The “European Orient” as a regional designation for Southeast Europe has its origins in the eighteenth century, and became a geographical and political reality for Europeans in the nineteenth century. As the classification suggests, it was located on the European continent; the Orient was already imagined to be located east of Vienna, as noted by American historian Suzanne Marchand, i.e., actually in the middle of Habsburg territory. Today, the European Orient is no longer present in the collective memory of the Western world, even though an “Orientalization” of Eastern and Southeast Europe has taken place in recent media discourse, reviving the imagined division of East and West along with its associated dichotomous notions (backward-civilized). Therefore, studies and research on the Orient, on Orientalism, and on processes of Orientalization are as current as they are numerous, and are not exclusively located in the field of Oriental Studies. In the introductory chapter of this book, I present the literature on Orientalism and Balkanism as well as my categories of analysis, namely encounter, public sphere, and historical narratives. It ends with a brief overview of the following chapters and the structure of the book.