Quote:
Originally Posted by mariusgmioc
And as I said earlier, I do not consider a blade made by a Turkish smith, in a clear Turkish style (without any features that would differentiate it from a similar weapon made in Istanbul), as a Balkan blade only because it was produced in workshop located somewhere in the Balkans.
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Very logical approach, but it ignores the cultural context entirely. Apart from the location of where something was produced or assembled, the cultural context matters.
I am attaching an example. The weapon in the attached photo derives from the Italian storta, especially in terms of the blade and the guard. The blade itself was made in Europe, quite possibly Italy as well or Central Europe. It is hard to say who fashioned the grip, which is decorated in Ottoman style. If I had to make an educated guess, a descendant of Jewish migrants from Iberia seems like a plausible option. Its intended user was almost certainly a corsair of either Turkish origins or a Dutch or English renegade.
If we follow your approach, then this is really an Italian cutlass or an Italian/Ottoman hybrid. And yet, Eric Claude would call this an Algerian nimcha, even though apart from being assembled in Algeria, its parts, makers and users were not Algerian per se. He does so because these nimchas were regionally specific to Algeria, where they were used by corsairs operating out of Algerian ports.
When I refer to a weapon as Albanian or Sudanese or Viking, it is a cultural and regional attribution rather than a claim on ethnic origins. The latter is usually very difficult to lay an absolute claim on anyway.