From the Roman Praetorians to the Ottoman janizaries, through the mamelukes of Egypt, one single idea animated the empires: to constitute a corps of military groups specially selected and formed which could become the emperors guard and, more widely, participate in safeguarding the Empire. In Balkan literature this phenomenon occupies a preponderant place by the recurrence of its treatment. Through two Macedonian writers, Luan Starova and Stale Popov, we will question the reasons for the importance of this thematic. Far from limiting ourselves to the only "homo balkanicus", we will attempt to show, through the original theory of Ernest Gellner founded in the janizariat and the concept of castration in his work Nations and Nationalism, as with Georges Orwell and his masterly antitotalitarian fable Animal Farm, and, finally, with Clarissa Henry, Marc Hillel and Leon Poliakov dealing with the abduction of children and the "janizaries of the Third Reich" - that its subject concerns the human in his humanity.
