The Balkan countries are usually listed as eleven: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia. The small European part of Turkey, East Thrace, including most of Istanbul, also lies on the Balkan Peninsula. Only some of these countries sit wholly on the peninsula. Romania and Slovenia are mostly outside it and are included for history and politics, so shorter lists of eight or ten also appear. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains of Bulgaria.
Which Countries Count
Geographers draw the peninsula's northern edge along the Danube, Sava and Kupa rivers. By that line, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and most of Serbia are Balkan in the full sense. Croatia is split: its coast and south lie on the peninsula, while Zagreb and the Pannonian north do not. Only a small part of Slovenia and only the Dobruja region of Romania, between the lower Danube and the Black Sea, fall south of the line. Both are included in most lists because they shared the region's history, Slovenia as part of Yugoslavia and Romania through the Ottoman era. Many Slovenes and Croats reject the "Balkan" label and prefer "Central Europe". Moldova, which lies north of the Danube, is almost never included, though it shares much of Romania's history and language.
| Country | Capital | Area | Population | EU status (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Romania | Bucharest | 238,397 km² | ~19 million | Member since 2007 |
| Greece | Athens | 131,957 km² | ~10.4 million | Member since 1981 |
| Bulgaria | Sofia | ~110,900 km² | ~6.4 million | Member since 2007 |
| Serbia | Belgrade | ~77,500 km² | ~6.6 million | Candidate |
| Croatia | Zagreb | 56,594 km² | ~3.9 million | Member since 2013 |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | Sarajevo | 51,197 km² | ~3.2 million | Candidate |
| Albania | Tirana | 28,748 km² | ~2.4 million | Candidate |
| North Macedonia | Skopje | 25,713 km² | ~1.8 million | Candidate |
| Slovenia | Ljubljana | 20,273 km² | ~2.1 million | Member since 2004 |
| Montenegro | Podgorica | 13,812 km² | ~620,000 | Candidate |
| Kosovo | Pristina | 10,887 km² | ~1.6 million | Applied 2022 |
A Name Based on a Mistake
"Balkan" is a Turkish word meaning a chain of wooded mountains. The Ottomans used it for the range across central Bulgaria that Bulgarians call Stara Planina, the "Old Mountain". In 1808 the German geographer August Zeune named the whole peninsula after it, believing, wrongly, that the range stretched right across the region from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, as the Alps do further north. It does not; it covers only Bulgaria, and its highest point, Botev Peak, reaches 2,376 m. The name stuck anyway. In the early twentieth century it gave English the word "balkanisation", meaning the break-up of a region into small, mutually hostile states.
Mountains From Coast to Coast
The Balkans are among the most mountainous parts of Europe, which has shaped their history of separate valleys and peoples. The Dinaric Alps run parallel to the Adriatic coast from Slovenia to Albania, a band of limestone so riddled with sinkholes, caves and underground rivers that its Slovenian part, the Kras plateau, gave the world the word "karst". In Montenegro, the Tara River has cut a canyon about 1,300 m deep, often described as the deepest in Europe. Further east rise the Rila and Pirin ranges of Bulgaria, the Rhodopes along the Greek border, and the Pindus down the spine of Greece.
The highest peak in the Balkans is Musala in Bulgaria's Rila range, at 2,925 m, just ahead of Mytikas, the summit of Mount Olympus in Greece, at 2,918 m. The main lowland corridors follow rivers: the Danube in the north, and the Morava–Vardar valley running from Belgrade through Skopje to Thessaloniki, the natural road from Central Europe to the Aegean used by armies and railways alike. The coasts are the region's other face. Greece has about 6,000 islands and islets, and Croatia more than 1,200 along the Adriatic, as our guide to the Adriatic Sea describes.
Five Centuries of Ottoman Rule
The Ottoman Empire crossed into Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, defeated a Serbian-led army at Kosovo in 1389 and took Constantinople in 1453. For up to five centuries it ruled most of the peninsula. That long rule left its mark in architecture, cuisine and vocabulary, and above all in religion: many Albanians and Bosnians, and communities in Bulgaria and Greece, converted to Islam, while most Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Macedonians and Romanians remained Orthodox Christians and Croats and Slovenes stayed Catholic.
Independence came piece by piece. Greece won its war of independence and became a kingdom in 1830. Serbia, Montenegro and Romania were recognised as independent at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Bulgaria declared full independence in 1908, and Albania in 1912. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 drove the Ottomans almost entirely out of Europe, and in June 1914 the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo set off the First World War.
Yugoslavia and How It Broke Apart
Seven of today's Balkan countries, counting Kosovo, were once one. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, formed in 1918 and renamed Yugoslavia in 1929, became after the Second World War a socialist federation of six republics under Josip Broz Tito. Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 and in 1961 hosted the founding summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, keeping Yugoslavia outside both Cold War blocs. After he died in 1980, it came apart. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991, and Macedonia followed in September. Bosnia and Herzegovina's independence in 1992 led to a war that lasted until the Dayton Agreement of 1995 and killed about 100,000 people, including about 8,000 Bosniak men and boys murdered at Srebrenica in July 1995. Kosovo's war of 1998–99 ended after 78 days of NATO bombing. Montenegro separated peacefully from Serbia in 2006, and Kosovo declared independence in 2008, which Serbia does not recognise. The neighbour-by-neighbour picture is in our guide to the countries that border Serbia.
Languages That Grew Alike
The Balkans are a textbook case of languages from different families growing similar through centuries of contact, a pattern linguists call the Balkan Sprachbund. Bulgarian and Macedonian are Slavic, Romanian is Romance, Albanian is a separate branch of Indo-European and Greek another, yet several of them share features found almost nowhere else. Bulgarian, Macedonian, Romanian and Albanian all attach the definite article to the end of a noun instead of putting it in front, and several have lost the infinitive. Meanwhile Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are one mutually intelligible language with four official standards. Serbian is written in both Cyrillic and Latin script.
Faiths Side by Side
The Balkans' religious map is one of the most mixed in Europe. Sarajevo, where a mosque, an Orthodox cathedral, a Catholic cathedral and a synagogue stand within a few minutes' walk of one another, has been called the Jerusalem of Europe. Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 settled across the Ottoman Balkans. Thessaloniki was a majority-Jewish city for centuries, until the German occupiers deported about 45,000 of its Jews to Auschwitz in 1943. In northern Greece, the monastic republic of Mount Athos has governed itself for over a thousand years, with twenty Orthodox monasteries and a ban on women that dates back to the Middle Ages.
Albania went furthest the other way. In 1967 the communist leader Enver Hoxha declared it the world's first officially atheist state, closing or destroying mosques and churches. His regime also built more than 170,000 concrete bunkers across the country against an invasion that never came, and many still dot the fields and beaches. Religion was legalised again in 1990. Albania's Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics are known today for unusually good relations, and many families include more than one faith.
Shrinking Populations, Growing Tourism
The Balkans are among the fastest-shrinking regions in the world. Low birth rates and large-scale emigration to Western Europe have cut populations sharply since 1990. Bulgaria has fallen from almost 9 million at its peak in the 1980s to about 6.4 million today. Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Romania have all lost large shares of their young people to Germany, Austria, Italy and elsewhere in the EU.
Tourism has moved the other way. Dubrovnik's walled old town, made even more famous as a filming location for Game of Thrones, draws so many cruise visitors that the city has capped numbers. The Bay of Kotor in Montenegro and Lake Ohrid on the border of North Macedonia and Albania are World Heritage Sites. Ohrid, more than a million years old, is one of the oldest lakes in Europe.
Where the Balkans Stand in 2026
Five Balkan countries are now in the European Union: Greece since 1981, Slovenia since 2004, Romania and Bulgaria since 2007, and Croatia since 2013. Greece, Slovenia, Croatia and, from January 2026, Bulgaria use the euro, and Montenegro and Kosovo use it without being members. Romania and Bulgaria joined the Schengen area fully in 2025. The rest, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina, are official candidates, some of them for more than fifteen years, and Kosovo applied in 2022. How these countries fit into the wider east of the continent is covered in our list of Eastern European countries.