The Balkans are those countries on the Balkan peninsula, including Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, Including North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia [though you may see a different variant of this list depending on how the list is being defined]. While we definitely want to go to all of those countries, even for us, we didn’t think we could go to all of those countries in one shot.
We decided on North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova [Moldova sometimes makes it onto the Balkan list because of its proximity and ties to Romania but more often not.] Regardless, we decided to add Moldova because it was next to Romania and when else would we go to Moldova
Then, because of our flight options we ended up starting in Athens and adding Greece to our list.
It should be noted that we did this trip in 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine [otherwise Moldova definitely would not have been on the list!]. And while it was during Covid, it was a time between variants when infection rates seemed to be going down. We also chose this particular set of Balkan countries because they would let us in if we had a vaccination card [except for North Macedonia which didn’t seem to care about Covid one way or the other].