THE BEST AND WORST OF THE BALKANS

If I had to summarise the Balkans in one word, it would be: MOUNTAINS !!!

In fact, the word “Balkans” is the Turkish word for “Mountain” labelled so by the Ottomans during their 400 year plus occupation of the entire region.

What do the Balkans share in common? Mountains and greenery with lots of fortresses/castles, lakes and forests. What do they not share? A see or ocean and not one bit of desert or brown or dry earth. Orthodox Saint Petka (also known as Paraskeva) is officially the PATRON SAINT OF THE BALKANS.

Paris, Leo and I all agree that most surprising country of all was MONTENEGRO in that it exceeded all our expectations. It has a bit of everything. Adriatic Coastline, huge mountains, history and is inexpensive to boot.

Here are our TOP 3 countries:  

Paris chose Croatia as his favourite because of the Adriatic swimming and sailing and the classic narrow street Old Towns. Leo chose Montenegro because of the sheer scale of mountains and the Tara Gorge and Bridge and I chose Romania as my favourite because of its culture, history, geography and the most things to see and do.

The Balkan Nations share many things, good and bad. On the bad side, they were all invaded by the same offenders being the Romans, Hapsburgs and Ottomans. On the good side they are mostly of Slavic origins and love grilled meats and cheese pastries called BUREKS (Tiro-pites in Greek).

Here is a summary of the 9 Nations we all visited:

After travelling 100 days through so many countries you start to lose perspective on what the characterises are of each country so we wrote them down as OBSERVATIONS – this helped us remember what we had seen and experienced in each country and to compare them – we share these observations with you now...

Finally we conclude the MAIN FEATURE of BALKANOPOULOS with the BEST AND WORST of the 9 Balkan Nations we visited. No Golfco Pictures Blog is complete without this. Enjoy.

We hope you enjoyed our little wrap-up of what was an amazing 100 days of Balkan wonder.  

The next series of posts to be labelled as POST FEATURE will cover the journey of John through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Cyprus. Hold on to your hats. Its not over until the skinny Greek sings… 

 THIS IS PARIS, LEO AND JOHN SIGNING OFF HOUSTON...

See you all in Lebanon !!!