Haji Bektash Veli

Cappadocia is a popular tourist destination. Visitors are drawn by its striking rock formations, its houses, medieval churches and towns carved out of the rocks, its troglodyte underground settlements. It is all very compelling. A different sort of visitor is attracted to the little town of Hacibektaş, a site of pilgrimage for Muslims from around Turkey and beyond. This was once the centre of the Bektashi dervish order, inspired by the medieval sage Haji Bektash Veli, after whom the town is named.

Haji Bektash Veli is believed to have come from Turkmenistan. After his travels, he settled at this town in central Anatolia. The mystical Sufi order he inspired became very influential over centuries throughout Anatolia and the Balkans. It was the official sect of the Janissaries, the elite Ottoman troops recruited among the Sultan’s Christian subjects through the ‘Devşirme’ system of blood tribute. Some have suggested that the eclectic belief system of the Bektashi, with its wide-ranging influences, may have appealed to men who had in their early childhood been Christian. When the Janissary corps was abolished at the order of Sultan Mahmud II in the so-called ‘Auspicious Incident’ in 1826, and thousands of its members massacred, the Bektashi too were driven underground. Although the sect experienced a revival during the ‘Tanzimat’ reform period during the 19th century, it was finally driven out of Turkey in 1925 by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, along with other Sufi orders.

Haji Bektash Veli, with gazelle and lion

The Bektashi sect’s headquarters was moved to Tirana. The Bektashi had long been influential among Albanian Muslims. Ali Pasha Tepelena, the early 19th century ruler of southern Albania and most of Greece, is believed to have been an adherent. Bektashism thrived in Albania until the communist takeover in 1945, following which many dervishes and babas, the heads of the Bektashi Tekkes (communities somewhat akin to Christian monasteries), were executed. With the banning of all religious practice in 1967, the Bektashi, like all religious communities in communist Albania, were shut down. But since the end of communist rule in 1990, the Bektashi have experienced a revival. While I was working in Albania in 2011, Hajji Reshat Bardhi, the Dedebaba, the overall head of the order, died. Leading politicians and foreign diplomats were among those who paid their respects, indicating the influence of the sect in the country.

A dervish in the early 20th century, Hacibektaş

The pilgrims visiting Haji Bektash Veli’s mausoleum in Hacibektaş when I visited bore witness to his continuing influence outside Albania. The former centre of the Bektashi order is now a museum. Although Ataturk had closed down the sect in Turkey, a sign at the entrance asserts that the ideas of Haji Bektash Veli were applied by Ataturk in establishing the Turkish Republic. Indeed, Haji Bektash Veli’s enlightened teachings were in many ways ahead of his time. He was a noted advocate of the rights of women, arguing that a society that did not educate its women could not progress. Among sayings attributed to the sage in the museum is one that states that ‘In the language of conversation, you cannot discriminate between man and woman. Everything God has created is in order. To us, there is no difference between man and woman. If you thing there is, you are mistaken.’ He was also a pacifist, and in the most famous painting of him, he is depicted holding a gazelle and a lion, illustrating his words quoted in the museum that ‘Greed and malice disappear by love in our midst, Lion and gazelle are friends in our embrace.’

The Hacibektaş complex

The 14th century ceremony and meeting house holds an exhibition of artefacts and photographs, including a group picture of some of the last dervishes and babas when the order was closed down in 1925. In the kitchens, the famous black cauldron of the Bektashi is exhibited. The cauldron symbolised fellowship, and also held a symbolic importance for the Janissaries. In his novel The Janissary Tree, Jason Goodwin describes a murderous plot in the 1830s involving surviving former Janissaries against the modernising reforms of the Sultan. As an ominous warning of their intent, the Janissaries bang their cauldrons, their traditional protest and precursor of violent demonstrations.

The Master House, which contains the mausoleum of Haji Bektash Veli, included the oldest part of the complex. The ‘Cilehane’, or ‘Suffering Place’, is a small room where dervishes would withdraw for prayer and fasting, and is believed to originate from the time of Haji Bektash Veli himself. Pilgrims, the majority of them women when I visited, shuffled around the mausoleum, praying before the tombs of the holy men, reaching out and touching them. One group of men whispered in Arabic among themselves, reading the explanatory plaques in English rather than Turkish. The scene was very much reminiscent of Christian pilgrimage sites, with the veneration of saints. One could see why more orthodox Sunni Muslims might look askance upon Bektashism. The legacy of Haji Bektash Veli is complicated and controversial. Many Muslims claim he did not found any distinct Bektashi order, which only emerged after his death. Alevis claim him as a teacher of Alevism. Whatever the truth, which is by now lost in the mist of the past, I found his humanism, his tolerance, his espousal of women’s rights, attractive, and a valuable counterpoint to so many of the trends in modern Islam.

A visit to Çeşme

My principal motive in visiting Çeşme, a small coastal town west of Izmir, was the hope of seeing a little bit of the lost world of the cosmopolitan Levant that had been partly preserved. Izmir itself, or Smyrna as it had been known, had been largely destroyed by the great fire of 1922 and the depredations of 20th century town planners. Çeşme is, of course, now a Turkish town, its Greek population having departed for good in 1922. The last remnants of the retreating Greek army that had been routed by the Turks in the summer of 1922 had been evacuated from Çeşme. As the Turkish army of Mustafa Kemal entered Smyrna, the last Greek troops were still hastening away.

Çeşme is a charming little town. Many old houses, once the homes of rich Greek merchants, still survive. The main street leading down to the seafront is dominated by the large Greek basilica of Ayios Haralambos. It is no longer used for the purpose it was built, its congregation having departed. When I visited, it was firmly bolted, although it is sometimes used for exhibitions.

Just across the water from Çeşme is the Greek island of Chios. The town and the island have long been closely linked, and many of Çeşme’s onetime Greek inhabitants moved to Chios during the population exchange in 1922-23. Now they are linked again, by tourism. Regular ferries carry visitors, Greeks and Turks among them, back and forth. One waterfront restaurant in Çeşme had a menu in Greek, including Greek coffee, identical to Turkish coffee, but the name is important to Greeks. Before travelling to Çeşme, I read online the account of a Turkish visitor to Chios who, asked at a supermarket checkout whether he was Turkish, was told that in that case he could have a discount.

The owner of the guesthouse where I stayed told me that hotel owners from Çeşme and Chios cooperated in order jointly to promote tourism. He told me of an initial meeting at which one of the Çeşme Turks had produced old photos from before the population exchange. A Greek from Chios had recognised his grandfather in one of them. It was evidently an emotional moment. In his book, Twice a Stranger, Economist journalist Bruce Clark described cases of emotional visits to towns or villages by descendants of people who had been forced to leave during the population exchange, often welcomed with open arms by the current residents.

The population exchange had been a traumatic experience, people uprooted from their homes and forced to move to an alien country, whose language, in some cases, they did not even speak. Many retained a lifelong attachment and nostalgia for the places they had left. Visiting Thessaloniki a few weeks earlier, I was told by a Greek man that he could remember as late as the 1950s that one cinema in the town continued to show Turkish films to audiences of Greeks who had been born in Turkey.

Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha, with lion, Çeşme

The Çeşme seafront is dominated by the castle. A plaque states that it was built in 1508, during the reign of Sultan Beyazit II, although some believe there was already a fortress there, built by the earlier Genoese rulers. Outside the castle walls stands a statue of Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha, the Ottoman admiral at the Battle of Çeşme, in 1770. Hasan Pasha is hailed as one of the greatest Ottoman admirals, and he went on to hold the position of Grand Vizier, second only to the Sultan in the Empire. All this seemed rather peculiar given that the battle ended in defeat for the Ottoman fleet, at the hands of the Russians. Inside the castle is a museum devoted to the battle and the background of European politics at the time. Again Hasan Pasha is lauded for his outstanding performance during the battle. He had succeeded in sinking the Russian flagship, losing his own flagship in the process. The museum’s exhibits delight in taunting the then Russian Empress Catherine the Great for her expansionist policies as well as her notorious carnal appetites. Two cartoons from the contemporary British press are displayed. One shows the devil offering Catherine Constantinople and Warsaw in a dream. Another shows the Empress striding across Europe’s monarchs from Russia to Constantinople, while the monarchs gawp up her skirts and make lascivious remarks.

The temptation of Catherine the Great

At one time, Çeşme had been a popular retreat for the wealthy of Smyrna. Nowadays it is a favoured resort for Istanbul’s smart set. Next to the castle is a caravanserai built in the 16th century on the order of Suleiman the Magnificent. Now it has been renovated as a smart hotel. Non-guests are allowed to peak in. There are good fish restaurants in Çeşme. The lowness of the prices led me to believe that the fish on offer must be farmed. But they were so tasty that I think they were wild. Delicious. Though I did not particularly like the local habit of washing it down with raki.

Izmir: Once there was a city

Visiting Izmir, I knew I was coming to a large modern town. I was fascinated by the city’s past, and wanted to search out some of the remnants of what Izmir had once been. But I had no illusions, and was not expecting much. There are older pockets, notably the bazaar area, a warren of busy narrow streets clustered around the town’s oldest mosques, close to the Konak, the centre of the city’s government. Older buildings are also dotted around the streets just behind the long seafront quay, the Cordon. But most of Izmir is modern, ugly and uninspiring. It was not always so. For Izmir was once Smyrna, one of the great cosmopolitan metropolises of the Levant, a splendid jumble of different nations, religions, cultures and architectural styles.

Visitors to Smyrna in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th described it as a kind of paradise. Giles Milton titled his book about the destruction of the city in the fire of 1922 ‘Paradise Lost’. Phillip Mansel, in his book about the cities of the Levant, cites several visitors who were overwhelmed by Smyrna’s charms. The Turkish writer Naci Gundem described it as like a ‘fairy-tale country’, with ‘a magic atmosphere which made the most depressed souls end by laughing.’ The British writer Norman Douglas, who visited in 1895, wrote that it ‘seemed to be the most enjoyable place on earth.’ Like many visitors, he was struck by the city’s cosmopolitan character, ‘the variegated crowds about the harbour, eastern bustle and noise.’

Smyrna as it was

As in other great Levantine cities, several nations rubbed shoulders in Smyrna, and many languages were spoken. As well as Turks, there were large Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities, as well as western European ‘Franks’: French, British, Italians and Dutch, and, by the beginning of the 20th century, Americans. Trade built Smyrna, and fabulous fortunes were made. Many of the western European families had lived in Smyrna for generations. Some of them had never visited their professed home countries. They were Levantines, and Smyrna was their home. Christian churches of various denominations, mosques and synagogues all contributed to the colour of the city.

But tension in Smyrna was never far below the surface. For Turks, the privileges enjoyed by the western Franks under the notorious ‘Capitulations’, and the powers granted to their consuls, were a source of humiliation. The wealth of Greek and Armenian merchants was resented. Conflicts among the great powers all too often brought bloodshed to the streets of Smyrna. The Battle of Çeşme, 50 miles west of Smyrna, in 1770, when a Russian fleet destroyed its Ottoman counterpart, was followed by a massacre of Smyrna Greeks, whose enthusiasm for their fellow Orthodox Russians was well known. Then, as on later occasions, Christians took refuge on foreign ships moored in the harbour. In 1797, the murder of a janissary by two Cephalonian Greeks led to a rampage along Frank Street, the centre of the western European community, and the burning of churches and consulates. Hundreds of Christians, mainly Greeks, were murdered, and the fires spread to the Greek and Armenian quarters. The Greek revolt in 1821 brought massacres of Greeks in Smyrna, as in Istanbul.

Greeks were not always the victims. On several occasions in the 19th century, Greeks in Smyrna accused Jews of ritually sacrificing Christian children, leading to attacks on Jews. In 1901, the bells of St. Photeini monastery rang out to call people to anti-Jewish riots. Yet despite all this, Smyrna’s cosmopolitan character endured. The Greek community thrived. Its schools were considered among the best in the town; its cultural life was rich; its merchants built opulent mansions. Smyrna’s Jews continued to build synagogues. And when the authorities had the will, they could limit the fallout of interethnic strife. In 1895 and 1896, Armenian terrorist attacks in Istanbul were followed by massacres of thousands of Armenians, but in Smyrna the governor organised patrols to prevent such revenge attacks. When in 1915 the order came from the Ottoman government to deport Smyrna’s Armenians, the city’s enlightened governor, Rahmi Bey, a cosmopolitan Levantine to his core, refused to comply. As in Salonika, following the Young Turk revolution in 1908 there was an outpouring of joy and optimism in Smyrna that cut across ethnic and confessional lines.

Yet any appearance of positive inter-communal relations, or of an over-arching Smyrna identity that could encompass differences, proved illusory, or at best a very thin veneer. It began to fall apart with the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. Some Turks now considered that only the loyalty of Muslims could be counted on. Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk) recorded seeing the Cordon in Smyrna ‘full of members of a race which was our sworn enemy.’ Greeks, for their part, no longer disguised their longing to be incorporated in the mother country, which increasingly funded Greek national organisations in Smyrna.

The peculiar Levantine world survived in Smyrna in the First World War. While many British and French Smyrniots left to fight in their respective armies, others remained behind, and, despite some initial difficulties, continued to live much as before, protected by Rahmi Bey. Western-owned businesses continued to operate, even supplying uniforms to the Ottoman army. This was a feature of Smyrna. During an earlier war with Greece, the Smyrna authorities had allowed Greeks, Ottoman subjects among them, to go off to join the Greek army, with flags flying and the Greek anthem playing, and with tickets and food provided by the Greek consul.

The old Muslim quarter, Izmir

Smyrna’s tragedy began with the arrival of Greek troops in May 1919. The First World War was over. At its close, Greece was on the winning, Allied side, and its government looked forward to picking apart the corpse of the prostrate Ottoman Empire. Following the Greek landing, a fight broke out at the Ottoman barracks, near the Konak, leading to hundreds of deaths, mainly Turkish. Some Turkish prisoners were summarily killed on the Cordon, and Greek soldiers ran amok in the Muslim quarter. A few Greeks still wearing the fez were mistaken for Turks and also killed. But the Greeks, in their hour of triumph, had not reckoned with Mustafa Kemal, who was soon beginning to organise Turkish resistance in Anatolia.

Yet under Greek occupation, Smyrna’s cosmopolitan spirit still hung on, in large part thanks to another enlightened ruler, the Greek High Commissioner, Aristides Sterghiades. He had governed the partly Muslim city of Ioannina, near Greece’s border with Albania, in 1913, and he was determined to maintain good relations with Muslims in Smyrna. He punished some who had murdered Turks following the Greek army’s arrival, executing ringleaders. During his period in control, Turkish remained an official language, alongside Greek, and the number of Turkish-language newspapers actually increased. Some Turkish officials cooperated with the new regime. Smyrna’s Greeks loathed him.

But Smyrna could not survive the brutalities of the war in Anatolia. The Greek army came close to capturing Ankara, but, as its lines of communication were over-extended, and as Kemal’s army grew in strength, its fortunes were reversed. Following its rout in August 1922, its soldiers fled pell-mell for the coast, slaughtering, burning and raping as they went. Many of the Turkish soldiers advancing behind them were bent on revenge. On 9 September, the first Turkish troops entered Smyrna, Kemal arriving the following day. Kemal issued a proclamation threatening death to any Turkish soldier who harmed civilians. It had no effect. The Orthodox Archbishop, Chrysostomos, a firebrand Greek nationalist and a figure of hate for Turks, was torn apart by a mob as he left a meeting with the newly appointed city governor at the Konak. Some Turks who had collaborated with the Greek occupation were murdered.

As pillage, rape and murder escalated, fires began to be set in the Armenian quarter. Having been spared under Rahmi Bey, Smyrna’s Armenians were finally subjected to the wrath, the extraordinary vindictiveness harboured by many Turks towards their nation. When, on 13 September, the wind changed direction, blowing away from the Muslim and Jewish quarters, the various fires in the Christian quarters merged into an inferno. Most of the Greek and Armenian quarters, and much of the Frankish quarter, were engulfed. The human catastrophe which followed was witnessed from the foreign ships standing out in the harbour, and by many Europeans and Americans who remained in the city. People with foreign passports had been taken aboard British, French, Italian and American warships. The remaining Christians crowded on to the Cordon, hundreds of thousands of them, hemmed in by the fire behind, the sea in front, and Turkish soldiers to either side. The Cordon, the glory of Smyrna, which Naci Gundem had written made Smyrna Smyrna, became a scene of Hell.

Smyrna burns, 1922

Watching through binoculars from the ships, sailors saw Smyrniots on the quay robbed, pushed into the fire or into the sea, and beaten or stabbed to death by Turkish soldiers and irregulars. Young girls were picked out, raped, and often horribly mutilated. The sea was choked with corpses. The stench reached the ships, where some played music in order to drown out the noise of the unfolding horror. Some swam out from the Cordon to the ships, where they were not always welcomed. At last, the British admiral ordered that boats be sent to take some of the people off; some capsized under the weight of desperate humanity.

After the fire had burned itself out, Kemal ordered that the remaining Greeks and Armenians be expelled. Women and children, as well as older men, were evacuated, many of them by flotillas of private boats organised by American charity workers and under American flags. Men of military age, often defined very liberally, were marched off into the interior, to be abused, starved, murdered and worked to death. Few survived.

What of the responsibility for the tragedy at Smyrna? The official Turkish position has long been that the fires were started by Armenians and Greeks. That was what Kemal told the French consul while the fire was still raging. This assertion is repeated in the displays at the Ahmet Priştina City Archive and Museum, which I visited during my stay in Izmir. Yet numerous witnesses, including Americans and French, who were present in the city when the fires started, reported seeing Turkish soldiers and irregulars starting the fires. And contrary to official claims, it seems they were working under orders. Some Turkish witnesses later cast doubt on the official position. Kemal’s Chief of Staff, Ismet Inonu, later wrote that the young said they were following orders, while the old blamed lack of discipline. A Turkish journalist, Falih Rifki Atay, wrote in his memoirs that he was determined to tell the truth. The story he told was different to the reports he had written at the time. ‘Were those responsible for the fire really the Armenian arsonists, as we were told in those days,’ he asked? Quoting from his contemporaneous notes, he asked ‘why were we burning down Izmir’, just as they burned all the Armenian districts in Anatolia during the deportations of 1915? He was not alone in blaming Nurettin Pasha, the nationalist city governor appointed by Kemal, who he described as ‘a dyed-in-the-wool fanatic and rabble-rouser’.

There is something especially repugnant and unworthy about blaming the enormous tragedy visited upon the Christians of Smyrna, the arson, the theft, the mass rape, the wholesale slaughter, on the victims themselves. Kemal was present in the city. His callousness was revealed by his statement at a celebratory dinner while the city burned, ‘Yes, let it burn! Let it crash down! We can replace everything.’ To what extent Turkish soldiers and irregulars acted under orders and to what extent they ran amok, they were under his command; they and their actions were his responsibility. Not a national hero; a war criminal, plain and simple.

A new city has been built on the ruins of burned Smyrna. The bustling Turkish quarter, with its bazaar, its mosques, its cafes and kebab houses, is still there. It escaped the blaze, surely not coincidentally. Beyond the old Muslim quarter, a synagogue stands behind a high wall topped by a still higher wire mesh fence, testament to the once flourishing Jewish community. Nearby, the Asansor, a high lift, still takes people up the steep cliff face to the town above. It was built by a Jewish philanthropist at the beginning of the 20th century.

Where the Armenian quarter once stood, there is now a large city park. It does not blot out the memory of the horrors perpetrated there. Walking in Izmir, I found myself thinking of Lady Macbeth: ‘out, damned spot’. Ataturk had built a new city, but he had not managed to wash away the blood on his hands.

An old street, Izmir

Some other remnants survived. Although the long boulevards running parallel with the Cordon are now largely modern, soulless, a few buildings from before the fire remain, and some of the shady narrow streets running inland from the coast are intact, retaining an echo of the charm of old Smyrna. Here and there, grand buildings survive. Little clusters of old buildings stand out on the Cordon, one of which was occupied by Ataturk during his stays in Izmir, which now houses a museum. Another, now the Greek consulate, defiantly flies the Greek flag. The Roman Catholic church of St. John Polycarp, a bishop of Smyrna martyred in AD 167, survives. Like many Christian churches in Turkey, it sits behind high walls. Unfortunately, the church only grants visits to groups. I was turned away by an unfriendly voice on the entry phone. The 19th century Anglican Church in Alsancak, the former Frankish quarter, also survived. It contains a plaque honouring the members of Smyrna’s British community who gave their lives in the First World War, fighting on the opposing side to Turkey.

Old photographs of pre-1922 Smyrna show a bustling city, the Cordon packed with people, horses and carts, produce being loaded on to the ships that crowded along the length of the quay. Modern Izmir is a sad place by comparison. The Cordon is a wide open space, a featureless park dotted with young hand-holding lovers. When I visited, there was no shipping along the quay, just a few grey warships further out in the bay. The one similarity is the fishermen casting their rods along the quay, both then and now. With few exceptions, the buildings along the Cordon are modern blocks. There are cafes, but none of them match up to the elegance, the style of old Smyrna. When Kemal arrived in Smyrna, before the fire destroyed it, he drank a raki at the Hotel Kraemer. Now an equestrian statue of Kemal stands where the famous hotel once stood. On its plinth is a plaque quoting Kemal’s famous words to his troops as they set out on their advance towards Smyrna: ‘Soldiers! Your first goal is the Mediterranean.’ The statue looks forlorn and alone, with major roads passing around it on all sides. Is this ugly, modern Izmir what they fought for?

I had a similar feeling when I visited the Konak, the seat of government. In front of it stands the clock tower, built in 1901, that has become a symbol of Izmir. Old photos show the clock at the centre of a busy, attractive square. No more. The area in front of the Konak has been cleared. The clock looks lost in a large empty space. So does the attractive little old mosque nearby, with its beautiful, colourful tiles, lost among concrete and hideousness. Much like Thessaloniki, having been destroyed by fire, Izmir fell victim to the worst of 20th century town planning and architecture. Following the fire, The Times wrote that ‘one of the richest cities in the Levant is like a skeleton’. Izmir was rebuilt. But the spirit of the marvellous, rich, diverse city that was Smyrna was destroyed forever.

Xanthi, a beautiful town in Western Thrace

Continuing eastwards from Kavala, I reached Xanthi, in western Thrace. Xanthi has a well preserved, beautiful old town. Many of its old buildings have been sensitively renovated. Ottoman-style houses, with their first floors built out over the narrow streets, as if reaching out to touch each other, are interspersed with grand mansions more in a European style, built by rich 19th century merchants. Streets lead into little tree-shaded squares with stylish cafés. Xanthi has a bohemian atmosphere. Sculptures, fashioned out of metal, are dotted around the old town.

The region of Xanthi was known for the quality of its tobacco, and the city’s mansions were built by the mainly Greek merchants who prospered from it. Especially impressive is the house of Vasilios Kougioumtzoglou, built in 1877, with its colourful, decorated exterior. The Kougioumtzoglou family also owned another large house on the same street, which today houses Xanthi’s folklore museum. Inside, the visitor can walk through rooms depicting the life of a period Greek home of the 19th century. The family also owned a house in Plovdiv (Philippopolis in Greek), in present-day Bulgaria, indicating the one-time interconnectedness of the region.

Kougioumtzoglou mansion, Xanthi

Xanthi was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912, when it was taken by Bulgaria during the first Balkan War. Together with the rest of western Thrace, it became part of Greece after the First World War, and, apart from a period back under Bulgarian rule during World War II, it has remained with Greece since then. More than anywhere else I have been, in Xanthi I could see vestiges of the prosperity and accomplishment of the Ottoman Greeks. The once great cosmopolitan cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Smyrna, Salonika, Alexandria, have been devastated by the tragic events of the 20th century, destructive fires and war, which have left only traces of their past glory. But, on a smaller scale, Xanthi has been preserved, and some flavour of that past era can be sensed today, walking among the mansions of this once flourishing town.

The Ottoman Greeks enjoyed levels of prosperity and development far beyond those of the independent Greek state in the 19th century. Greek Levantine merchants and financiers spread their wealth and power around Europe. Their educational establishments and cultural achievements were widely admired. In the fine little town of Xanthi this has left an echo which has largely been lost in most of the rest of the region.

The Muslim quarter, Xanthi

Xanthi also offers a reminder of the cosmopolitanism of so many eastern-Mediterranean towns before the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of the narrow nation state. When Greece and the newly established Turkish republic agreed, by the Treaty of Lausanne, on the population exchange which in 1923 ended centuries of co-existence between Greeks and Turks, two exceptions were made. Muslims (Bulgarian speaking Pomak and Romany Muslims as well as Turks) would be allowed to remain in Greek western Thrace, and Greeks could remain in Istanbul. Most of the Istanbul Greeks were driven out in the 1950s, leaving only a tiny remnant today. But the Turks of western Thrace are still there.

Life has not always been easy for them. At the beginning of the 20th century, Muslims formed a significant majority in Xanthi, but, following the settlement of Greek migrants from Turkish eastern Thrace and Anatolia, and outward migration by local Turks, they are now very much a minority. Events outside Greece have sometimes had negative repercussions for them. Following the 1955 pogroms against Istanbul Greeks, Greece retaliated by introducing a law depriving Muslims who left Greece of their citizenship. And in response to the declaration of independence by Turkish north Cyprus in 1983, the Greek government adopted a policy of referring to ‘Greek Muslims’, no longer recognising a Turkish minority. Greek courts outlawed the term ‘Turkish’ in reference to the community in western Thrace.

Achrian Mosque, Xanthi

Such treatment no doubt made Turks in western Thrace feel less than welcome, and there were protests. But they clung on. And now, as far as can be seen, they rub along with their Greek neighbours, much as they have for centuries. Walking around Xanthi, women in headscarves go about their business. At one end of the old town, climbing up the hill, the old Muslim quarter remains just that. At the top of the hill, the Achrian Mosque, built after 1850, has notices outside in Greek, English and Turkish. People greet each with ‘as-salaam alaikum’, and chat away in Turkish. Children kicking a ball around shout to one another in Turkish.

I liked Xanthi, a town that has preserved its heritage, architectural and communal. Here, unlike almost anywhere else in either Greece or Turkey, the history of co-existence between Greeks and Turks has been preserved, and it seems to work.

Kavala and Mohammed Ali Pasha

To the east of Thessaloniki, on the Macedonian coast, Kavala is an attractive little town. The old town climbs up a hill above the bay, its narrow streets lined with Ottoman-era buildings, with their enclosed balconies reaching out across the road. The roads lead up to the Byzantine fortress, which was extended by the Ottomans. Beyond the hill is an aqueduct, built during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, in the 16th century. I enjoyed an evening meal at a restaurant owned by Greek migrants from Georgia, some of the many Black Sea Greeks who have moved to Greece since the end of the Soviet Union, the final extinction of a community going back nearly three millennia. Looking through the menu, I spotted khinkali, a kind of big Georgian ravioli, filled with seasoned minced meat, and a delicious broth that has to be slurped out. It is a Georgian dish, explained the waiter, who then told me that he and his family came from Tbilisi. The khinkali were not bad either. Not the best to be had, but not bad, so far away from Georgia.

Kavala was part of the Ottoman Empire from the late 14th century until 1912. One of its main claims to fame is that it was the birthplace of Mohammed Ali Pasha, father of modern Egypt, which he ruled for the first half of the 19th century. He founded a dynasty that reined until Nasser’s revolution in the 1950s. In 1801, Mohammed Ali had gone to Egypt as second-in-command of an Albanian contingent of an Ottoman force sent to restore authority after Napoleon’s brief occupation. By a mixture of military campaigning, cunning and ruthlessness, he managed to seize control of the whole country. At its height, his power eclipsed that of the Sultan, and for a time his rule extended over much of the Near East, almost reaching Istanbul itself.

The Imaret, Kavala

But Mohammed Ali did not lose contact with his roots in Kavala. He commissioned the building of the Imaret, a Muslim theological college. Nowadays it has been renovated as a luxury hotel. From the outside, stretched along a hillside overlooking the sea, it is an impressive sight. It has been described as the best preserved Ottoman-era building in Greece. Unfortunately, it was closed for renovation when I visited, so I was unable to see the interior.

Mohammed Ali Pasha’s home, Kavala

Close by the Imaret is Mohammed Ali’s family home, preserved as a museum. Upstairs, a large living room has been restored in the style of a traditional Ottoman haremluk, surrounded by low divans, covered with cushions, a low round table in the middle, and a conical fireplace on the back wall. I had seen such recreations before, in Albania, but what I had not seen before was a restored privy and washroom. I confess I was fascinated. In concept, it was not much different from the outdoor hole in the ground toilets I have encountered in rural areas in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In a square next to the house is a statue of Mohammed Ali on a horse, in the act of either drawing or sheathing his sword, a rare example of a Greek town honouring one of its sons who was a Muslim, and who was not Greek. But what was Mohammed Ali? I had understood he was Albanian, like the troops who were the backbone of the army he led to Egypt. When, in 2011, I visited the Alabaster Mosque in Cairo, which was commissioned by Mohammed Ali and which contains his mausoleum, my Egyptian guide too described him as Albanian (see post of 5 January 2012). But the young Greek guide at Mohammed Ali’s house in Kavala told me this was disputed, and that in Turkey he was claimed as a Turk. It was claimed, so he told me, that the notion that Mohammed Ali was Albanian was a misunderstanding caused by the fact that the troops that he led to Egypt were Albanian. The issue could apparently inflame passions. The young man told me of an occasion when parties of Turks and Albanians visiting the house at the same time had a fierce row over the matter.

Mohammed Ali Pasha, Kavala

In the Ottoman period, the question of Mohammed Ali’s nationality would have been of secondary importance. He was an Ottoman Muslim, and that was what counted. Although he ruled over Egypt, he never learned Arabic, and the language of his court was Turkish. Some contemporary diplomatic visitors claimed his native language was Albanian. But indeed, he might in any case have known the language of his soldiers. The young Greek at Mohammed Ali’s house in Kavala told me that at the time of his birth, in 1769, the population of Kavala was almost entirely Turkish, with just a very small Christian population. He thought there would have been very few Albanians there, apart from the soldiers of the garrison. Yet there were Albanians almost everywhere in Greece during the Ottoman period, including nearby Salonika. With the information I had, I could not conclude either way. I had liked the idea that an Albanian, a chancer from one of Europe’s smaller nations, had become ruler of an Empire in Egypt, Sudan, western Arabia and the Levant, and one of the most notable historical figures of his day.

The Yeni Tzami, Salonika's Esoteric Mosque

The last mosque built in Salonika, in 1902, the Yeni Tzami, or ‘New Mosque’, is also one of the city’s few Ottoman-era mosques to survive to the present. And it is one of the most unusual mosques in the world. It was built by an Italian architect to serve the city’s Dönmeh, or ‘convert’ community. The Dönmeh were descendants of Jews who had converted to Islam in the 17th century.

They were follows of Sabbatai Zevi, a Jewish mystic from Smyrna, who proclaimed himself the Messiah. He attracted a huge following among the Jews of Europe and the Levant, antagonising the Jewish establishment in the process, and, with his claims of earthly kingship, attracting the wrath of the Sultan. Finally, he was brought before the Sultan in Edirne in 1666. Offered a choice between conversion to Islam and impalement, he chose the former. Many of his followers reverted to Jewish Orthodoxy, while some continued to believe in their Messiah. Still others, the Dönmeh, followed Zevi’s example and converted to Islam.

The Yeni Tzami, Salonika

Salonika became the main centre of the Dönmeh, where some of them were prominent merchants. While outwardly Muslim, they retained many Jewish practices and continued to speak Ladino, the dialect of the Spanish Jews. Disapproved of by both Jews, for whom they were apostates, and strict Muslims who rejected their crypto-Judaism, until the late-19th century they practiced endogamy, marrying only within their own community. They were politically active, and were prominent in the Young Turk revolution of 1908, which originated in Salonika. As Muslims, they were included in the population exchange in 1923. In the early years of the Turkish Republic, they continued to play an important role, as merchants and as supporters of Ataturk’s secular, modernising reforms. However, during the 20th century many of them have gradually assimilated into the broader Turkish society.

Their remarkable, eclectic mosque in Salonika reflects the complex, ambiguous identity of the Dönmeh. A hybrid of European and Islamic styles, fusing Baroque, neoclassical, and Byzantine, it also contains Jewish features. Walking up the road towards it, the initial impression is one of extraordinary oddness. As well as a Mihrab, pointing towards Mecca and the direction of Muslim prayer, the six-pointed Star of David is repeated around the exterior and interior of the mosque. The mosque did not function as such for long. Scarcely 20 years after it was built, its faithful departed for Turkey under the Lausanne Agreement. Some tried to claim they were not in fact Muslims, hoping to be excluded.

The Dönmeh never really fitted. Only in the diverse, cosmopolitan atmosphere that was Salonika before the Balkan Wars did they find their place. Perhaps that was why they supported Ataturk, hoping that they could find a new home in a modern, secular state. They were to be disappointed. Ataturk’s vaunted secularism was in reality a sham. The very core of the new Turkish identity was in fact based on religion. At the start of the new republic, Turks were defined as Muslims, and a Turk could be a Muslim from anywhere in the Balkans, no matter whether he had spoken Turkish or not, so long as he identified with the Turkish nation. A Christian from Turkey, by contrast, even if he spoke only Turkish, could not be accepted as part of the new Turkish nation, and had to be expelled to Greece. The aim of Ataturk’s secularism was to keep religion in its place, out of the sphere of government, so that he could set about building his modern republic unfettered by competition from institutions that had held immense power and importance under the Ottoman order. But within the state, one religious community, Sunni Islam, was given a privileged position, under firm state control, but favoured over any rivals, be they non-Muslim or other branches of Islam. In this world, the Dönmeh, with their esoteric brand of Islam, their fusion of different faiths, were decidedly suspect.

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.

What are they doing to Skopje?

As I was driven from the bus station to my accommodation, the taxi driver asked me when I was last in Skopje. Four years ago, I replied. Oh, you will see a lot of changes. I knew something about the transformation Skopje was undergoing under the government’s ‘Skopje 2014’ project. I knew it was grandiose, and I knew it was controversial, and had elicited much criticism. I had come to see for myself. Do you like the changes, I asked? Yes, he replied, very definitely. I heard such positive responses from others during my visit. Some were clearly pleased at the prospect of a more monumental capital. Others I spoke to reserved their judgment, saying it would take time before a proper evaluation could be made. Others simply loathed the whole thing.

Skopje suffered a huge earthquake in 1963, which destroyed the majority of the city. Poignantly, the hands of the clock on the broken façade of the old railway station, now the city museum, still stand at the moment the earthquake struck. It was the city’s misfortune to be reconstructed in the style of 1960s and 1970s communism, all hideous concrete, now crumbling and decomposing. The result was a famously ugly city centre.

Even more unfortunate, the city became increasingly divided along the Vardar River, which bisects the city. On one side, the ugly modern town, mainly populated by Macedonians; on the other, the old Ottoman-era bazaar, with a largely Albanian character, and the Romany district of Shuto Orizari on its furthest outskirts. The old bazaar district has its charm. There are some fine Ottoman era buildings, several mosques, and Turkish baths (now an art gallery). And the low buildings, the shops selling baklava and other sweet Turkish cakes, the kebab places, the cafes with men drinking sweet tea and playing backgammon. Sadly, that charm had been largely unappreciated and neglected by city governments uninterested in Albanian quarters of the city.

Yet despite all this, I liked Skopje. Many others liked Skopje too. I first visited the city in 1988, when it was still Yugoslavia. I was there for only 24 hours, a very memorable 24 hours.

With a young American companion, I had an excellent dinner in the old bazaar, for what seemed an absurdly low price. Having no other means of communicating with the waiter, we simply pointed at our mouths, indicating ‘food’. It was a weekend, and, while bottles of wine were placed on restaurant tables, indicating that they were reserved, swarms of young people stood in the streets, all dressed up, chatting and laughing. It seemed, given the lack of means of Skopje’s young people, such street gatherings were the main form of socialising. Skopje was a fun city.* During later stays, I spent wild nights in some of the town’s frenetic live-music venues. There were excellent restaurants, second to none in former Yugoslavia. The river front, alongside the Vardar, was faced by lively cafes and bars. Excellent cocktails. Skopje even had an openly gay scene, quite original in a region otherwise blighted by homophobia. In short, Skopje was cool.

Alexander the Great in Skopje

The new makeover for the city is astounding in its ambition. It is as if the planners wanted to transform Skopje into the grandest, most splendid city in Europe, and set about doing it in three or four years. Massive new monuments litter the town centre. At its heart is a huge statue of Alexander the Great on the main square, sword in hand on a rearing horse, all atop a massive platform. Over the elegant Ottoman-era stone bridge across the Vardar stands an even more massive statue of Alexander’s father, Phillip of Macedon. Such monuments, although they are not officially named for Alexander and Phillip, are clearly intended to poke the Greeks in the eye. Athens insists that Alexander and Phillip are exclusively Hellenic figures, and that raising their statues in Skopje, as well as naming the airport, the football stadium, and the main north-south highway after them, amounts to a usurpation of Greek history. In part, the erection of such monuments reflects Macedonian despair at Greece’s persistent blocking of the country’s integration with NATO and the EU. Opposition criticisms of Skopje 2014 say such monuments needlessly antagonise Greece, and set back the country’s hopes for joining the European mainstream. But Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski seems to have concluded that, given Greece’s recalcitrance, and the weakness of the rest of Europe in face of it, the integration promise is, for the foreseeable future, a chimera. So all this emphasis on Alexander and Phillip is a big ‘Ya Boo Sucks’ to Greece. It is of course utterly puerile, and stoops to the Greeks’ own fatuous level. But it is just a little understandable given Greece’s unreasonableness.

A stronger reproach against Skopje 2014 is its lack of architectural or aesthetic merit. The whole project reflects the ambitions and tastes of megalomaniac politicians. Its guiding spirit is nationalist aggrandisement. The sheer bombastic bulk of the Alexander statue is bad enough, but it really comes into its own at night, when the fountain it sits above is irradiated by a multi-coloured lights show. In many cities you can find horrendously kitsch souvenirs, but in Skopje they decided to create the original champion of kitsch. The city is being turned into a pastiche of the great capitals of Europe. There is a triumph arch to compete with Paris, a higher concentration of statues than London, and several new neoclassical buildings, or old buildings being given a neoclassical facelift. There are new bridges, one of them with statues along it, reminiscent of Prague. Even the new buses have been copied from London, red double-deckers clearly styled on the beloved old Routemasters.

Giving Skopje a makeover was perhaps not a bad idea in itself. Other drab post-communist capitals in the region, Tirana, Podgorica, Prishtina, have made efforts to smarten up. But no other city has attempted anything approaching Skopje’s ambition. A transformation on such a scale is difficult to digest in such a short timeframe. Some elements are surely positive: the revamped stadium; the improved infrastructure; the rebuilding of the national theatre destroyed in 1963. Some of the new buildings are of a more contemporary design, notably the Philharmonic Orchestra hall. Skopje had the chance to build contemporary buildings of note that might have put the city on the map.

Church of St Clement, Skopje

It has done it before. The Church of St. Clement of Ohrid, Skopje’s Orthodox cathedral, finished in 1990, is a remarkably adventurous and interesting building. With its domes, it is identifiably an Orthodox church, yet its design is modern, an updated take on the traditional Byzantine model that most new Orthodox churches continue slavishly and boringly to follow. The fountain in front of the church, presented by the city’s Islamic community, was also a remarkable symbol of unity in a city divided along ethnic and religious lines.

But, one or two buildings aside, the present revamp of the city does not follow such a path. The buildings and monuments being erected are not bold, not original, not interesting. There is no vision beyond a bland reiteration of the worn out styles of other cities and of bygone eras. As I looked upon all of this, I wondered whether the old cool Skopje could possibly survive? The bars along the Vardar are still there. The Cuban bar still fizzes in the evenings. But I couldn’t escape the view of the new buildings across the river. Is it possible that in the future this view could be impressive?

The view across the Vardar, Skopje

Across the Vardar, in the first stretch close to the riverbank, I was in a building site. New statues: the one of Phillip nearing completion; Cyril and Methodius, the Greek Macedonian evangelists of the Slavs. Beyond that, the old bazaar area is much as I remember it. It was a sunny weekend at the start of spring when I was there. People were sitting outside the cafes, drinking tea or beer, eating grilled meat or sticky cakes. It’s all on a more manageable scale than the colossal new city going up a hundred metres away. Here it is still possible to relax. But there are plans for this end of town as well.

Albanians, who make up some 20 per cent of Skopje’s population, had objected that all the new statuary reflected Macedonians’ history and Macedonian heroes of no relevance to them. In response, a few notable Albanians were added to the list of statues. Among them is Skanderbeg, the greatest of all Albanian heroes, who held out for 20 years against the Ottoman advance in the 15th century. A much more modest statue than most of the others going up, I rather liked it. In contrast to the monuments in Tirana and Prishtina, his sword is sheathed. He looks less ferocious, more approachable perhaps, if that is what one wants from a Skanderbeg statue. At the moment, the statue is in an odd position on the edge of the bazaar district, looking out over the highway that runs through the city. But he is to have a square of his own. One of the objections raised by a Macedonian friend to the city’s makeover is that, rather than uniting the city, it reinforces its division. In future, Macedonians will have their square, and Albanians will have theirs.

And how much is it all costing? This is another source of controversy. Critics accuse the authorities of a lack of transparency or public consultation. To someone used to the planning process in the UK, the years of debate and argument involved in any public infrastructure project, the speed with which the transformation of Skopje is being pushed ahead is astounding. Macedonia is a poor country. Economic activity was already focused to a considerable extent on Skopje. Does it make sense to undertake such a vast, expensive vanity project? And does it make sense to focus so much investment on the already privileged capital city? So much of Skopje city centre still looks slightly grubby and unkempt, parks not properly cared for, pavements crumbling. Does the plan include such details that go to make a city beautiful? Might not an effort to revamp the city have focused on such details? My worst fear is that, in a few years’ time, the new monuments and buildings may start to look the worse for wear as well. Oh dear, Skopje, what have they done to you?

*Later that night, while searching for a bar that was still open, we met a young woman who spoke English. She said she was from Zagreb, and was herself visiting Skopje. She suggested we hop in her car, and that she would find an open bar. She was clearly very drunk, and getting in a car with her was surely a bad idea. But we were quite drunk too, beyond the point of responsible decision-making. It was terrifying, racing around, ignoring traffic lights, barely maintaining control. The car was a Yugo, not such a bad car at the time. In my fear, I gripped the inside door handle so tightly that it, and the whole interior lining of the door, came off in my hand. Suddenly she lurched to a stop, for no apparent reason. The American and I took our chance and jumped out.

We were close to the railway station, and from somewhere nearby we could hear music. Still thinking about finding more booze, we walked towards it. On a piece of waste ground, tables were laid out, piled with food and drink. A makeshift stage had been erected, and musicians were playing. The people were Romany. They welcomed us, offered us a seat at their table, gave us bottles of beer, thrust food in front of us. They couldn’t talk to us, but then the crazy drunk woman from Zagreb turned up. She interpreted for us, and explained that the celebration was to mark the circumcision of a young boy. It was a happy atmosphere.

Then a policeman arrived. He sat down next to us, and was offered food and drink by the solicitous Romany hosts. He could speak a little English. He asked us what we were doing there, where we were staying? It all seemed quite friendly. And then suddenly, he said ‘you go now; go home.’ We were confused. Why would we want to leave? We were having fun. We stayed put. And then a couple of minutes later, this time firmly, an instruction, with a tone of warning: ‘Leave now; go home.’ We got up smartly and left, leaving the girl from Zagreb with a beer in her hand. Walking back to the youth hostel, we were bemused. What had been going on? Did the policeman know or suspect something we did not? Were we not safe there? Was something afoot? Twenty-five years later, my memories of that evening are as clear as ever. But I never understood what happened.

Skopje’s placid exterior belies tensions beneath the surface between the different ethnic communities. Visiting the city shortly after the 2001 Albanian insurgency, a young, very articulate Albanian working for one of the western embassies told me that the next time, Albanians would go the whole way, and take all the territory that was rightfully, historically theirs, including Skopje. No matter that Albanians made up barely 20 per cent of the city’s population. But he was from Tetovo, the overwhelmingly Albanian city in the north-west of the country, commuting daily to work in the capital. Despite its tensions and divisions, Skopje had always been more relaxed. A few years later, I visited a radio station, which doubled as a bar, and broadcast in both Macedonian and Albanian.

Ararat, Armenia and Turkey

Visiting the Ararat region of Armenia early in 2013, I was constantly being made aware of the country’s painful history, and the degree to which it continues to hang over and dominate the present. On my first morning, I woke up to a beautiful clear day, and there, from my motel terrace, looming over the landscape, was the towering, snow-covered bulk of Mount Ararat, symbol of Armenia. Noah’s Ark is said to have come to rest in the Ararat range. Armenian legend has it that Noah’s great-great-grandson, Hayk, was the founder of the Armenian nation. The Armenian word for their country, Hayastan, derives from his name. Yet Ararat is not part of modern Armenia, but of neighbouring Turkey. I was staying right up against the border, a border which is closed, cutting Armenia off from lands which its people still consider to be rightfully their own. The presence of Ararat today seems almost to mock the Armenians who, so close by, cannot go there, unless they undertake a long, round-about journey through a neighbouring country.

Khor Virap Monastery, with Mount Ararat in the background

A school teacher in a village close to the border asked me whether I had been to eastern Turkey? Was there any sign of the Armenian heritage there, he asked? He said he hoped that Kars, Erzerum, Van, would all one day again be part of Armenia. I visited a museum dedicated to the Armenian poet Paruyr Sevak, in the village of his birth, Zangakatun. Sevak had died in a car accident in 1971, and is widely revered in Armenia. As well as exhibits linked to the poet’s life, including his desk, and his couch, along one long wall of the museum was a huge mural. The mural showed Sevak pulling aside a curtain, revealing the suffering of the 1915 genocide, when over a million Armenians from eastern Turkey were sent on forced death marches away from their ancestral homeland. This was part of a policy of the wartime Turkish authorities to remove nations they considered to be fifth columnists aligned with their enemies. It was a murderous policy, accompanied by numerous massacres. The mural showed a cast of evil characters, including a Hitler-like figure, and pig-faced humans who the museum guide told us represented the Young Turks, who had seized power in the dying Ottoman Empire shortly before the First World War. The guide explained that Sevak pulled aside the curtain on the Armenian tragedy.

This sense of injustice permeates modern Armenian life and dominates the national consciousness. Many other countries perceive that they are the victims of historical injustice, that they have lost territory that rightfully should have been theirs. But it is hard to think of anywhere where history has left such an indelible mark, such a debilitating legacy that poisons the country’s relations with its neighbours and impedes its quest for a better future. Turkey has for years resisted international pressure to acknowledge the genocide. But for some Armenians such an acknowledgement does not seem adequate. One young woman told me she was not interested in an apology. For her, nothing less than the recovery of Armenia’s lost territory would suffice. And she wanted Turkey to pay Armenia compensation for the deaths of their long dead kin. I asked her whether she seriously imagined such aspirations were remotely realistic? What did she expect to happen to the people currently living in the regions of eastern Turkey she coveted, far more numerous than the entire population of present-day Armenia? Would they be expelled, in an echo of the treatment meted out on Armenians a century earlier? Who knows, she responded, what might be possible in future.

I visited the monastery of Khor Virap, or ‘Deep Well’, within sight of the border fence. The monastery was built over a deep pit where St. Gregory the Illuminator is said to have been imprisoned for 13 years by the pagan King Tiridates III. St. Gregory is credited with converting the Armenians to Christianity in 301 AD, making Armenia the first state officially to adopt Christianity. At the monastery’s centre is a little church with the conical tower typical of Armenian churches. It is surrounded by a defensive wall, with turrets. I peered down into the deep pit where St. Gregory is said to have been imprisoned, and thought better of descending.

Across the border too, in modern-day Turkey, the landscape is dotted with Armenian churches, most of them now in ruins. They attest to the formerly Armenian character of the region. Most notable is the medieval Armenian capital of Ani, now a field surrounded by a wall, and dotted with ruined churches. Right up against the border with Armenia, not far from where I was now staying, I had visited Ani in 2010. It is understandable that Armenians mourn their lost lands, and the ghosts of their massacred ancestors. Turkey should acknowledge the injustice, the suffering it heaped on other peoples, Armenians, Greeks and others, during the traumatic founding of their modern state on the ashes of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. But while Armenians cannot be expected to forget their past, they do need to come to terms with it and deal with their neighbours in the present. An accommodation with Turkey needs to be found. As Serbs and Albanians grasp for a modus vivendi over Kosovo, only a little over a decade after their recent war, surely after a hundred years Armenians and Turks can find a way to look to the future.