In 'Danube', the Trieste writer Claudio Magris steers us through the region created and enclosed by the river and known as Mitteleuropa. "Who ever saw a green horse or an intelligent Serb?" is a Romanian proverb of lengthy stock. Asked in 1921 to consider an invitation to become king of Albania, Lord Inchape is supposed to have stared at the motorcyclist who brought him the urgent message, and replied: "Where is it?" (He declined on the grounds "It's not in my line."). The Balkans shaped the opening and close of our last century, but for poorly prepared Westerners they remain, even now, a distant cauldron into which we like to toss our prejudices, ignorance and jokes an indeterminate, Ruritanian region, full of people with names like Zog and nowhere better evoked than in the novels of John Buchan and Dornford Yates.
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