Macedonia: Time to tell Greece to stop

Travelling down by bus from Chişinău to Odessa in July 2022, my first visit to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, I was not sure what to expect. I had been following the news from Ukraine compulsively. I knew there was a night-time curfew, and that there were frequent air raid alerts. I had heard life in Odessa had normalised somewhat since those first fraught weeks when the threat of a Russian assault on the city from the land or the sea had seemed very real. The tank traps on the city streets had largely been removed. But how was life in the city? How were people coping? Having previously lived in Odessa, I had a huge attachment to this beautiful city, with its unique spirit and its frenetic nightlife. A largely Russian-speaking city with a significant pro-Russian element among its population when Russia began its aggression against Ukraine in 2014, Odessa had briefly appeared at risk of going the same way as Donetsk and Luhansk. How had the city fared in face of the new Russian onslaught?

Another year, another recommendation from the European Commission that EU accession talks be opened with Macedonia, and another veto from Greece. This time Greece was joined in its veto by Bulgaria, a cynical, opportunistic move condemned by many Bulgarians, including three former presidents. But there is little doubt that Sofia’s objections could be easily overcome. Indeed, Skopje had already agreed to the conditions set by Sofia shortly before the key European Council meeting on 11 December, making the Bulgarian move all the more baffling. It is Greece that remains the key blockage to Macedonia’s EU hopes.

Greece’s dispute with Macedonia over its name has dragged on for more than two decades. While Athens elicits very little sympathy in the world for its stance, it has been able to use its membership of the EU, as well as NATO, to bully its little neighbour and try to force it into submission. Sporadic diplomatic efforts try to find a way around the impasse. In the past, they had some success, for example in enabling Macedonia to join the United Nations under the provisional name the ‘former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’. This was never a long-term solution, and the Greek habit of referring to the country using the acronym ‘FYROM’, and even to its inhabitants as ‘FYROMians’, is understandably taken by Macedonians as an insult – ‘Don’t FYROM Me, Call Me by My Name’, went one campaign a few years ago.

In the last few years, the main international effort to bridge the gap between the two sides has been focused on the UN mediator, Matthew Nimetz, most recently in his suggestions presented in November. His doggedness in pursuing his mandate, despite persistent lack of success, may be admirable, but, given the lack of political will in the two capitals to reach a compromise, has been fruitless. Diplomatic efforts are usually about trying to achieve the possible, rather than about principle. Without greater international will to push for a satisfactory outcome, Nimetz has done the best he could in the circumstances. Unfortunately, such diplomacy of the possible often finds no place for the concept of right and wrong. Diplomats are too frequently blind to the question of where right lies, trying to pull the sides towards some central position on which agreement can be reached. It is pragmatic, but it is often not just, especially to the weaker party. And often as not, a side that believes strongly that justice is on its side refuses to play the game, instead holding out for its cause.

Greece objects that the name ‘Macedonia’ implies a claim to its northern region of the same name. It is a preposterous claim. Firstly, historic Macedonia includes both Macedonia and Greece’s northern region, as well as a smaller area in present-day Bulgaria. None has exclusive right to the name. Secondly, Skopje has persistently disavowed any claim to Greek territory. Thirdly, there are a number of other cases of provinces of one country having the same name as a neighbouring country, including the province of Luxembourg in Belgium and Brittany in France. If others can accept this without complaint, why not Greece? And fourthly, the notion that little Macedonia could represent any kind of territorial threat to Greece is risible.

But, as recently suggested by the EU Enlargement commissioner, Stefan Fuele, Macedonia’s progress on EU integration should be decoupled from its dispute with Greece. A year ago, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found in favour of Macedonia’s claim that Greece, by blocking the country’s NATO accession, had breached its undertaking in the 1995 agreement that enabled the country’s UN membership, that it would not block the country’s accession to international organisations under the provisional name. Yet Macedonia remains in limbo, still blocked by Greece from entering either organisation. Greece’s disingenuous argument at the ICJ that it had not blocked Macedonia’s NATO accession, but that it had been the joint decision of the NATO membership, was rejected by the court.

The prospect of Macedonia’s EU membership, as well as the process of fulfilling the accession criteria, is important. Enlargement has been the EU’s key strategy for stabilising a troubled region and binding the countries into a virtuous cycle of democratic development, improved governance, economic prosperity and good relations among states that have only recently experienced conflict. This applies to Macedonia too, which experienced a short insurgency by members of its large ethnic-Albanian minority a little over a decade ago. While much progress has been made since then in integrating Albanians and satisfying their legitimate demands, Macedonia remains unsettled, the Macedonians nervous about the future of their state. Greece’s blocking of the country’s progress in joining the EU and NATO is risky and irresponsible, as is the EU’s weakness in going along with it.

Of course, other EU members cite the need for unanimity in agreeing to the accession of new states. So, year after year, European Council meetings trot out the need for Macedonia to resolve its disagreement with Greece before its accession negotiations can get underway. The need for good neighbourly relations as a condition for EU membership is raised. But what hypocrisy! The need for good neighbourly relations has rightly been a requirement for Balkan countries that have recently been at war with one another. But in the case of Macedonia this requirement has been abused by Greece to give it an advantage in its dispute with a weaker neighbour. That the rest of the EU has gone along with this bullying of a small, poor, fragile country in need of the union’s help is to the huge discredit of the whole union, not just Greece itself.

Such behaviour by Greece, abusing its EU membership to give it an advantage in its bilateral relations, has been persistent and unashamed. EU officials say they do not want to import the dispute between Greece and Macedonia into the union. In truth, the EU imported many of its worst headaches when it admitted Greece. The EU was blackmailed by Greece into agreeing to the accession of Cyprus without the prior settlement of that country’s longstanding division, because otherwise Athens threatened to block the entire enlargement process for the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. Thus, thanks to Greece, the EU imported the Cyprus conflict, but also thanks to Greece, is blocked from admitting Macedonia because it would mean importing a dispute – a dispute, that is, of Greece’s making.

When it entered the union, Athens did not face anything like the conditionality that would-be EU members have to face now. Greece’s utter disregard for the rights of indigenous minorities within its own borders, whose very existence it denies, would be inadmissible for a country wishing to join the union today. Greece continues to get away with behaviour that any pre-accession country nowadays would face huge pressure to correct.

The relationship between Greece and the rest of the EU has too often looked like the tail wagging the dog. But now Greece itself is in dire need of help. Its economy in free-fall, utterly unable to pay its debts, Greece will need far more than the bailouts it has already received. If Greece is to be rescued from the mire, and if Greeks are to be given some hope for the future, a much more substantial part of its debt will sooner or later have to be forgiven. Reforms to make its economy more competitive, to slash its bloated state, and curb corruption and tax evasion are necessary. But in a climate of excessive austerity, without growth, and without hope, they will not resolve Greece’s problems. This is politically difficult, especially for Germany, which will have to foot the lion’s share of the bill. But the continued pretence that Greece will in time be able to reduce its indebtedness just prolongs the agony.

In return for receiving help, other EU members rightly impose conditions on Athens. The country must not return to the days of free-spending and covering up the extent of its indebtedness with false statistics. But what about on the political front? If Greece’s delinquent mismanagement of its economy is no longer to be tolerated, what about its persistent trouble-making in the EU’s relations in the Balkan region? What about Greece’s obligation to good-neighbourliness? Greece is in desperate straits. It should receive the help it needs. But it should not be allowed to continue benefitting from the largess of its fellow EU members while abusing its membership of the union to stymie the crucial efforts to integrate Macedonia and build stability in the Balkans. The next time the EU considers the opening of accession talks with Macedonia, Athens should be told firmly to stop it.

Venetian and Ottoman Crete

One of the main themes of my journey through Greece in the autumn of 2012 was visiting former territories of the Venetian Republic: Corfu; Preveza; and Chalkida/ Negropont. I finished this journey at one of the most important and longest standing of Venice’s overseas territories, Crete. Taken during the carve-up of Byzantine territory following the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, Crete was ruled by Venice for more than 400 years. Crete was much more than a trading outpost or a naval base defending the republic’s trade routes to the east. Crete was a colony. Venetian families settled there, and took the best, most productive land for themselves. Sugar plantations were established, in a medieval prototype of the later slave economy of the Caribbean. The slaves were mostly Christians seized in raids by the Crimean Tartars and sold at the Black Sea ports.

The Lion of St Mark, Rocca al Mare fortress, Heraklion

For the hordes of tourists who visit Crete, the main historical interest for most is found in the ancient Minoan sites. I had visited Knossos during an earlier stay on the island in 1996, as well as the museum in the nearby capital of the island, Heraklion. Undoubtedly the Minoan remains are remarkable. But I was put off by the garish reconstruction plucked from the imagination of the British archaeologist Arthur Evans. I had been more stirred a few years earlier by the more modest remains from the same period on the Aegean island of Santorini. No reconstruction or guesswork there. You are walking the street where the residents had strolled three and a half thousand years earlier. But on this visit I was more interested in Crete’s later history.

During two visits in 1996, I stayed in the village of Anogia, in the mountains above Heraklion. Here is a very different Crete from that of the coastal towns, with their Venetian, Ottoman and ancient remains. In isolated villages like Anogia in the island’s interior is the Crete of the Greek shepherds and goatherds who had lived there for thousands of years, outliving the comings and goings of one invader after another, their lives revolving around their flocks and their traditions. Anogia is a conservative place. The culture of the blood feud, I was told, had hardly been consigned to history. The blood feud has been, or still is, a feature of a number of such regions in the eastern Mediterranean: mountainous landscapes with pastoral societies. In this respect, there is much in common between the cultures of Montenegro, northern Albania, Sicily and Crete, as even some of the natives recognise. During my second stay in Anogia, with a group of students from around the Balkans, at one point a local Anogia lad embraced a young man from Montenegro, and declared emotionally, ‘Cretans and Montenegrins, brothers.’

Weapons are an important part of life in Crete’s interior. One evening in Anogia, sitting in a café garden, I watched as a man repeatedly walked out from a bar and fired his pistol several times into the air. What was the reason, I asked a Cretan companion? He has just heard that his wife is expecting a child, the reply. Not an occasion to stay and celebrate with his spouse, it seemed. Rather, an evening with his male friends, and his gun.

There was a wedding while I was in Anogia, a huge event, and everyone present in the village was invited, even unknown foreigners like me. They had slaughtered 300 sheep for the occasion. The mutton is boiled, and then the water is reused to cook pasta, imparting the flavour of the meat. The wedding took place in the evening, but the celebrations went on all day. On Crete, it is the groom’s family that hosts the wedding and provides the feast. Throughout the day, visitors were welcomed at his family house. I went along with my companions, a Dutchman and two Greek women from Athens. We were greeted by the groom and by his parents, and sat down to a pasta lunch, washed down with local wine. The village church was small, and most of the guests stood in the square outside, some of them wearing traditional Cretan costumes, the men in high leather boots. As the wedding came to an end, and the couple emerged from the church, the shooting began. And boy did they shoot. I had witnessed weddings involving shooting in Montenegro. Men fired pistols into the air, a dangerous and sometimes tragic practice, as the bullets come down, and from time-to-time people are hit. But in Anogia they used automatic weapons, machine guns blasting away. Afterwards the revellers dispersed around the various tavernas in the village, all of them taken over for the wedding feast. As we ate our supper – more mutton-water pasta, sprinkled with grated feta, the persistent shooting made us rather jumpy.

Anogia is well-known in Greece, owing to a notorious massacre there during the German occupation in World War II, when, as a reprisal for resistance activity, the order was given to slaughter the entire adult male population. Most of the men were away in the mountains, with the resistance, but many were killed, and the village was raised to the ground. It was rebuilt after the war. When I told some Greek friends back in Oxford that I had stayed in a village on Crete, they asked me which one? I did not suppose it likely they had heard of a small village in the mountains. But they had, and they were impressed. ‘Oh, Anogia, Anogia is famous.’

The Venetian Loggia, Heraklion

Apart from being a starting point for visits to Knossos, most people do not rate Heraklion highly as a tourist destination. Indeed, other towns on the island, such as Rethymno and Chania, are more attractive. Yet Heraklion boasts some of the most impressive Venetian remains on the island. In Venetian times, this was Candia, the island’s capital, whose name was also usually applied to the whole island. Much of the massive city walls built by the Venetians, interspersed by huge bastions, remain intact. Protecting the old harbour is the 16th century Venetian fortress of Rocca al Mare, or Koule, as it came to be known under Ottoman rule. On the fortress, as on the city walls, big stone plaques of the Lion of St Mark, symbol of Venice, remain in place. Close to the fortress, the Venetians built long, vaulted, tunnel-like shipyards, where their galleys could be built or repaired. Most have been demolished, but some remain, although no longer open to the sea. Similar shipyards are also found at Chania, at the western end of the island. The most elegant building in the city is the 17th century Loggia, the centre of civic life in Venetian times, and nowadays the town hall. Close by is the Morosini fountain, an elegant monument of now worn stone, with lions standing guard around a central bowl. It is another memento of the cultural flowering the island enjoyed during the Venetian period.

There are reminders of the period of Ottoman rule too. The Ottomans invaded Crete in 1645, after a ship carrying eminent Ottoman subjects home from their pilgrimage to Mecca was taken by the Knights of St. John, from Malta. The captors tried to land on Crete, but were turned away by port after port, eventually abandoning the vessel. Crete’s Venetian rulers did not want to risk Ottoman displeasure. Despite this, the Sultan took advantage of the opportunity to order the invasion of Crete in reprisal. With most of the island taken, the Ottoman army laid siege to Candia in 1647. The siege was to last for 22 years. The Venetian fleet attempted to seal of the Dardanelles, to prevent the supply of the Ottoman besieging force, and managed to frustrate Ottoman attempts at a naval blockade of Candia. The Venetians even won some notable naval victories.

During the siege, Crete received little support from the rest of Europe, now much less concerned with the eastern Mediterranean since its focus had shifted to the Atlantic. France, under Louis XIV, maintained good relations with the Sublime Porte, while allowing French volunteer forces to join the fight in 1668-69. To no avail, the French withdrew after they failed to push the Ottomans back, followed by other small forces from elsewhere. Finally, in 1669 the Venetians surrendered. They were granted honourable terms by the Grand Vizier, Ahmed Koprulu, an Albanian, and allowed to leave the town. Venetian power in the eastern Mediterranean had been all-but-snuffed out, despite the retention of a few bases. Venice did, however, manage to push the Ottomans back a little in Dalmatia, capturing the strategically important fortress of Klis, just inland from Split.

Crete was in Ottoman hands for more than 200 years. It was the island’s second experience of Muslim rule. For 150 years in the 9th and 10th centuries it was the Emirate of Crete, having been conquered by Arabs from Al Andalus, modern Spain. The island had been retaken for Byzantium in 960-61. There were repeated revolts against Ottoman rule by the island’s Christian population. Following the Congress of Berlin, in 1878, the island became semi-autonomous, with a Christian governor. But tensions between the island’s Christian and Muslim communities continued. Following a massacre in 1898 of several hundred Greeks, as well as 17 British soldiers and the British Consul, Ottoman forces were ordered off the island by the great powers, and replaced by four occupying powers, Britain, Russia, France and Italy. Nominally, Crete remained under Ottoman suzerainty, with a High Commissioner appointed by Athens. But Ottoman rule had effectively come to an end, and the island was incorporated into Greece in 1913.

Many Cretan Greeks had converted to Islam during the Ottoman period, and some estimates put the Muslim population of the island at almost half by the early 19th century. Some of them remained crypto-Christians in the privacy of their homes, and subsequently reverted to Christianity, while others left for mainland Turkey during the repeated violent conflicts of the 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, Muslims are reckoned to have made up not much more than 10 per cent of the population, the last of them leaving during the population exchange in 1924.

The Church of St Titus, Heraklion

The island contains several Ottoman-era remains. Of particular interest in Heraklion is the Church of St Titus. The earlier Christian church on this site had been converted into a mosque by the Ottomans. However, following its destruction by an earthquake in 1856, a new mosque was built. Following the departure of the last Muslims from Crete, it was in turn converted into a church, but it retains some typically Muslim features, notably ornate little niches in chapels on either side of the entrance, which have been adapted as Christian shrines. Another notable remnant of Ottoman times is the Sebil of Haci Ibrahim Agha, a public fountain, whose builder ordered that snow be brought regularly from the mountains during summer, so that passers-by could quench their thirst with cool, fresh water. Nowadays it houses a café. Next to it is the older Bembo fountain, named after the Venetian governor who had it built. In the run-down narrow streets of the old town are many, often dilapidated houses dating to Ottoman times, typical of that style. On the façade of one shop is an engraved sign in both Ottoman Turkish and Greek.

Rethymno, westwards along the coast from Heraklion, is a very attractive little town. Its old district, mainly dating from the Venetian period, is much better preserved than the island’s capital, with many fine buildings indicating the prosperity of Venetian Crete. In the central square, the Rimondi Fountain was once the centre of the town’s life. The nearby Loggia now houses a shop selling reproductions of classical artwork. On a hill above the old town stands the huge 16th century Fortezza fortress, claimed to be the largest of all Venetian fortresses. It had been intended to hold the entire population of the town within its walls, and at one time included the sumptuous residence of the Rector of the town. Most of the buildings within the walls are gone, but the Ottoman-era Sultan Ibrahim Mosque still stands, minus its minaret.

The Kara Pasha Mosque, Rethymno

There are other Ottoman-era buildings in Rethymno. One fine house now has shop windows on either side, but in the middle, above the entrance, is the date, 1844, and inscriptions in Greek and Ottoman Turkish. The elegant Kara Pasha Mosque, near the seafront, nestles among palm trees and bushes, the simple beauty of its domes and arches accentuated by the sunlight playing on it from different angles at different times of the day. The Neratzes Mosque, in the town centre, now houses a music school. Its exterior is graffiti covered, but the minaret is being restored. Nearby, another minaret sits alone amidst a cluster of buildings. A little outside the town centre, the Veli Pasha Mosque is in better shape, and now contains a museum.

Chania, at the western end of the island, is considered by many to be Crete’s most attractive town. It became the island’s capital during the period of the autonomous Cretan state, before unification with Greece. And in Ottoman times the Pasha of Crete resided there Eleftherios Venizelos, a leader of Greek rebellion against the Ottomans on Crete, and later Prime Minister of Greece, was from near Chania, and his final resting place is there. The town’s name originated during the Arab Emirate of Crete, when it was called Al Hanim. To the Venetians it was La Canea.

The Yali Mosque, Chania

Chania’s picturesque old harbour surrounds a bay ringed by restaurants and cafés. On one side of the harbour, the Kucuk Hassan Mosque, popularly known as the Yali (Seaside) Mosque, minus its minaret, was built in the 17th century, not long after the Ottoman conquest of the town, following a two-month siege. Jutting out on a long wall protecting the harbour is a Venetian-era lighthouse. Across the harbour from there is the low Firka fortress, where the Greek flag was first raised on the island upon unification in 1913. In the inner harbour several of the long vaulted Venetian dockyards remain.

Away from the harbour area, so popular with tourists, are some very charming quarters. Some sections of the impressive Venetian city walls, as well as bastions, remain. I particularly liked the Spiantza district, not far from the harbour, a maze of colourful lanes. At its heart is a leafy square. In contrast to the cafés of the harbour, when I visited in November, on this square I only saw Greeks, quietly sitting in the shade of the old trees. Old men seated at a café window cheerily sang along to traditional songs, while a couple of Romany boys accompanied them on an accordion. A Greek coffee here cost two or three times less than at the harbour. At one end of the square is the odd hybrid church of Agios Nikolaos. During the Ottoman period, it was converted into a mosque, and while it is now a church again, the minaret is still there, at one corner. Not far away, another minaret stands on its own.

The cultural heritage of Crete is exceptionally rich, spanning civilisations over more than three millennia, from Minoan, to Classical Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Venetian and Ottoman, and through it all, the traditional lives of the hardy Greek villagers of the mountainous interior, outlasting all the island’s varied rulers. Much of this heritage is still there to see, and as elsewhere in Greece, perhaps the more recent Venetian and Ottoman layers, as well as the older Byzantine and ancient remains, are being accorded greater value and respect than was often the case in the past. Crete’s history was frequently troubled, by war, invasion, rebellion and natural disasters. And while invaders were generally not welcome, and their rule was often oppressive, the diversity they bequeathed is today one of the island’s most appealing features.

Sadness in Salonika

I was a bit out of spirits when I arrived in Thessaloniki. I had been robbed in Athens the previous day. Foolish of me. Eleni had issued stern warnings about taking good care of my things. But sitting on a rock near the Acropolis, reading a book, I did not pay attention. I didn’t realise anyone was near me. I didn’t hear anyone. But of course, thieves are quiet. My bag was gone: passport; money; cameras; ipod touch. Arriving in Thessaloniki, I was not yet over the trauma. And it was raining; miserable, grey. And the gyro I ate that first evening was a disappointment. They put mustard and ketchup on it! Over the next few days I realised this was normal in Thessaloniki. Back in Athens a few days later, I grabbed some gyro before boarding the ferry for Crete. I asked the waiter not to add mustard and ketchup. He looked puzzled. No, we put tzatziki. With mustard and ketchup is not Greek. In Thessaloniki they add mustard and ketchup, I told him. Ah well, maybe in Thessaloniki, he said, as if anything were possible there, but it is not Greek.

The White Tower, Thessaloniki

I forced myself out into the drizzly morning, more out of stoical determination than inclination. Perhaps I was not in the right frame of mind to give Thessaloniki its due. But actually I was not expecting a lot. I knew today’s Thessaloniki to be a big, modern city, with some ancient remains and a large number of medieval, Byzantine churches. I also knew that a once fine city, a thriving, multi-ethnic metropolis, a rich mosaic of overlapping cultures and multiple languages that had existed only a hundred years ago, was no more. For my arrival coincided with the hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Greek army in Ottoman Salonika during the first Balkan War, in 1912.

Following the city’s incorporation into Greece, the Turks and Bulgarians had gone. And then the Jews, the huge Spanish Jewish population, whose forbears had been expelled from Spain in the 15th century, and that had at one time made up half the population. Those of them who did not leave after the end of Ottoman rule were destroyed in the Nazi holocaust. The departed populations had been replaced by hoards of Greeks expelled from Turkey as part of the population exchange (what a horrible sanitised description of the mass expulsions of populations from their homes) that followed Greece’s Asia Minor disaster after the First World War, its failure to carve out a new Byzantine Empire in Anatolia. Salonika, Selanik to the Turks, Solun to the Bulgarians and other Slavs, now reverted to its ancient name, Thessaloniki, and was a Greek city.

I had read the wonderful memoir by Leon Sciaky of his formative years in a Jewish merchant family, growing up in Salonika. Its title, Farewell to Salonica, not only reflected his own departure from his native city, when he emigrated to America, but a farewell to the city itself, to a civilization, a way of life that had been obliterated, never to return. Salonika had gone the same way as several other great multi-ethnic metropolises on the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea seaboards: Alexandria; Smyrna; Trieste; Odessa; Constantinople, that had not survived the onset of the nation state in the twentieth century, with its intolerance of all that was other, all that did not conform with the homogenising national idea.

Sciaky’s beautiful book evokes a bygone era through the life of a close-knit family. Walks with his grandfather; the little world of the living room where the family would gather in the evenings, sitting on the divans, and where neighbours would visit; the streets around their home, with their tradesmen and beggars; the office of the family business, and the characters, merchants, farmers, Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, who would visit, smoke, drink coffee and while away their time; his days at school, and his contacts with pupils from other ethnic groups; summers in the countryside with the Bulgarian and Turkish peasants so beloved of his grandfather, who bought their grain and took care of their worries.

It is a charming picture, but Sciaky was never naïve about the stresses facing this intricately woven multi-ethnic society, in which different peoples lived alongside one another, rubbed shoulders and greeted each other, but for the most part lived separate lives. His is a deeply personal account, but he was also a shrewd observer of the politics of his region. He was all too aware of the contrary aspirations of Turks, Bulgarians and Greeks for nationhood. And the Jews, who had by and large fared well in the tolerant atmosphere of the Ottoman Empire, for whom Salonika was their home, and who, unlike the Greeks or the Bulgarians, had no neighbouring national homeland. The battle for Salonika and for Macedonia would hugely impinge on their lives, yet the Jews could be hardly more than bystanders to the unfolding events.

It is clear that Sciaky, like his grandfather, loved the Bulgarian and Turkish farmers in Salonika’s hinterland with whom his family did business. He was all too aware of the heavy burden placed on the Bulgarian peasant: ‘The Turkish landowner, whose domain included whole villages, treated him as a conquered slave. He staggered under the load of iniquitous levies and burdensome taxes, and smarted under the insult of enforced labour. Time and again he abandoned his fields, put aside his plough and fled to the mountain fastnesses where he could be free.’ But while excoriating the cruelty of many of the Turkish beys, he wrote with warmth of the kindness of the Turkish peasants, and his appreciation of the Muslim obligation of hospitality towards guests, and the relative tolerance of the Ottoman, Muslim order, in comparison with Christian Europe.

Of the Greeks, Sciaky had less to say. He understood the resentment of the Bulgarian peasant towards his fellow Orthodox believers: ‘Toward the Greeks he nurtured a hatred as implacable as the one he bore towards the Turkish bey, his oppressor. Had not his Christian brothers tried to Hellenize him and his children? Had not the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, under whose spiritual jurisdiction the Turks had placed him, sent him priests to conduct services in his church in a tongue he did not understand? Had they not burned his books and forbidden the teaching of his mother tongue in his own schools?’ Forced assimilation was the Greek policy towards other national groups even before the end of Ottoman rule.

For most of Sciaky’s happy childhood the clouds of doom were gathering over his fragile world. His telling of the multiple bomb attacks in Salonika in 1903 is poignant, seen through the eyes of a little boy. The attacks were carried out by a group of radical young Bulgarians on the fringe of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (VMRO), to which many of the Slavs in Ottoman Macedonia belonged. The young Sciaky was brought face to face with the terrible human consequences of the clash of nations in Macedonia, when, in the aftermath of the attacks, the frantic Bulgarian milkman hammered on their door, begging refuge from the indiscriminate Turkish reprisals against the Bulgarian population.

As a young man, Sciaky witnessed the tragedy of the Balkan Wars at close hand, when he went with his grandfather to visit Kilkish (Kukush), the small Bulgarian town to the north of Salonika where he had spent happy childhood summers. Sciaky’s grandfather knew the peasants of Kilkish and the surrounding area, and was deeply attached to them. Throughout his life he had bought their grain, he had helped them out through years of drought. His father had known their fathers and grandfathers. He felt protective towards them.

In the first Balkan War, in 1912, while the Bulgarians took most of the burden of driving the Ottoman forces out of the Balkans, Greece and Serbia divided up most of the spoils. Salonika was the greatest prize. When the Bulgarian army arrived the day after the Greeks, the Ottoman commander explained that he had only one Salonika, and he had already surrendered it. For several months two armies, Greek and Bulgarian, uneasy allies, co-existed in Salonika, glaring at each other, sometimes fighting each other. When the fraying alliance finally rent apart in 1913, and the Bulgarian army was driven away from Salonika, the Slav peasants fled northwards with them, leaving a denuded countryside, emptied of its inhabitants, many of the Turks having fled the previous year.

News of the fall of Kilkish to the Greek army, the end of the world he had known throughout his life, was a terrible blow to Sciaky’s grandfather. He had to go there, and his grandson went with him. They travelled through a largely deserted countryside, desolation all around. Kilkish itself had been burned.

In 1914, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a report on The Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, written by an International Commission made up of eminent figures from several European countries, as well as Russia and the United States. It was a seminal publication, which sought to establish accountability, and to document the excesses perpetrated on all sides.

In and around Kilkish, the defeat of the Ottomans in 1912 gave free reign to local Bulgarian bands, the comitadjis referred to by Sciaky, some of whose members he had met during an earlier stay in Kilkish. The Carnegie Report describes terrible atrocities against local Muslims, as well as against disbanded Ottoman troops who, having surrendered, were on their way to Turkish held territory. Hundreds of them were reportedly massacred in the Kilkish region. Men, women and children were murdered, some burned alive in their mosques. The band leader held most responsible for the massacres, a certain Donchev, was afterwards sentenced to death by VMRO for his crimes. VMRO, although its adherents were Slav, had called for an autonomous Macedonia for all Macedonians. The report was critical of the Bulgarian military authorities for not initially establishing control in the captured areas, leaving only small garrisons as they marched on to Salonika. But it acknowledged the later efforts of the Bulgarian army to restore order, end the excesses, punish the perpetrators, and gain the trust of local Muslims.

When Kilkish fell to the Greek army the following year, its Bulgarian population fled en-masse, as well as from the surrounding villages. As described in the Carnegie Report, the conquering Greeks set about methodically burning the town, as well as at least 40 Bulgarian villages in the surrounding area. The purpose was clear; this area was now Greek, and the Bulgarians would never be allowed to return. Those Bulgarians who were unable to flee, or who were too slow, were, in the words of the report, subjected to ‘indiscriminate butchery’ by the Greek army. One Greek cavalry unit was described as ‘slaughtering Bulgarian peasants at sight’, sparing neither women nor children. Amid the wanton killing, numerous rapes were also committed, the report noting that ‘the Greek troops gave themselves up openly and generally to a debauch of lust.’ In a Greek baggage train captured by the Bulgarians, letters home by Greek soldiers were discovered, which the commission members were satisfied were genuine. Some of them boasted of the wholesale slaughter, butchery, rape and torture they perpetrated against the Bulgarian population. The report concluded that ‘from Kukush to the Bulgarian frontier the Greek army devastated the villages, violated the women, and slaughtered the noncombatant men.’

When Sciaky and his grandfather arrived a short while later, there was almost no one left. His depiction of a meeting with a fleeing Bulgarian peasant they met on the road, leading a small child on a donkey, an individual example among hundreds of thousands, vividly portrays the horrible human cost of the war: ‘The misery, the look of dread and utter agony in the small blinking eyes of the pock-marked face with the yellow straggly beard were the very embodiment of human fear and despair. No, not human. It was the animal dread of cattle at the slaughterhouse, the wild glassy stare of terror in a cornered animal. It was a look which, once perceived, made one cringe with shame and humiliation, the shame of its having been in a human eye.’

So what of the modern Thessaloniki I had arrived in? Apart from the eradication of its once rich multicultural life, much of the old city was destroyed in a fire in 1917. A modern city rose in its place. Some districts survived, notably Ano Poli (the Upper Town), which rises up the hill, partially enclosed by surviving sections of the city walls, culminating at the Byzantine era fortress, the Heptapyrgion. Wandering through its narrow, stone-paved lanes, its little squares, and its numerous surviving Ottoman-era houses, most of them restored, it is the most charming part of Thessaloniki.

The city has numerous Byzantine churches, most of which survived Ottoman rule as they were converted to mosques. Having reverted to Christianity, many were severely damaged in the 1917 conflagration, but have been restored. The Hagios Demetrios basilica, named after the city’s patron saint, had to be completely rebuilt. Finest of all is Hagia Sofia basilica.

The Rotonda, with Heptapyrgion fortress in the background

The White Tower, the emblem of the city, is perhaps a symbol of sorts of continuity with the Ottoman past. Standing by the seafront, this late-15th century construction once formed part of the city walls, demolished in the 19th century. In that century, it had been known as the Bloody Tower, or the Janissary Tower. In Ottoman times, Salonika had been a centre of the Janissaries, elite troops originally recruited from among the conquered Christian nations of the Balkans. But by the beginning of the 19th century, the once mighty Janissaries had grown slack and become an over-powerful interest group, and a brake on the Empire’s efforts to reform and create a modern, European-style army. In what was known as the ‘Auspicious Incident’, they were bloodily suppressed in 1826, thousands of them being massacred in Salonika. The name ‘White Tower’ originated in 1890, when it was whitewashed by a prisoner in exchange for his freedom. Nowadays, the tower houses a museum of the history of the city.

As well as the restored Byzantine churches, Thessaloniki contains several ancient archaeological sites, including the Roman forum, and the ruins of the palace of the Roman Emperor Galerius, with some well-preserved mosaic floors. Close-by the palace is the Arch built by Galerius to commemorate his victory over the Persians in 297 AD. And a little beyond that is the Rotonda, designed by the Romans as a mausoleum, later used as a church and then as a mosque. Unusually, its restored minaret still stands.

The Bey Hamam

Surviving Ottoman-era buildings have not been as well cared for as the Byzantine churches. A century after the end of Ottoman rule, many of them are in a poor state of dilapidation and neglect. But that may now be changing, and restoration efforts might indicate that the city is coming to terms with a period in its history it had preferred to forget. Among the best preserved is the 15th century Bey Haman, the first Ottoman bath house built in the city. It was in use until the 1960s. Nearby is a many-domed covered market, the Bezesten. In Ottoman times, valuable goods were sold there, including fabrics and precious stones. Nowadays it houses jewellery shops. Across the road, the 15th century Hamza Bey mosque was one of the few purpose-built mosques in Salonika, most of them having been converted churches. When I visited, it was covered in scaffolding, undergoing restoration. A much better preserved mosque is the Alaja Imaret, which takes its name from the poorhouse that stood next door. Nowadays, it houses exhibitions, and when I was there it had an exhibition of artworks commemorating the Greek conquest of the city a hundred years earlier.

The centenary of the conquest was much in evidence during my stay. Greek flags festooned buildings throughout the city. The Greek army accepted the Ottoman surrender on 26 October, the feast day of St. Demetrios, the day of my arrival. Crowds queued patiently outside the basilica of the city’s patron, waiting their turn to kiss a holy icon, Greek flags hanging inside and out.

The exhibition in the Alaja Imaret was a feast of jingoism. Paintings showed the Ottoman surrender watched over approvingly by saints and angels, and by the Virgin Mary, with the infant Jesus on her knee. One showed a map of Greece, with different colours marking its gradual expansion, stage by stage from independence in 1832, with a saint overlooking. The paintings had no artistic merit, just crude, gaudy nationalistic pastiches. The placing of such an exhibition beneath the graceful dome of a 500-year old mosque appeared staggeringly inappropriate. I could not share the celebration of the city’s conquest, could not stomach this portrayal of a divinely ordained victory. As with so many celebrated military victories, the horrors described by the Carnegie report, and the terrible loss depicted by Sciaky could not but take the lustre off any notion of glory in the conquest of Salonika and the dismemberment of Macedonia.

One very well preserved Ottoman-era building is the house once lived in by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, father of modern Turkey, and a native of Salonika. At the beginning of the 20th century Salonika spawned the nationalist Young Turk movement among the Ottoman military. The house is managed by the next-door Turkish consulate. Normally, it is possible to visit the house, which contains a small museum. But when I was there the building was being renovated. Surrounding the consulate and house is a high, tightly-meshed steel wall, testimony to the still fraught relations between the neighbouring countries. During my few days in the city, each time I walked past there was a bus load of Greek police outside. Whether this was a precaution during the centenary of the conquest of the city, or whether such a level of security was normal, I did not know.

The Galerius Arch

Overall, I was depressed by Thessaloniki. Probably my bad mood after the robbery in Athens had not helped. Despite all the ancient and Byzantine monuments, the surfeit of UNESCO World Heritage sites, I found the city ugly. The destruction of the 1917 fire could not be helped, but what had risen in its place seemed unworthy. And not all the destruction can be blamed on the fire. Next to the Galerius Arch is a board with pictures showing it at different points in the city’s history. A lithograph from 1831 shows the arch passing over a street of typical Ottoman-style low-level buildings. Photographs from between the two world wars and from the 1950s show a still attractive scene, of a street with old, low buildings. The text beneath one of them describes how, in the 1950s and ’60s, the old buildings around the arch were demolished, to make way for the ‘regeneration’ of the district. Now, like most of the old monuments in the city centre, the arch sticks out like a forlorn memory of better days among the nondescript 1960s blocks that crowd around it. Regeneration? The city has been devastated by the ill-judged town-planning of the post-World war II era. Thessaloniki was the European City of Culture in 1997. Surely a cruel joke.

Chalkida, a once fine city

Chalkida has little to commend it to foreign visitors. Within easy day-trip distance from Athens, it is a popular weekend destination for Athenians out for a fresh fish meal by the sea. But why would I want to go there? Eleni, whose flat I was staying in in Athens, seemed surprised. It is a modern, rather non-descript town, not very attractive. Yet in the Middle Ages, this town, known as Negropont, was perhaps the most important overseas possession of the Venetian Republic. It was the republic’s key naval base in the eastern Mediterranean, from which it controlled the Aegean, a vital outpost defending Venice’s crucial trading links with the east.

Venetian Negropont

Situated at the end of a spur of the Athens-Salonika railway line, a sign on the dilapidated train station gives the ancient name of the town, Chalcis. Chalkida is the main town of Euboea, a long, narrow island that stretches along the eastern coast of Greece. At Chalkida, the gap between the island and the mainland, the Euripos Strait, is less than 50 metres, and is spanned by a short bridge. Chalkida has long been famous for the crazy currents that race, swirling through the gap, changing direction every few hours. According to legend, Aristotle, who died in Chalcis, threw himself into the water, exasperated by his inability to explain the phenomenon. A tourist information sign by the bridge gives a technical explanation, which I struggled to understand.

Venice acquired Negropont in the aftermath of the sacking of Constantinople by a Venetian-Frankish force in 1204, along with other choice pieces picked off the body of the prostrate Byzantine Empire. Under Venetian rule, it was a heavily fortified town, surrounded by strong walls. But in 1470 the town fell to the Ottoman Empire. It was a huge blow to the republic, one of its greatest disasters in the long, steady expansion of the Ottomans into Europe.

The Sultan, Mehmet II, conqueror of Constantinople 17 years earlier, was one of the most energetic of all Ottoman rulers. He was noted for his meticulous planning and his attention to logistics. Having amassed a huge fleet and army, he ignored the bridge to the town, and built a pontoon bridge a little to the north. The siege began, Mehmet’s heavy cannon battering the walls. It soon became clear that a breach was imminent. Yet the Captain-General of the Venetian fleet, Nicolo Canal, kept his galleys out of the way. Finally, urged on by his captains, he ordered the fleet to sail down towards the pontoon bridge. Wind and tide were in his galleys’ favour, and they would surely have rammed through it. But Canal lost his nerve and ordered a withdrawal. The watching defenders saw that they had been abandoned. The following day, 12 July, the wall was breached and the Ottoman forces burst in. Still the defenders did not give in, raining roof tiles and boiling water on to the attackers. Their revenge was savage, almost the entire population being massacred. The governor, Paolo Enrizzo, surrendered on condition that he be allowed to keep his head. The Sultan obliged him by having his body severed at the waist.

On his return to Venice, Canal was arrested, tried and exiled. Many considered he was lucky not to be executed. He had had a long, illustrious career, mainly as a diplomat. He was not a military man. In any case, in the 15th century, when the Ottoman Empire, rampant and at the height of its power, seriously set out to seize an objective, no European power could stand against it. Mehmet the Conqueror had set his sights on Negropont, and he was not going to be denied.

The fall of Negropont, not long after the capture of Constantinople, left the whole of the eastern Mediterranean vulnerable to the expanding Ottomans. It was a catastrophe not only for Venice, but with wider significance for Europe. Gioachino Rossini wrote an opera based on the siege, Maometto II, first performed in Naples in 1820. Two years later, a revised version was performed in Venice, this time with a happy ending. In 1826, a new version was performed in Paris, no longer set in the battle for Negropont, but in the struggle between Ottomans and Greeks, under the name Le Siège de Corinthe. This was a shrewd move, nodding to the philhellenism current in Paris during the Greek independence war. It was also a homage to Lord Byron, a romantic hero for poets, artists and composers around Europe following his death in Greece in 1824. Byron had written a poem entitled The Siege of Corinth. The fall of Negropont had dropped out of European consciousness, superseded by later wars.

Chalkida became part of newly independent Greece in 1832. By the end of the 19th century, most of the old town of the Venetians and the Ottomans, as well as the surrounding walls, had been torn down. Very little is left today. In what is still known as the kastro district, despite the absence of the old walls, is the basilica of Ayia Paraskevi. Following the return of the Greek emperors to Constantinople, half a century after its sacking by the Crusaders, the seat of the Latin Patriarch in the east had been moved to Negropont. The western style is evident in the architecture of the basilica, a strange hotch-potch of Byzantine and Gothic. The building survived Ottoman rule because, like so many Byzantine churches, it was converted into a mosque under their rule. Facing the basilica is the former residence of the Venetian bailo, the governor, in a very dilapidated state, but in the process of restoration when I visited. I looked in the front entrance. Workmen were sitting around, having a break. But amongst the ruin, the high ceiling and arches running through the hallway attest to the one-time opulence of the building. Close-by the basilica is a closed 15th century mosque, without its minaret, as usual. In front of it is an ornate Ottoman fountain, which would be beautiful were it not covered in graffiti, typical of the degree of interest and respect for the Ottoman-era heritage in Greece.

On the hill on the mainland side of the bridge, across from the kastro, is the 17th century Karababa fortress, built by the Ottomans. As I walked in the gateway, a large pack of feral dogs resting under the trees raised their heads. Some of them began to bark and growl. As I stood their uncertainly, a couple of large beasts started to walk purposefully, menacingly towards me. I beat a retreat. But I wanted to look round the fort. I looked around for weapons. Armed with a heavy stick and a few rocks, I walked gingerly back in, but this time I made my way quickly away from the dogs, behind some buildings and a make-shift stage, presumably left over from some kind of performance. Out of sight of the dogs, I found a way up on to the ledge that went around the inside of the wall of the fort. Safe now, I walked along to the far end of the castle.

There, among the arches of the tower at the end of the fort, is a marvellous museum. It contains exhibits from the Byzantine, through the Venetian and Ottoman periods, ending with the early period of Greek independence (another museum in the town covers the ancient period). I was met at the entrance by a huge man, looking very much like a hairy biker type. He gave me a full tour. The exhibits were organised by period, with explanations in English as well as Greek. Belying his appearance, my guide quickly proved to be highly knowledgeable, as he explained to me the development of Byzantine architecture as revealed in the exhibits.

Most fascinating of all to me, in the Venetian section were several carvings of the Lion of Saint Mark, symbol of Venice. They had once been fixed into the town walls. The Ottomans, as elsewhere, were untroubled by the presence of the symbols of the former rulers, and had left them in place. Later, they had been saved when the walls were demolished. Some of them were very large, much larger than I had seen in most Venetian cities, indicating the importance of Negropont. But particularly extraordinary were two examples of lions that were unmistakably of Chinese design. Of course, Venice had trading links with China, strung out along the Silk Road. My guide told me that Marco Polo was believed to have visited Negropont. But I had never before seen such clear evidence of Chinese influence on Venice, and, no less, on the symbol of the republic.

Among the exhibits are engravings of Chalkida during the Venetian and Ottoman periods. Both show a fine city, surrounded by walls, the first with church steeples, the second with minarets. I asked my guide when it had happened, who had pulled down the walls and the fine buildings, was it the Turks? No, it was the Greeks! What had possessed them? The town today, a mixture of modern blocks and dilapidated wrecks, makes me almost despair. Not for the first, nor the last time in Greece, I wondered what moved people to trash so many fine old towns? When I mentioned it to Eleni, in Athens, she responded by recalling an interview she had seen with a leading politician from Venice. Asked what Venetians would do if their city was finally engulfed by the sea, he replied that they would build something else. For Eleni, this was a good response; the new replaces the old. Yet no one could persuade me that the travesty of modern Chalkida is an improvement on what came before, any more than I could look on the loss of Venice with equanimity.

The rich Venetian and Ottoman heritage that graces other parts of the Balkans has been effaced in much of Greece, its remnants left to decay. The relics of the ancient and Byzantine worlds are assiduously preserved, but little value appears to have been attached to the Venetian and Ottoman inheritance. Maybe the excellent museum in Chalkida is evidence of a change of heart. Certainly my guide was keen to preserve all of his town’s heritage, through all its stages. He had given me an outstanding tour, and was a font of expertise. As I left, I asked him whether he was an archaeologist by profession. ‘Oh no’, he chuckled, ‘I am just the security guard.’

Preveza and the struggle for Greece

Preveza, at the mouth of the Amvrakikos Gulf, in southern Epirus, is a pleasant little town. In a maze of narrow streets between the Venetian clock tower, built at the end of the 18th century, and the seafront are lots of little restaurants selling simple, fresh seafood, packed with locals and a handful of foreign visitors during my weekend stay. It is a sleepy, peaceful place in autumn, but it is expanding fast, new villas springing up along the coast, international flights now arriving at the airport. But the proliferation of crumbling fortresses, overgrown with greenery, attest to a time when Preveza was strategically important and bitterly fought over. Now that importance has gone. Inside the walls of the Agios Andreas and Agios Georgios fortresses, which flank the town, stand derelict military barracks, empty guard huts at the entrances, evidence of more recent, but now ended military use.

The Venetian clock tower, Preveza

Preveza changed hands many times during the Middle Ages, and, after a long spell of Ottoman rule, was held by Venice from 1717 until the Venetian Republic was snuffed out by Napoleon in 1797. The small French garrison stationed in the town, together with local Preveza guards and a band of Suliote warriors, were no match for the army with which Ali Pasha marched on the town the following year. The massacre of the defenders and the local Christian population that accompanied Ali Pasha’s capture of the town was one of the most notorious episodes in his cruel reign. He then called on those who had escaped to the mountains to return to the town, promising they would not be in any danger. When they returned, many of them were immediately put to the sword. Surviving prisoners were marched up to Ioannina, many of them perishing on the journey. Those who made it were paraded through the streets of Ali Pasha’s capital carrying the severed heads of their dead comrades, to the taunts of the town’s Muslim inhabitants. A handful of the French prisoners were afterwards sent to Istanbul.

Lord Byron briefly stopped in Preveza a few years later, when he first arrived in Greece, dining with the British consul in the town. It did not make a favourable impression. Byron’s companion, John Cam Hobhouse, was appalled by the hole-in-the-floor privy, later admitting that ‘had the commander of the brig been very pressing, I believe we should have consented to go back to Patras.’ The sorry state of Preveza in the years following Ali Pasha’s conquest was attested by another British traveller, the Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes, who visited a few years after Byron and Hobhouse. He wrote of a deplorable change in the town, whose population had been reduced from 16,000 to 3,000, a monument to the worst afflictions of arbitrary power. The remaining inhabitants stalked like spectres through its vacant and deserted streets, many of the buildings and all the churches raised to the ground. Yet despite all that, Hughes wrote, Preveza was ‘a very favourite residence of the pasha, his great naval depot, fortified by the strongest works and adorned by the finest palace in his dominions.’ But Ali Pasha cannot have cared much for Preveza. He removed the clock mechanism and bell from the clock tower, and took them back to Ioannina.

Pantokrator fortress, Preveza

Ali Pasha beefed up the defences of the town. He substantially rebuilt the Venetian fortress of Agios Andreas, and built the Agios Georgios fort on the other side of the town. He built the Pantokrator fortress, named after the church on the site, a little to the north of the town, and a small fortress on the other side of the gulf, next to where the airport now stands. This is a region of many castles, up and down the coast. The fortresses around Preveza are all decaying, neglected. Modern buildings and streets have breached the walls of Agios Georgios. Sitting a little distance from the town, and only recently surrounded by new suburbs, the Pantokrator fortress has been better preserved. Jutting out into the sea, from a distance it looks rather fine. But inside, it is much decayed. Some more modern constructions inside the fort have also been abandoned, and vandals and graffitists have done much damage. There appears to be little interest in conserving the town’s past.

With the fall of Ali Pasha in 1822, the town reverted to direct Ottoman rule, which continued until the First Balkan war of 1912. Later in the 19th century, as the emergent Balkan states vied for the territory of the decaying Ottoman Empire, Albanians struggled to assert their interests. Preveza had a significant Albanian population in the 19th century. In 1878, as the Congress of Berlin considered a further carve up of Ottoman territory, and Greece pressed its claim to Epirus, Albanians began to organise their resistance. In January 1879, the Albanian Committee of Preveza, a branch of the League of Prizren, organised the Assembly of Preveza, a meeting of local Albanian delegates and supporters from elsewhere in the Albanian-inhabited Ottoman lands. This Assembly determined to oppose the cessation of Epirus from the Ottoman Empire to Greece. The following month, Albanian representatives from around the Ottoman Empire signed a petition in Preveza, threatening to take up arms to prevent the town being transferred to Greece.

On this occasion, the Albanians prevailed. But it was only a temporary reprieve. In the First Balkan War, in 1912, Preveza was taken for Greece. There is no visible sign of the former Albanian presence now. The statues and monuments are for Greek heroes, the victors. By the best preserved section of the wall of the fortress of Agios Andreas is a memorial to the fallen defenders of the homeland from 1912-1940, the Greek homeland. Their victory meant this would not be a homeland for Albanians. The Albanian story in Preveza has been rubbed out. Prominently placed on the seafront is a statue of Odysseus Androutsos, one of the several rival leaders of the Greek revolt against the Turks, whose mother was from Preveza. Shortly before his death in Missilonghi, just down the coast from Preveza, in April 1824, Byron had accepted an invitation from Androutsos to attend a congress in Salona, in eastern Greece, to try to unite the different Greek factions. He hoped his presence might help bring accord. He never made it, dying before he could set out.

Ioannina to Tepelena

When Lord Byron visited Ioannina in 1809, he travelled for three days from Preveza, on the coast, with an entourage of servants, guards, an interpreter and ten horses, carrying beds and linen with them, among many other necessities. I travelled with a rucksack by bus from Igoumenitsa, having first taken the ferry from Corfu, and was in Ioannina in time for lunch. Travel is less arduous today, and less romantic.

When Byron visited, Ioannina was the capital of Ali Pasha Tepelena, the Albanian despot who controlled a large territory, including most of present-day Greece, southern Albania, and the south-west corner of Macedonia. Nominally subject to the Sultan, Ali Pasha ruled largely autonomously in his domain. Arriving at the town, the first impression of Byron’s companion, John Cam Hobhouse, was almost fairy-tale: ‘The houses, domes and minarets, glittering through gardens of orange and lemon trees, and from groves of cypress – the lake spreading its smooth expanse at the foot of the city – the mountains rising abruptly from the banks of the lake – all these burst at once upon us...’ The impression was marred by the sight of the severed arm of an executed robber hanging by a finger on a piece of string from a tree as they approached the town.

Ioannina, the Aslan Pasha Mosque

Another British traveller who visited Ioannina not long after Byron and Hobhouse was the Rev. Thomas Smart Hughes, a Cambridge don, who published an account of his travels in Sicily, Greece and Albania in 1821. Approaching the city, he described it as having a noble appearance, crowned with palaces and mosques. The palace of Ali Pasha, and those of his two sons, were, he wrote, in the best Turkish style of architecture, bursting on the sight with great magnificence. Like Byron and Hobhouse, Hughes’s party stayed in the house of Niccolo Argyri. Hughes tells how Ali Pasha, on the death of Argyri’s wealthy father, had appropriated most of his property, which, fearing for his life, Argyri had been unable to oppose. As a result, he was left with a fine house in Ioannina, in which Ali Pasha had ordered him to accommodate the British guests, but with hardly the means to maintain it. This was not an uncommon fate for the city’s Greek merchants. Hughes met one of them, the richest in the city, who had built a house so splendid that Ali Pasha had seized it for his nephew, banishing the merchant and his family from the town.

Like Byron, Hughes was received by Ali Pasha, who at the time was assiduously courting every British visitor, hoping to gain territorial advantage, perhaps an Ionian island, having bet on them during the wars with the French. Hughes, like Byron and Hobhouse, had heard much of the tyrant’s cruelties, including his penchant for roasting alive, impaling and skinning those who crossed him. Not long before Byron’s arrival, Antonis Katsantonis, the leader of a rebel band that had long been a thorn in Ali Pasha’s side, had been captured, together with his brother, Yorgos, and cruelly executed by having his bones broken with a sledge hammer. One of Ali Pasha’s most notorious acts of cruelty was the drowning in Lake Pamvotis of some 17 Greek women for alleged adultery. Among them was Kyra Frossyni, who had apparently been accused of adultery by the jealous wife of Ali Pasha’s son. Some have suggested she may also have been a mistress of Ali Pasha himself. The event was commemorated by a painting, which now features on postcards sold in souvenir shops in Ioannina.

But, as Byron had discovered, Ali Pasha had great charm when he chose. Hughes struggled to recognise the brutal tyrant when his party was received by him in Ioannina: ‘Here it is very difficult to find any traces of that bloodthirsty disposition, that ferocious appetite for revenge, that restless and inordinate ambition, that inexplicable cunning, which has marked his eventful career: the mien of his face on the contrary has an air of mildness in it, his front is open, his venerable white beard descending over his breast gives him a kind of patriarchal appearance, whilst the silvery tones of his voice, and the familiar simplicity with which he addresses his attendants, strongly aid the deception.’

As I walked from the bus station, along a road that followed the shore of Pamvotis lake towards the historic city centre, I caught my first glimpse of a minaret through the trees, and felt perhaps an echo of the excitement of earlier travellers. Ioannia is nowadays a big, modern town. But the historic centre still has charm. Although the lake is polluted, one cannot tell that looking over it towards the same mountains described by Hobhouse. Walking alongside the lake, beneath the great walls of the citadel, as men sit with their fishing rods, it is still a beautiful scene.

When Byron arrived, he found a message awaiting him from the forewarned Ali Pasha, inviting him to come up and visit him in Tepelena, where he was conducting a ‘little war’, besieging Berat. While they stayed in Ioannina, they were looked after by two of Ali Pasha’s grandchildren, Byron describing the boys as ‘the prettiest little animals I ever saw’.

Ioannina was taken by Greece in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, much to the chagrin of the Albanian community there. Abdyl Frashëri, one of the founders of the League of Prizren, formed to prevent the annexation of Albanian-inhabited Ottoman territory to other newly emergent Balkan states, had been the head of the Albanian Committee of Ioannina. This sought to preserve the city and the Epirus region from inclusion in Greece. There is little sign nowadays of the once significant Albanian presence in Ioannina. A friend in Tirana told me his grandmother was originally from Ioannina, and that he still had some relatives there, although most had moved to Albania. Of those who remained, the elderly ones could still more or less speak Albanian, but the younger generation not. Expulsion or assimilation under pressure have been the lot of national minorities in Greece.

Ioannina as it once was

But there is still much evidence of the Ottoman past, including the bazaar area, with its narrow lanes and low houses, some dating from that period. There is also a Jewish quarter, although few Jews remain. A memorial to the Jews deported under Nazi occupation commemorates the extinction of their once flourishing community. Within the citadel walls, many of the buildings are modern. But some of the former public building remain. These include an Ottoman-era library, as well as the now-ruined and overgrown baths. Byron and Hobhouse had wanted to visit the baths, but had been put off by the sight of the elderly masseur at the entrance. Argyri told them it was a pity, as they would have been served by ‘belli Giovanni’.

Above the library and the baths stands the Aslan Pasha Mosque, now a museum, but, unusually in Greece, retaining its minaret. Following a revolt against Ottoman rule in the 17th century, the Monastery of St. John the Baptist, which had stood on the site, was demolished and replaced by the mosque, and the Christian populace, those that had not been slaughtered for their participation in the rebellion, was banished from the citadel, the ‘castro’, and forced to live outside the city walls. Following the inclusion of the city in Greece, the mosque continued to function as such until 1924, when the Muslim population was expelled as part of population exchange with Turkey that followed Greece’s ‘Asia Minor Disaster’. The abandoned Mosque was turned into a museum in 1933. Alongside the Mosque is a long, low building that had once been a Medresa.

The museum is organised into sections exhibiting artefacts from Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities, the last of these in the main part of the Mosque. It is a fine collection, amply, even generously given the historically poisonous relations between Greece and Turkey, demonstrating the once cosmopolitan nature of the city.

Among the exhibits that attracted my attention was a Damascus sword that had been presented to Georgios Karaiskakis, a klepht, insurgent against Ottoman rule, one-time commander of Ali Pasha’s personal guard, and hero of Greece’s independence war, by the British naval Captain Thomas Cochrane. The Scot Cochrane was one of Britain’s most dashing and successful naval officers during the Napoleonic Wars, and some have seen him as one of the inspirations for the fictional naval officers, C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubry. Disgraced in Britain following his conviction for his part in the Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814, he continued his seagoing career in command of the Chilean and then Brazilian navies during their respective independence wars. Then, in 1827-28 he took part in Greece’s independence war, which is when he must have presented the sword to Karaiskakis, who was killed in battle shortly after Cochrane’s arrival. Cochrane, having become the Tenth Earl of Dundonald following the death of his father, returned to the British navy as an admiral in 1832.

My attention was also drawn by the display in the Christian section of the museum of the costume of a Suliote woman. The Suliotes were a warlike people who long resisted Ottoman rule from their mountainous region to the west of Ioannina. Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians, they were in time assimilated as Greeks. At the height of their power, in the second half of the 18th century, the Suliote Confederacy was an independent territory comprising numerous villages and several thousand souls. After seizing power in Ioannina, Ali Pasha carried on a relentless war against them, eventually abandoning direct assault and resorting to siege and attrition. In 1803, the Suliotes finally capitulated and went into exile. In his usual style, Ali Pasha reneged on his promise to let them pass unmolested, and many of them were massacred. In a famous episode described by the Rev. Hughes, a group of Suliote, women trapped near the monastery of Zalango, in desperation threw their children over a steep precipice, and then, singing and dancing, whirling furiously, with a shriek they hurled themselves to their deaths.

A Suliote

Many of the Suliotes who escaped made it to the Ionian isles, where some entered Russian military service during the period of the Septinsular (Seven Island) Republic. When that came to an end, and the Ionian islands reverted to French control in 1807, many entered French service, including in a unit known as the Albanian Regiment. While the French hung on to Corfu until Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the other Ionian islands fell into British hands, and some Suliotes ended up in British service, in the Greek Light Infantry Regiment they formed. Byron took some of them on as his guards on Cephalonia in 1823, before he embarked for Missolonghi to take his part in the Greek independence war. Suliote warriors also featured prominently in his efforts once he got there. He penned some verses in honour of the wild, unruly and often troublesome, yet brave Suliotes, to whom he was much attached:

Up to battle! Sons of Suli –

Up, and do your duty duly –

There the Wall – and there the Moat is

Bourrah! Bourrah! Suliotes!

The Suliote identity is hard to fathom in modern terms. While they spoke Albanian, identities in the Ottoman Balkans were generally defined by religion rather than nation, and the Suliotes, like the Greeks, were Orthodox. Hughes appears to have confused religious and ethnic identity, in his account referring to Ali Pasha’s troops as ‘Albanians’, perhaps unaware that the Suliotes too were Albanian. They fought hard against Ottoman Muslim oppression, including against their fellow Albanian, Ali Pasha. But when the Sultan sent an army to subdue the recalcitrant Ali Pasha in 1820-1822, he formed an anti-Ottoman alliance with his former Suliote foes, promising them a return to their lands. Ultimately, Suliotes distinguished themselves in the Greek independence war, and in the Greek military following independence. As such, whatever their ethnic origins, they finally identified with Greece. In the small museum of the independence war on the island of Nissi, in the lake at Ioannina, are pictures of Suliote warriors in their strikingly fine costumes which so captivated Byron.

Fethiye Mosque and Ali Pasha's tomb

A short distance from the Aslan Pasha Mosque, on a plateau surrounded by high walls, is the former inner citadel, Its Kale, where Ali Pasha’s Seraglio used to stand. Alas, the palace that so impressed Hobhouse and Hughes was destroyed in a fire in 1870. In the place where it stood is now a Byzantine museum and a large open space. The fortifications at Ioannina go back to the Byzantine period, although they were much extended and strengthened by Ali Pasha. The austerely simple Fethiye Mosque, built at the end of the 18th century, next to the site of the palace, still stands tall, and well preserved. Next to the Mosque are the tombs of Ali Pasha and his first wife, covered by a wrought iron bird cage like structure, an imitation of the original, which was removed during the Second World War. Ali Pasha’s body was buried without its head, which was sent as a trophy to the Sultan following his defeat and execution in 1822.

As the Sultan’s forces closed in on him, following a long siege, Ali Pasha, tricked by offers of a pardon, sought refuge in the monastery of Agios Panteleimon on Nissi island, together with his favourite wife, or mistress, a Greek Christian woman called Kyra Vassiliki. Trapped in the upper room, but defiant until the end, he was shot through cracks in the floor boards before being beheaded. The little monastery now houses a museum dedicated to Ali Pasha. The monastery had to be reconstructed after a tree fell on it some years ago. Nevertheless, a glass square in the modern floor of the upper room reveals what are claimed to be the holes in the original floor through which Ali Pasha was shot.

Visiting castles, old buildings and other sites associated with famous historical figures, one rarely gets a sense of how they were in their heyday. Great stone palaces of the Muslim world, even when they survive, such as the Alhambra in Granada, shorn of the carpets, divans, cushions, all the colour that gave them life, are impressive, but evoke nothing of what they were like, of the world that once existed within the now bare stone walls. Nowadays, there is nothing left of the opulent palace described by Byron, Hobhouse and Hughes. Their accounts, and others like them, are all we have left of the vanished world. And yet, in the little museum on Nissi, surrounded by artefacts and pictures from Ali Pasha’s own time, I felt I caught just a glimmer of the Ioannina of the past.

Seeing a picture of the citadel with Ali Pasha’s palace in all its glory recalled something of the wondrous sight that so impressed earlier visitors. Among the many pictures off Ali Pasha, most of them shrouded in a voluminous cloak, is one by a British visitor, Joseph Cartwright, who met him some years after Byron. Cartwright was paymaster of the British forces based in Corfu, then the capital of the British protectorate of the Ionian Isles. He was a member of the delegation negotiating the transfer of the town of Parga to Ali Pasha. His picture shows Ali Pasha as he really was, and as described by Byron, as immensely fat. In his hand is his favourite, long pipe. And there, in a case in the middle of the room, is the pipe itself; the pipe held and smoked by Ali Pasha. And in the next room, the dress allegedly worn by Kyra Vassiliki on the day Ali Pasha was killed. Vassilki herself had been taken as a prisoner to Istanbul, but was later released and allowed to return to Greece.

Ali Pasha, with pipe

After spending a few days in Ioannina, Byron and Hobhouse set out on an eleven-day journey to Tepelena, there to meet Ali Pasha. The first night, as Hobhouse forged on ahead with some of their party, Byron was lost in an enormous storm, only arriving in the village of Zitsa in the middle of the night. The next day, Byron was enchanted by Zitsa, describing it as being ‘in the most beautiful situation (always excepting Cintra in Portugal) I ever beheld.’ They were entertained at the local monastery by the prior, who, according to Byron’s servant, Fletcher, tried to teach him Greek and kissed him. The Dutch author Tessa de Loo, who made a journey from Ioannina to Tepelena in the 1990s, which she described in her book In Byron’s Footsteps, was disappointed with Zitsa, which she found to have been thoroughly modernised. With luck, she was able to enter the monastery, now abandoned by the monks and only used on special occasions.

I decided rather to head for the Zagori region, slightly to the east of Zitsa, renowned for its spectacular scenery and picturesque villages, carefully conserved according to regulations put in place by the authorities. The only bus to Monodendri, at one end of the Vikos Gorge, left Ioannina well before dawn. I arrived just as the first dull light began to illuminate the stone buildings of the village. My first day in Zagori was washed out by a violent storm that must have been something like the one that overtook Byron. Thunder rumbled from one side of the sky to the other, and then back again throughout the day, and the rain came down in sheets. I ventured out during a brief lull, wandering along the slippery cobbled paths of the old village. At one end of the village, where the tarmacked road arrives, where the buses stop, there are newer buildings, small hotels and shops, built for the burgeoning tourism industry. While they are built in the traditional stone style of the region, they do rather disfigure that part of the village. But walking into the heart of the old village, it is still very charming.

When I reached the village square, dominated by a huge old tree, the storm got going again, unleashing the biggest hail stones I had ever seen, like good sized stones. I sheltered in a little taverna, which was promptly plunged into near darkness as the electricity went out. Having already eaten, I asked for a glass of local grappa, which was warming and pleasant. Even better, the lady brought me a little plate of delicious spit-roasted pork, with some bread and onion, on the house. It seemed, for a moment, I was not just a customer, but, together with an elderly man in the corner, a guest who had sought refuge from the storm. This was the heart-warming kindness of strangers that I experienced many times during my travels in Greece.

Historically, Zagori was a multi-ethnic region, and many of the place names have Slavic or Vlach origin. The name Zagori itself might indicate a Slavic origin. Similar names – Zagora, Zagorje, meaning behind the mountain, are found in many South Slav regions. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was a prosperous region, as can be seen in the fine, large stone houses, most of which date from that period. A number of schools were founded in the 19th century, sometimes with help from Greek émigrés, which fostered the eventual triumph of Greek language and identity, which was finally resolved by the mass expulsions of Slavs and Albanians from northern Greece in the first half of the 20th century.

A bridge in Zagori

It is a lovely region. During two days of bright sunshine following my arrival, I visited the old village of Vitsa, not far from Monodendri. Both are set on hillsides, in the kind of beautiful situations that so beguiled Byron at Zitsa. Until the 1950s, when modern roads were built, the villages of Zagori were linked by stone paths, with 18th century stone bridges crossing the rivers and streams. It makes for wonderful trekking country, and the high-arched bridges that dot the valleys are a delight to see. Perhaps most splendid of all is the Vikos Gorge, nearly 1,000 metres deep in places, and all the more spectacular for its narrowness, sheer walls of rock rising up high from the riverbed at its bottom. The gorge is in virgin, pristine state, with no buildings, and just a path along which trekkers can walk. In summer, it is a popular destination. In October, I saw almost nobody as I walked.

Returning each day in mid-afternoon to the same little taverna in Monodendri where I had sheltered the first day, I sat under the huge plane tree and ate delicious simple food, washed down with Zitsa wine, the wine which Byron and his party must have drunk at the monastery there. Close to Monodendri, sitting perilously on the edge of the precipice of the Vikos Gorge, is the little 15th century Ayia Paraskevi monastery, much renovated, with bearded monks pottering about. On the day I visited, there were parties of Greek pilgrims, come to pray, light candles and bow before its icons.

I made the journey from Ioannina to Tepelena by bus in half a day, getting out at the border crossing at Kakavia, walking across, and catching a minibus on the Albanian side. When Byron and Hobhouse made the journey, taking a route a little to the east of today’s road, there was no border. This was all the territory of Ali Pasha. Ali Pasha was born in a village near Tepelena, and it was here that he had started his career of brigandage and war-making. Byron wrote of the arrival at Tepelena in the poem he wrote during his travels, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Childe Harold saw, like meteors in the sky,
The glittering minarets of Tepalen,
Whose walls o’er loom the stream; and drawing nigh,
He heard the busy hum of warrior men
Swelling the breeze that sighed along the lengthening glen.

He passed the sacred harem’s silent tower,
And underneath the wide o’erarching gate
Surveyed the dwelling of this chief of power

Where all around proclaimed his high estate.

He was much impressed by the sight of the throngs gathered outside the palace, ‘a new & delightful spectacle to a stranger…’ In a letter to his mother he described ‘the Albanians in their dresses (the most magnificent in the world, consisting of a long white kilt, gold worked cloak, crimson velvet gold jacket & waistcoat, silver mounted pistols and daggers)…’ Hobhouse wrote of a first night in the castle disturbed by ‘the perpetual carousal which seemed to be kept up in the gallery, and by the drum, and the voice of the muezzin…’

Statue of Ali Pasha, Tepelena

The minibus dropped me in the square at the entrance to Tepelena, in front of the statue of the town’s most celebrated son, a reclining Ali Pasha, his beard flowing, pistols tucked into his belt. There is no palace now, but the fortress still stands. Inside its walls are modern houses, higgledy-piggledy along scrappy litter-strewn streets, some of them derelict. Tepelena is a modern town now, most of its buildings the poorly constructed blocks of the Hoxha period. I stayed at the communist-era Hotel Tourism. Every town in Albania had one like it. It wasn’t too bad, simple but adequate. The window frame in the bathroom did not fit into the hole in the wall, leaving a gap of about half an inch on one side, not uncommon in Hoxha-period construction. Thankfully the October nights were still warm. I slept well, no muezzins to disturb me now.

Seen from the river, the long fortress wall stretches along the ridge above. It is a fine sight on a sunny morning. The turquoise river winds through the valley, the fortress on one side, hills rising on the other. A rickety wooden bridge, slung between stone pillars, is the only link with the town for villagers on the other side. I stood at one end, half of the planks rotted away or missing, as many gaps as solid boards, and decided I did not need to cross. Halfway along the castle wall above the river is an entrance. Was this where Byron and Hobhouse arrived? It is piled high with earth, rubble and rubbish now.

The fortress, Tepelena

There is a plaque marking Byron’s visit on the town-side wall of the fortress, with the famous picture of the poet in one of the Albanian costumes he bought in Tepelena, and some verses roughly translated from Childe Harold. But little has been done to show off Tepelena to its best advantage. However it looked when Byron visited, nothing has been preserved except for the stark fortress walls. Perhaps it was never as beautiful as Gjirokaster to the south and Berat to the north, both now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Few tourists stop here, despite the name of the hotel. But the site is magnificent, the river lovely, the castle impressive. Tepelena could be something more.

Lord Byron in Albanian costume

Byron wrote to his mother that he had spent £50 on Albanian costumes. In his portrait, painted back in England, he looks less like an Albanian warrior than an English lord in fancy dress. When, the day after his arrival in Tepelena, they were received by Ali Pasha, Byron was dressed in uniform with a sabre. The meeting took place in a room paved with marble, with a fountain in the middle. Ali Pasha paid them the unusual compliment of greeting them standing. He was highly attentive, telling Byron to regard him as a father while in Ottoman lands. Perhaps a little disconcertingly, he told Byron he could tell he was well-born by his “small ears, curling hair and little white hands”. He asked Byron to visit him often, especially at night, when he was more at leisure. During their stay in Tepelena, Ali Pasha sent gifts of almonds, sherbet, fruit and sweetmeats.

Byron admired the Albanians, seeing in them primitive virtues, bravery and honesty. They appealed to the romantic poet. In Childe Harold he wrote of them:

Land of Albania! let me bend mine eyes
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!
[…]
Fierce are Albania’s children, yet they lack
Not virtues, were those virtues more mature.
Where is the foe that ever saw their back?
Who can so well the toil of war endure?
Their native fastnesses not more secure
Than they in doubtful time of troublous need:
Their wrath how deadly! but their friendship sure,
When Gratitude or Valour bids them bleed,

Unshaken rushing on where’er their chief may lead.

Byron kept a couple of Albanians as his guards throughout his travels in Greece. His lasting affection for them probably explains his indulgence of the unruly Suliotes he took under his wing when he joined the Greek independence struggle more than a decade later.