GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

The Balkan Peninsula, in South-eastern Europe, is bounded by the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea in the southeast; by the Mediterranean in the south; and by the Ionian and the Adriatic Seas in the west. Its territory covers more than 540,000 square kilometres, and it includes the states of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece, together with a small part of present-day Romania (i.e. the region of Dobruja on the south side of the Danube) and the Turkish part of Thrace in the extreme south-east. The chapter will deal with the prehistory of these countries, apart from Greece, which has been the subject of separate chapters.

The natural boundaries of the peninsula in the north follow the course of the river Danube and its largest tributary, the Sava, which runs through the Pannonian plain in Yugoslavia. The western limits are rather less clearly marked. It is generally held that they follow the valley of the Kupa, a tributary of the Sava, and from thence extend along a line which reaches the Adriatic littoral in the vicinity of Rijeka, or slightly more westward along the valley of the Soča.

The peninsula is intersected by a series of mountain ranges and systems. In the south-east, the Aegean coastal strip is sharply separated by the Rhodope mountains from the interior and from the Thracian plain. The Stara Planina range that runs through central Bulgaria divides the country into northern and southern parts. Of these the northern section is linked more closely to the Danube valley and the wide plain that runs north of the Danube as far as the Carpathian mountains.