In the first part of the 20th century most Balkan countries were scarcely urbanised. Around 80 to 86 percent of the people of Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia lived on the countryside. Whereas the urban population could hardly be labelled ‘urban’ either. Most of the cities were de facto villages. The peasants who lived there abandoned their villages, without really reaching the city.

The mass urbanisation on the Balkans began to take place in the 1950’s. In Yugoslavia only, almost eight million people changed their places of living, during the three decades after World War II. This massive urbanisation caused several problems. Due to the speed with which the urbanisation was taking place, the ‘second, third and other’ cities couldn’t compete with the capitals and stayed small and peripherical. Mass urbanisation caused the cities to ruralize (or ‘rurbanize’), while causing villages to die out. In Romania this lead to a ‘systematization’, whereby the almost empty villages were destroyed by the communist government. After 1989 urbanisation somewhat slowed down and in some countries – with the exception of Albania - people were returning to the villages again.

Animosity towards cities has a long tradition on the Balkans. The first and oldest reason why village people hated the city has its roots in the Turkish occupation: the Turkish rulers and their helpers resided in the cities, the rest of the people lived on the countryside in villages.
A second reason of animosity towards the cities developed in the 19th century, and was a consequence of the Europeanization and Industrialisation of Southeast Europe – which was ‘dangerous’ and ‘alien’ to the Balkan peasants. They defended their traditional world, as if it was attacked, not really by a specific city, but by ‘modernity’ as an abstract enemy.

Also the few Balkanic intellectuals got influenced by 19th-century anti-urban ideas, which mostly came from Russia and Germany. The Russian Slaphophils, and later the Narodniki like Alexander Herzen, Ivan Kirievski and Aleksej Chomjakov, were read enthusiastically by Balkanic anti-urban-intellectuals. In Germany Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl and Oswald Spengler wrote several texts in which the peasant-life and it’s world was hailed as the ideal way of life. It is interesting to note that these ideas were picked up by different intellectuals on the Balkans, coming from classes of Boyars in Romania or traditionalists, but also by early socialists in peasant parties in Yugoslavia.

The anti-urban ideas developed in the 20th century as ideologies and were mixed with racism as used by fascist organisation like the Iron Guard in Romania and the Ustasha in Croatia. The hate for the cities was a combination of different elements: agrarian romantic, anti-Europeanism and anti-centralism. There exists a hatred towards the big cities, without big cities being a tangible thread. The animosity towards the cities on the Balkans is not some hatred for existing cities, but it is pointed at some universal thread, that comes from the ‘Mega-cities’ in the Western civilisation, that ‘will destroy the naturality’, which was ‘given by God’.

The most recent example of this Balkanic anti-urban discourse popped up during the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia during the nineties. The new formed right-wing radicals F.E. in Serbia use an anti-urban ideology that is not new at all, and it says rather more about the fear of changes in a post-communist and post-war country.