Museums in Macedonia

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.

Museum of the Macedonian Struggle, Skopje

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.

Monument to the Battle of Kilkis

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.

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.

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.

A visit to Sofia

Visiting Sofia, one is struck by the evidence of the overlaying cultures and civilisations, one upon the other, that have replaced, but not fully eradicated those that came before. First there are the ancient remains, the Roman sites that are being revealed as the foundations of new buildings are dug, and by the current work on the metro in the city centre.

The Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church

Then there are the Ottoman buildings. Ottoman rule ended only in 1878. More survived than, for example, in Belgrade, where very little remains to show it was once a predominantly Muslim city. As the Ottoman Empire gradually retreated and was ejected from central and eastern Europe, from the end of the 17th, and through to the 19th century, the usual pattern was to wipe out all trace of its having been there. Muslims were expelled or fled, and the mosques were mainly destroyed. But Bulgaria was a late-comer to national liberation.

A small town of a little over 10,000 when it was chosen as the capital of the newly independent state, Sofia had been a provincial centre in Ottoman times. Of course, the new nation constructed buildings appropriate for a European capital of a mainly Christian country, notably the enormous Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, named in gratitude to Bulgaria’s Russian liberators. Some Ottoman buildings were converted to new uses, notably the 16th century Black Mosque, the Orthodox Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church for the past century or so, now unrecognisable as the Muslim edifice it once was. The mosque itself had been built on the site of an earlier convent. Earlier still had been a 4th or 5th century Christian basilica, and before that a pagan temple.

But some of the Ottoman heritage remains. The hamam next to the one surviving mosque is no longer in use, but looks splendid from the outside. Also from the 16th century, and recently reopened after falling into disuse in communist times, the Banya Bashi Mosque is named after the baths. My companion on an evening stroll through the city told me that, as a boy in the 50s and 60s, he and his father went there regularly, as they did not have a bath in their home. And the building in which the archaeological museum is now housed was formerly Sofia’s largest mosque, the Grand Mosque.

A reminder of the pre-Islamic, Christian Balkans is the restored basilica of Hagia Sophia, close to the Cathedral. It was built in the 6th century, before the arrival of the Bulgars, during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, who commissioned the great basilica of the same name in Constantinople.

Sofia was perhaps not the most obvious choice of capital for the new state. Nowadays, entering or leaving the city through its soulless, dilapidated suburbs, a wasteland of concrete monstrosities from the communist era, is a depressing experience. But it is a city with roots, with a long heritage. Its city centre, steadily being renovated, is increasingly matching its ambitions.