The Balkan sprachbund is known to its specialists as distinctive and made up of languages that are closely similar, a view that can best be assessed by typological comparison. This paper compares three different western Eurasian sprachbunds — Balkan, Circum-Baltic, and the Avar sphere in the Caucasus — to each other and to the larger sets of western Eurasia, all of northern Eurasia, and all of the northern hemisphere. The typological properties compared are six complex typological macrofeatures each consisting of a set of related features. They capture some of the classic Balkan features and some deep-seated typological traits, and they enable us to place the Balkan area in the larger typological and linguistic-geographical map of Eurasia. Mapped in typological space, the Balkan languages prove to be discrete as a set and to form a compact cluster at or even beyond the edge of the European typological space. That is, the Balkan sprachbund occupies an apex position, hyper-European or even ultra-European, in a typological map of Eurasia. In these respects it differs from the Circum-Baltic area and in some respects resembles the Avar sphere, which is also very compact and often peripheral or extreme in the Caucasus. The Balkan-Avar similarities and differences can be accounted for by similarities and differences in the sociolinguistics of the two areas. The main general conclusion is that the Balkan sprachbund is essential to understanding the linguistic geography and typology of all of Europe. Issues for future research are testing the robustness of the hyper-European characterization by surveying more features, and determining whether the Balkan sprachbund is leading the evolution of a European linguistic profile or is a zone of peripheral archaisms in an evolutionary process trending in the opposite direction.