Among the new buildings going up along the River Vardar as part of the Skopje 2014 project are a couple of grand new museums, the neoclassical Museum of Archaeology and the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. This is not just about building a grander capital. These buildings form part of the government’s endeavour to shore up the identity of a nation in face of the denials of its existence by some of its neighbours. The nearly finished Museum of Archaeology, like the statues of Alexander the Great and Philip II of Macedon, asserts the continuity claimed for the modern Macedonian nation with Macedonian antiquity. The Museum of the Macedonian Struggle focuses on the fight for freedom and independence of the Macedonian people during the late-19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. As was apparent from some of the exhibits, the struggle portrayed here relates to the whole of historic Macedonia, including northern Greece. But Thessaloniki, capital of Greek Macedonia, also has its Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. It gives a very different perspective of the same period, and the Macedonian people whose story it tells is not the same Macedonian people with which the museum in Skopje is concerned.
Under Ottoman rule, Macedonia was a jumble of ethnicities, Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Jews, Albanians and others. It gave its name to a mixed fruit salad, a Macédoine. This all came to an end with the catastrophes of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the population exchange that followed the Greek defeat in Anatolia in 1923. Following the carve-up of Macedonia among the emergent Balkan states, the Slavs (and Albanians) of north-west Macedonia found themselves incorporated into Serbia. After World War II, Tito gave them their own republic. They were not to be Bulgarians, although their language was almost identical to Bulgarian. The new museum in Skopje commemorates their struggle. It barely acknowledges that, at the start of the 20th century, many Macedonians saw themselves as Bulgarians. Yet it is hard to ignore this. Among the exhibits from the Balkan wars are the banners of the irregular Macedonian detachments from Bitola and Ohrid, with the red, green and white of Bulgaria. Also exhibited is a photograph of irregulars marching under the Arch of Galerius in Salonika. They are described as Macedonians, although it was Bulgarian forces that entered Salonika one day after the city was surrendered to the Greek army. Leon Sciaky, who grew up in Salonika in the early 20th century, and spent summers in the Slav-inhabited villages to the north of the city, was in no doubt; he described them as Bulgarians.
Such questions of the complexities of national identity are not reflected in the museum in Skopje. That is not what it is about. It is a one-sided presentation, displaying the struggle of only one of the nations that had inhabited Macedonia, and had fought over it. It is also partly motivated by modern politics. The ruling party which initiated Skopje 2014, VMRO-DPMNE, claims succession from the older VMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, which led the struggle of the Macedonian Slavs, be they Bulgarian or not, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Furthermore, the museum presents the sufferings of Macedonian opponents of communism under the Tito regime. The link is plain. Those who suffered were from VMRO, whereas today’s main opposition party, the SDSM, is the successor of the former communists.
Greeks too have known how to use history selectively to underpin national goals. The fact that northern Greece, including Epirus and Thrace as well as Macedonia, was not predominantly Greek-inhabited before the Balkan wars and the population exchange with Turkey was awkward for the nationalist narrative of Greek history for much of the 20th century. The expulsion of non-Greeks, the Bulgarian and Macedonian Slavs, Turks and Albanians, and their replacement with Greek refugees from the emergent Turkish Republic, was a matter of policy, to strengthen Greece’s hold on its newly acquired territories. It was a policy that continued long after the Second World War. In the 1980s, Greek communists who had fled the country following the civil war in the 1940s were allowed to return, in a gesture of national reconciliation. But non-ethnic Greeks from northern Greece, and perhaps half of the communist-led Partisans were Slavs, were excluded. I went to an exhibition at the Yeni Tzami (New Mosque) in Thessaloniki devoted to the Greek communist diaspora in Eastern Europe following the civil war. Among all the recipient countries, the display did not include Yugoslavia, still less Macedonia, although some Greek communists, and many Slav Partisans from northern Greece, went there. The exhibition perhaps reflected a coming-to-terms with a painful episode in the country’s history. But if so, it is only a partial coming to terms. It does not include non-ethnic Greeks.
The White Tower, Thessaloniki, as it was
Yet museums in northern Greece do reflect the multi-ethnic past of the region. The White Tower, an Ottoman-era edifice on the Thessaloniki seafront that once formed part of the city fortifications, and which has become a symbol of the town, now houses a museum of the city. The photographs and exhibits portray the cosmopolitan diversity that was the city’s richness, its Jewish merchants, its mosques, the hustle and bustle of one of the Mediterranean’s great ports. It tells the story of a city that is no more, most of its people having been driven out or, in the case of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, murdered. And most of the city itself was physically destroyed by the great fire of 1917 and by the depredations of post-World War II town planners. But that the story is told might suggest a more relaxed attitude of today’s Greek inhabitants towards the past of the city they inhabit. Some Ottoman-era buildings and monuments are now being restored, cared for and valued in a departure from the practice of several decades past.
One of the most poignant museums in Thessaloniki is the small Jewish museum. With photographs and text, as well as artefacts, the museum tells the story of the community that was once the city’s largest, accounting for around one-half of the population. The community was descended from the Spanish Jews expelled in the 15th century by the most Catholic and most intolerant of Spain’s monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. At the start of the 20th century, they were still speaking their Spanish dialect, Ladino. Sultan Bayazit II had ordered that Spanish Jews arriving in the Ottoman Empire be made welcome, reportedly observing that King Ferdinand could not be a wise monarch when he thus impoverished his country, and in so doing enriched Bayazit’s Empire. Spanish Jews settled in many Ottoman towns, but made their greatest mark in Salonika. But, as described in Leon Sciaky’s marvellous memoir, Farewell to Salonica, that world largely came to an end following the city’s incorporation into Greece in 1912. The city’s Jewish quarter was particularly ravaged by the 1917 fire, and many Jews, including Sciaky, left after that. Most of the rest were deported and murdered during the World War II German occupation. The city’s vast Jewish cemetery was destroyed by the occupiers, not just a wanton act of vandalism, but a deliberate attempt to erase centuries of Jewish history in the city. Several of the tombstones that were recovered are now displayed in the museum. Though a tiny remnant of what it once was, a small Jewish community remains in Thessaloniki.
Having read Sciaky’s account of his final, tragic visit, with his grandfather, to the small town of Kilkis, to the north of Salonika, immediately after the Greek army’s victory over Bulgaria in June 1913, and the flight of the entire Bulgarian population of the region (see post of 10 December 2012), I decided to visit the town. Modern Kilkis is a non-descript town of characterless blocks. And it is a Greek town, its former Bulgarian identity rubbed out a century ago. On the edge of the town is a monument and a small museum dedicated to the battle. A couple of soldiers standing guard outside what appeared to be a military headquarters helpfully pointed me in the right direction. A sign on the main road leading to Thessaloniki pointed me to the ‘Sacred site’ of the battle. Having read the report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on The Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, with its description of the Greek army’s murderous campaign in the Kilkis area, its burning of the town and the butchery and rape of the Bulgarian inhabitants who did not get away fast enough, I found this assertion of sanctity hard to stomach. In some ways, the monument itself, no doubt unwittingly, is a more fitting commemoration of the terrible events. A Greek soldier, holding a fallen comrade in one arm, another at his feet, points his pistol at the ground, to all appearances in the act of shooting a defenceless person in front of him. The museum contains numerous photos, as well as letters, maps, uniforms and weapons. It was difficult for me to form much of an impression, as the text was in Greek only. This museum was not aimed at foreign visitors. But it appeared to give a relatively even account of the battle, with photographs of Bulgarian forces as well as Greek. What it did not appear to show at all was the massive civilian tragedy of the rape of Kilkis by the Greek conquerors.
Museums can have many purposes. They are supposed to record and document past eras and events. But sometimes they reflect the times in which they were built as much as the times they portray. They are not always neutral or dispassionate. The museum in Kilkis, opened in the 1960s, records an important victory in establishing the frontiers of modern Greece. In this narrative, the Bulgarians were a military foe. That they were also the majority population of that region, displaced after the battle, is not the theme for this museum. Still less is the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle in Skopje about giving a full picture of the many-sided battle for Macedonia. The politics of identity in this beleaguered little country is too raw for that at the moment. But the museum of the city of Thessaloniki is an example of what a good museum can be. In bringing to life the great city of the past, it educates its visitors, and helps reconcile the modern city with the cities that were once there, but which have been washed away.
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