Byzantine-Balkan group? Are you an idiot? South Slavics and Greeks extremely different, I, as a Bulgar even would get offended. Don't mind all Serbs and Greeks on this forum. If that happens even more people are going whine then Hungary-West Slavic thing. Just NO.
I see even more ignorant people popping up. "Greek-South Slavic group nuuhhhh" NO. JUST NO. Influence is not even culturally from the byzantines and that was 600 years ago. Turkish has more influence then greek on Bulgarian/south slavic languages.
Have you travelled beyond whatever cave you're holed in? Culture has two layers, high culture and low culture. The Balkan low culture is identical. A village in Bosnia, Macedonia, Wallachia, Morea, Zagora etc is in its everyday cultural functions identical.
This is probably what you refer to when you talk about "Turkish influence", whatever that means in a game that starts a couple centuries before the Ottoman cultural-administrative-demographic apex. But things that the world and the Balkan countries themselves consider Turkish are actually Byzantine and therefore native to the Balkans.
The Ottoman cuisine is a rehash of the Byzantine cuisine. Byzantine desserts and Persian/Levantine savoury dishes. Things like kebabs, stuffed vineleaves, baklava, everything with aubergines, rosewater, quince spoon sweets etc are well attested Byzantine items, most of them existed since ancient Greece. They’re not Turkish, they’re ancient Eastern Mediterranean staples.
Then there’s the folklore which frankly is very similar throughout Europe, so we shouldn’t single out the Balkan as particular, eg European fairytales have been deconstructed to death as more or less samey stories. Yet there are distinct customs in the area from the Alps to Greece that survived well into our times like men dressing in Krampus-like costumes during certain holidays.
As for the Balkan high culture, guess what, it's almost-identical as well. The Byzantine literary/theological tradition extended as far Russia. Marrying into the Imperial family was #1 foreign policy for all Orthodox powers. During Byzantium’s apex even a
Rurikid Grand Prince of Rus married the niece of an emperor with as low legitimacy as it could get, and he still assumed that niece’s surname – Monomakh.
The Danubian Principalities and the Balkans in general followed the Byzantine legal code (the Hexabiblos, the Farmers' Laws etc) as codified as late as the 14th century. At some point the Romanian and Greek nobility were effectively merged during the latter half of the timeframe. The
Phanariote rule was the outcome of centuries of such Ottoman Christian intermarriage, not the cause.
The Albanian Prince
Karl Topia’s monument inscriptions were written in Greek during a time when Byzantium was an Ottoman vassal and even though he was a Catholic ruler and had excellent relations with Rome. Surely there must have been some cultural significance to Greek as not to choose Latin or something over it. Tosk Albanian was written in the Greek alphabet till last century.
Your only defence would be language = culture, as such Balkan cultures need to be distinct. Well, enter the
Balkan sprachbund. An area were Greek/Romanian/Albanian/Bulgarian-Macedonian/Torlakian converge in most grammar and syntax features despite being in different languages groups, due to cultural and geographical proximity.
Fun fact, new linguistic research places Neapolitan (and Sicilian to some extend) into the
Balkan Sparchbund too. Of course, Sicily and the south of Italy was Greek speaking well into the middle ages, but it’s not only because of that. Before the Romanian/Slavic/Albanian/Neapolitan/Greek linguistic area there was an Illyrian/Thracian/Messapian/Greek linguistic area where those peoples intermingled and created a cultural continuum.
You see, geography and culture always finds a way. They’re larger than the fleeting appreciations and sensibilities of ideological parvenus such as the modern nation-state and its followers like you.
Of course, in-game groups are an abstraction and they can’t always be perfect. Slovenian is an outlier in this discussion. Technically an isogloss exist in Slavic languages. Those under the literary influence of Byzantium (East Slavic, Serbian, Bulgarian) pronounce the non-slavic "au" as "av" or "af", like Greek does, while those slavic languages not under Byzantium’s influence (West Slavic, Slovenian, most Croatian dialects) pronounce it like in Latin/Italian - "a-u".
Yet if merging all the Balkan groups together isn’t the poster kid for the devs' new culture group =/= language group idea then I don’t know what is. I could go on forever - I mean, we didn’t even touch genetics! - but first people like you would have to sit the fuck down before calling me an ignorant idiot.
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