ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two Greek intellectuals acquainted with the Balkans in the era between the two world wars. A critical outcome of the altered state of political affairs was the forced movement of peoples within the region, most notably between Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria. If contradiction is inherent in the collective self-identity that is nationality, so it is with both the form and the function of the entity that is the Balkans. Historically framed nationalist programmes in the Balkans had coupled chronological continuity with ethno-territorial claims to produce an activist immediacy to national identity. A modernizer's overriding concern with the potential and the problematics of development among the Balkan states, including domestic and external factors, underlies Ioannis Sofianopoulos's account of the countries he visited and the people he met. Konstantinos I. Amantos continued his contrastive exposition of Greek and Albanian identities by arguing that both peoples faced a difficult future because of the nature of their past cultural development.
