Balkans

Why did the Ottoman Turks call all European lands that they conquered as “Balkans”?

The Ottoman “Rumi” Turks did no such thing. Although the word “Balkan” comes from the Turkish language, its real meaning until the 19th century was different. It only referred to the Balkan mountains, not more. Balkan in older Turkish meant “steep mountain range full of trees”. Then this word became the name of that particular mountain range specifically. As for the term “Balkans” to refer to that entire “peninsula” that makes up southeastern Europe, it was invented in the 19th century by Western European scholars based on the name of the said mountain range. The term was then adopted in the Turkish language as “Balkanlar” too.

The actual Ottoman Turkish term for what is now called the Balkans was Rumeli (Rum ili), which has been borrowed into English as “Rumelia”. This was, in turn, a translation into Turkish of the more previous Greek and Latin word “Romania”, which means “Roman-land” and should not be confused with the modern nation of Romania —which, in turn, used to be called Wallachia and Moldavia and Transylvania (Eflak ve Boğdan ve Erdel in Turkish) until the 19th century. Actually, Anatolia, which constitutes the majority of Turkey’s present territory between the three seas and the Euphrates River, has also always been an integral part of the greater Roman lands. However, “southeastern Europe”, centered in Thrace and Macedonia, was even more Roman and was therefore called Roman-land/Rumeli because the capital Istanbul, also known as Nova Roma (New Rome) belongs to this peninsula. That is why it was called Romania in late antique and medieval times and then Rumeli/Rumelia.

Ottoman and Austrian and Russian Rumelia/Balkans in 1815.

Ugur Dinc