Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/67



South-Eastern Europe forms no unity in the common sense of the word, as a peninsula of the Balkans. Bulgaria is the only true Balkan country because it is geographically connected with the chain of Haemus, called by the Turks, Balkan, the Rhodope being purely Thracian. All the western part of the peninsula is linked to a much more important range, the Pindus. Greece, with its islands, is a Mediterranean State. North of the Danube, Roumania, inseparably linked as she is to the Carpathians, a mighty sierra, leading to the West, to the Quadrilateral of Bohemia, has its chief geographical features, as for instance the course of the Transylvanian rivers, directed towards the countries of the west.

But, as the elements of the past, between all these states separated today by national frontiers and unjust prejudices — and too often by feelings of hatred also — the unity is easily discernible. In ancient times a single great race possessed all territories from the borders of the Hercynia or the « Amber Way » to the Aegean and, as the eastern limit, to the valleys of Asia Minor: the Thracians Moesi on the Danube and Mysians in Anatolia, here Phrygians, there Brygs. If in the Asiatic peninsula the actions of the Greeks were later to diminish, there was a time when the European shore had, in Histria,