Balkan food and cookery is a subject which implicitly poses the question: what are the Balkans? They take their name from the Turkish balkan, referring to the chain of mountains in central Bulgaria, and then by extension to the entire peninsula which stretches south from the rivers Danube and Sava to the southern tip of Greece. Thus ‘the Balkan peninsula’ embraces the whole of former Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, and European Turkey. It divides the Ionian Sea from the Aegean Sea; and it links W. and C. Europe with the Middle East.
