For reasons that make a bit of sense if you think about them a while, the east of the Balkans (colloquially, not geographically) is the Western Balkans, and the west is (for the most part, saving influences of seafaring and the South) the East. Ovid was exiled to Varna, as once the roads had been built and the sea routes made familiar, the east was the Western bound, and I suppose vice versa.
An ancient trend -- it's deeply woven into the languages. Hardly an expert, but it seems that in the east, the diacriticals are there to make a phonic transposition from Cyrillic noises, while in the east, they're more organic to the language. Interestingly, more than once, though no examples come to mind, I've expected to find a shared word from Latin, and encountered it from modern Romance, presumably Italian.
And every other year, the orchestras of Europe troop down to the country to the east for a major international festival. Not this year, as it's a competition year, but there is at least an opening concert. Having attended concert in the room, I remember the acoustics, and listening to the first symphony of the national composer (whose statue I had a brief hello with most mornings during the run, as it was next to a very large intersection, and I had to wait for the light), the horns seemed perfectly calibrated to the warm acoustic of the former equestrian hall.
When you're genuinely making art, as opposed to puting together entertainments for the machine, place matters. In a literary context, this is where Auerbach ends his long story of mimesis (written in peripatetic exile) -- Mann, and a specific region of Germany. The stories we tell are not a figment of the place, but you can't make worthwhile art as if you aren't in the place where you are. It doesn't bound experience, or even condition experience, but it does provide a ground for it.