Anna’s Dance: A Balkan Odyssey is set in tumultuous 1968. Below is a brief historical outline to help contextualize the novel.

Time: Spring 1968

A year past The Summer of Love. The world erupts in chaos. 

In Europe, students and workers riot against imperialism, capitalism, and racism:

• France—Students force the Sorbonne to close. Other universities follow its example.

• West Germany—Student-worker anti-government protests bring mass incarcerations. Two students die.

• Italy— Students occupy all but one university. The University of Rome closes for twelve days.

• Spain—Students and workers demonstrate against Franco’s dictatorship, seeking democracy, workers’ rights, and education reform. The University of Madrid closes for over a month.

• Poland— Student and public protests bring violent confrontations with police, fueling a government campaign against the “Zionists.” Universities close, students are arrested, and most Polish Jews flee the country.

• Czechoslovakia—Widespread peoples’ protests—the Prague Spring—empower Alexander Dubcek and his “communism with a human face.” The Soviets invade in August and reassert control.

• Yugoslavia—Artist and intellectual-backed student demonstrations in early June demand socio-economic reform. Tito makes some pacifying gestures.

In America, students and the public protest segregation and Vietnam: 

• Walk-outs by LA high-school students spread to fifteen other cities;

• Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated on April 4. Violent protests erupt in over one hundred cities, including Washington, D.C.

• On April 23, African American students protesting Columbia University’s administration occupy school offices and take three administrators hostage.

• On June 6, Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel.

Setting: The Balkans

• Yugoslavia— Under Josip Broz Tito, this socialist state left the Iron Curtain in 1948 and became a “golden experiment,” that place “in between,” where life was more free than in the other Eastern European Soviet satellites. 

• Bulgaria—Todor Živkov’s regime sought to keep the country “dissident” free, operating labor camps for those who did not comply with its rules. Of all the Soviet satellites, it maintained the closest ties to the USSR, and its secret police worked closely with the KGB.

• Greece— An anti-Communist military junta in 1967 imposed strict controls on its population, including censorship of arts and the media.

• Turkey— Turkey’s Western path was traditionally upheld by the military, who viewed itself as the guarantor of secularism. After a military coup in 1960, Turks elected the Justice Party to lead them in 1965. But student and worker unrest in 1968 resulted in clashes.