatic news (the same site can be found at "balkantimes.com" and the more politically correct "setimes.com"). A good place to practice your language skills, as the news is available in nine languages (ten if you count both Serbian alphabets). The small print mentions that the site is sponsored by the United States European Command.
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Southeast Europe: People and Culture
This site has been developed by the European Commission to provide information about the Balkan countries that may one day form part of a enlarged European Union (the countries of the Western Balkans plus Turkey). It includes a wide range of features about culture and sports in the region.
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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. Of most immediate interest to prospective travellers is a new project called "Return to Europe: A Balkan Journey", to which I have contributed some photos. It features an interactive map designed to lead the visitor to places of interest in the region, with the help of some well-chosen quotations from earlier travellers.
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Treasure Quest
This site aims to introduce the many cultural treasures of Southeast Europe to children in the region. Although the presentation is naturally aimed at children, adults may also learn something new here. It's good to see all the Balkan countries cooperating to emphasise a shared heritage that goes beyond national borders.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Balkan Baby
A blogger based in Zagreb talks about the Balkans in general. There are lots of Balkan-related blogs out there, and many of them are linked to each other; rather than duplicate those links here I have just listed this one.
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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.