(2009) – both very impressive compared with their British equivalents (I learned, for example, from a casual dip that the famous French photographer Brassai was Transylvanian - which is not noted in the British Guides). Curiously, although there is a French bookshop in Bucharest, there is no German bookshop – and the Brasov one restricts itself to books on the Saxons in Transylvania. But it is the language barrier which makes most novels, social histories and memoirs inaccessible. So commercial practices are the second prism – for example my old neighbours still get a lot of French visitors because they are (quite rightly!) listed in one of the French Guide Books (“les Routiers” I think) as offering a quite lovely and typical traditional rural experience. The prejudice of authors, of course, is the final and perhaps most important prism we have to be aware of…….not just individual but collective – as various accounts of this genre about British travel in the Balkans in the last century have shown me recently. One, complete with about 500 bibliographical references, is a PhD thesis The Debated Lands - which looks first at the motifs of discord, savagery, backwardness and obfuscation which characterise the 19th century books about the area. In the approach to the First World War all of at changed; specific countries were embraced by economic and military alliances and some countries acquired what has been called a "pet state" status. Todorova sums up as the pet state approach to south-east Europe: “the choosing from amongst the Balkan states a people whose predicaments to abhor, whose history and indigenous leaders to commend, whose political grievances to air, and whose national aspirations to advocate”. In this way Montenegrins, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians and Albanians were all, at different times, picked out for laudatory comment. Until reading these books, I had not realised, for example, how many British women volunteered for duty in the Serbian field hospitals and how media and literary coverage of this phenomenon brought that country into the British consciousness - and how positively. That was followed by a strand of writing in the late 1920s which took the romanticisation into deeper territory – with a revolt against western modernity and mass society – From the end of the First World War until the outbreak of the Second, travelers were finding in this previously depraved corner of Europe…. " a peace, harmony, vivacity and pastoral beauty in utmost contrast to the perceived barrenness of the West, and which produced benefits for those weary of modernity that ranged from personal rejuvenation to outright revelation”. According to this alternative balkanism, violence had disappeared from the region, savagery became tamed, obfuscation turned to honesty and clarity, and the extreme backwardness that had formerly been the gauge of Balkan shortcoming was now the very measure by which it was extolled. For many travelers, any mystery that did remain around the geographical object became less the marker of a befuddled and dishonest culture than a vital indication of spiritual depth…….
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