A Poetic Tour of the Balkans, hand-made by someone who has walked its streets and who cares as much about the code as about the places.
The region
I first traveled through the Balkans in the 1990s. This site does not dwell on what was happening then; its subject is the older, deeper thing those years obscured — the layered coexistence of Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg, and Socialist heritage in the same streets, the same walls, the same skylines. Cross-cultural cosmopolitanism has always been the point: a bridge in Prizren, a mosque and a monastery within a few kilometers of each other, a fountain in Sarajevo where several traditions meet rather than divide.
A partial command of the Bosnian and Turkish languages shapes how the places are described here, and the Ottoman-era loanwords that survive in both languages such as šadrvan, tekija, hamam — are treated as living, first-person vocabulary rather than researched footnotes. I'm working on adding more of these to the site, especially in Albanian (Shqip).
The craft
The other half of this project is a love of hand-crafting bespoke, performant websites. That is an unusual pairing, and it is deliberate: the same attention the tour pays to a fountain's carved canopy, the code pays to markup, structure, and speed. Neither half serves the other. They simply belong to the same person.
In practice that means:
- vanilla HTML with no front-end framework;
- a few standards-compliant Web Components;
- strict HTML5 conformance;
- structured data as inline RDFa;
- and accessibility targeting WCAG 2.2 AA.
The result is a codebase kept deliberately dependency-light so it stays legible and lasts.
Built in the open
The decisions and dead-ends behind the build are written up as they happen. You can follow my developer journal at mashqandmachine.com, and the full source lives on GitHub.