Despite all of the political changes and wars of the last few centuries, there still still a sense here, underneath everything, that the lowland pashas still claim to govern the mountains. I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, although that's a thread in the culture ("corn (wheat) eaters" is the traditional insult for the lowlanders in the plain in the country to the north, who are bounded to the north by mountains that I'm also quite taken by.) I have seen very skillful locals with good souls on the mountains here, but this isn't a mountain culture. It's very sedentary, the wealthier people tend to the corpulent, and the popular music sounds Turkish to my untrained ear.
One interesting thing about the old 19th c. Austrian (and then, post-compromise A-H) architecture in the largely Muslim country to the west/nw is that it has a Moorish inflection rather than a Turkish inflection -- you see the latter more clearly in the indigenous mosques. There is a story that the locals in Sarajevo (famously resistant to central authority--regional governors of the Sublime Porte were only allowed to spend a certain number of hours within its bounds, and that's in a country where the rural folks would often rip up roads in the night to prevent the easy commerce with the center), when the Archduke arrived for his infamous visit, were very proud of their new town hall, but as they stood there on its steps, he simply went up and down the line lambasting them for the lack of security, given the first attempt to kill him in the morning. And then, later that afternoon... Which is to say -- always make a point of admiring the local architecture. You'll notice things.
The Balkans are subject to four winds. The wind from the south reaches to the primitive puritanism of the old Turkish empire, brought into the conversation by the reformers early in the last century (there is a peculiar memorial to Ataturk outside one of theatres in Bucharest -- the "8" in one of years is sideways, for some reason), and through that glass, past the weary warriors of central Asia, one glimpses the classicism of distant Arabia.