Who are the Slavs, anyway?

As we explore the "old" history of the Balkan region, I think it'd be an interesting exploration to look at where the people who live there now, the Slavs, originally came from.

Interestingly, the Slavs are not the first people group who occupied the Balkan region. This region actually belonged to many different indigenous people groups, including the Greeks, Illyrians (later Albanians), Thracians, and Dacians. These people had all been conquered by the Romans, and were under heavy Roman influence, though they were disorganized following the fall of the Roman Empire. In the northern and western parts of the region, many of the people were heavily Romanized, speaking Latin, and usually conforming to Roman patterns of life and belief. To the east, still holding out in the mountains, were the indigenous Thracians and Illyrians, who held to indigenous beliefs, and lived in a tribal system. To the south, the Tracians and Greeks still conformed to Greek cultural influence.

All of these cultures were soon terrorized by various invaders, such as the Huns, and the Germanic tribes, who depopulated the region and tried to create unstable empires for much of the fourth and fifth centuries. By the end of these conquests, the peninsula was largely a power vacuum, which created the space for the Slavs to move into the region.

The origins of the Slavic people are largely unclear, and the search for a Slavic "homeland" has proved so far not to be fruitful. Though there are evidences of a proto-Slavic language that originated somewhere between present-day Germany and Russia, no archaeologists have found any settlements or burial sites that allow them to locate the Slavs before the fifth century.

The first writings describing the Slavs are those of the Byzantines/late Roman historians, who described a group of tribes, living north of the Carpathian mountains. They were described as a spartan, hardy, and largely leaderless people.

Following the end of the invasions by the Germans and the Huns, the Croatian tribes, followed by other Slavs, started to move into the area. This was called the Great Slavic Migration, during which many of the Southern Slavs moved into the Balkans region, eventually becoming the dominant political and cultural force in the region. Though some of the smaller states, such as Albania and Dalmatia, are occupied by some of the original peoples, many of the states, including those to which we will be traveling, are predominantly Slavic.

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My thoughts:

I honestly don't really take a lot of interest in the "older" history of a region. Maybe it's because I'm an engineer/scientist, and I like to deal in absolutes. But determining when and how a people group originated seems to be much more difficult than designing a suspension.

There are so few certainties that exist before the modern era -- while the Greek and Roman cultures are rigorously documented, the movement of migratory tribes across Europe is not only hard to track, but also hard to discuss. With only fleeting, enigmatic scraps of information from well-respected historians discussing these cultures, we really can't know anything about these societies without turning to the vaguer disciplines such as archaeology.

But I think that's the one of the main reasons we're going on this trip -- to be more comfortable with ambiguity. Tech has a culture where (almost) every problem has an answer that can be looked up in the back of the textbook. But real life doesn't have an answer key. Many of the issues we will deal with in our personal lives, in our society, and as human beings have no elegant solutions, and honestly don't even have clear facts surrounding them. Life is complicated and messy, and sometimes the best way to embrace that fact is to go outside your comfort zone, explore a little, and just appreciate the subtleties that surround us.