Time stands still

This was the impression of British travelers who sought to “discover” the exotic world of the European peripheries, a couple of thousand kilometers away from London. In the middle of the British Industrial Revolution, Edward Daniel Clark traveled to Russia and described it as a country frozen in “Asiatic barbarity” (Dolan, 2000). John Paget went to Hungary roughly forty years later and published a thorough and thoughtful description of the country in 1839. He was startled by the “laziness” he experienced: “A Magyar never moves when he can sit still.” “Among many of the nobles,” he also noted, “there is so great ignorance and so strong prejudice…against losing what they consider their rights, and…against raising the peasantry to think and feel like men” (Paget, 1839, 19, 21).

“Laziness” was an impression received by visitors in the Balkans even thirty years later. “Foreign visitors called it laziness…intellectuals sidestepped the issue by referring to the ‘pre-capitalistic’ attitudes of the Balkan peasantry” (Palairet, 1997, 311). Two British women traveled throughout the Balkans in the 1860s and 1870s and reported on Bosnia-Herzegovina's