Note 787 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

The Balkan Peninsula tells much the same story of contrasted geographic conditions and development in its continental and peninsular sections. Greece proper, in ancient as in modern times, reached its northern confines where the peninsula suddenly widens its base through Macedonia and Thrace. In this narrow southern section to-day, especially in isolated Peloponnesus, Attica, and the high-walled garden of Thessaly, are found people of the pure, long-headed, Hellenic type, and here the Greek language prevails.787 But that broad and alien north, long excluded from the Amphictyonic Council and a stranger to Aegean culture in classical times, is occupied to-day by a congeries of Slavs, who form a southwestern spur of the Slav stock covering eastern Europe. Its political history shows how often it has been made a Danubian or continental state, by Alexander of Macedon, by the Romans, Bulgarians, and Ottoman Turks,788 as it may be some day by Russia; and also how often its large and compact form has enabled it to dominate the tapering peninsular section to the south.