LITMIR.BIZ

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more intensely than anywhere else, Truth and History, in the Balkans, are national considerations. In Greece, they are generated and reproduced by what a scholar, who asked that I not reveal his name, termed the “archeological Mafia,” and by an academic establishment which maintains an incestuous relationship with the State. To cast doubt upon the approved version is to court danger. In Salonica and in Athens I received pointed advice, some good-natured, some hostile, about what might be appropriately written. Greek sensitivities are extreme, sensibilities easily bruised.

      In Macedonia, the mechanism of identity formation was, under the Communists, if anything less subtle than that which had occurred in Greece. Today, despite the ostensible collapse of the ancien régime, the same academics propound the same analyses in the same rigorously disciplined congresses, as if nothing had changed. The continuum of historical doctrine has remained stubbornly unbroken.

      Albania was the most extraordinary case. The doctrine of Albanicity, dovetailing with neo-Stalinist historical inevitability, had been elevated to the status of a religion. Enver Hoxha is long gone, but the aftertaste lingers on among intellectuals who proclaim their faith in his perverted legacy while denying him.

      In Serbia, whose much-condemned, ill-understood woes cast a long shadow across the peninsula, the construction of a national self included myth, legend and the legendary obduracy of the Serbs themselves. Serbia, like its southern Balkan neighbors a latecomer to the intoxication of the national ideal, looked longingly to a glorious pre-Ottoman past. In the mid-fourteenth century, the great king Stefan Dusan had extended Serbian hegemony throughout the Balkans, barely failing to capture Salonica. Though Dusan’s empire did not survive his reign, which ended with his death in 1355, it has never ceased to haunt—and inspire—Belgrade. Though Serbia falls beyond the scope of this book, I often found its presence impinging on the narrative, as it did on the perceptions of Greeks, Macedonians, Bulgarians and Albanians . . . and, of course, of the Kosovars.

      IN A REGION where one man’s national martyr is another’s war criminal, where one country’s founding myth is another’s tale of woe and usurpation, what other refuge can the chronicler of human absurdity seek than compassionate relativism? If this account appears particularly critical toward Greece, there are reasons. My long, deep emotional attachment to the country reflects the interplay of love and hatred that are the hallmark of any relationship founded in passion. Greece, too, as self-defined heir to the Byzantines and depository of the legacy of Athens, wields a cultural power that its neighbors cannot easily equal.

      Greece is, at the same time, a raw, new country whose creation and expansion partake of the same forces that would shape Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and now, Macedonia. Yet it would deny to its minuscule northern neighbor the right to construct its own representation of itself. Insofar as it does this, it stands open to the accusation of historical injustice.

      This, finally, is a book that does not deign to conceal its parti pris. Against the mighty, the specialists and the experts, the economic determinists who would strap life, in all its numinous richness, to the Procrustean bed of inevitability; against the arrogance of the nation-state masquerading as the agent of post-modern supra-nationalism; against the long-fanged world-culturalists who posit their ideology as the entire discursive field, secreting blood enmity and ethnic strife as they totter across the land, hands fluttering in mock innocence.

      It speaks for the marginal, the despised, the concealed and the dissimulated; for the small countries (like Macedonia or Québec) who have inexplicably missed the cut-off date for national legitimacy as decreed by their overbearing neighbors or masters; for the minority languages that dare not speak their names; for the Vlachs, for the Kosovars, for the Macedonians of Greece, for the Gypsies everywhere.

      It offers no solution, only the certainty that European nationalism has failed the Balkans as surely as communist “internationalism.” Free market democracy, hailed as the panacea, is more likely to recreate a situation similar to that which prevailed in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and release old tensions, new dangers and the whisper of war.

      The southern Balkans—the area encompassing Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Kosova and Bulgaria—possess a potential for conflict, and for disaster, which exceeds that of Bosnia. The status quo is unjust and unstable; economic disparities are on the rise, outside powers are locked in bitter commercial and political rivalry through their local proxies. Even the slightest shift in the ethnic imbalance could trigger hostilities involving the region’s two heaviest armed potential belligerents, Greece and Turkey.

      The process known as globalization, for all its claims, provides no inoculation against the lurking bacillus of national resurgence. Instead, it is likely to awaken local and regional particularisms, driven by the ideology of competition of which war is merely the continuation by other means. Not in the Balkans will the exquisite corpse of nationalism be easily laid to rest.

      CHAPTER 1

       CITY OF SHADOWS

      DAWN IS BREAKING as the night train from Athens sways and rattles along the northern Aegean shore. Crouched around fires, knots of Albanian refugees look up as it rushes by. Suddenly my fellow passengers begin to rouse themselves, talking excitedly. My eyes follow their pointing fingers. On the northeastern horizon the lights of Salonica glisten, reflected on the still waters of the bay. Time seems to accelerate as the express picks up speed for the long, swooping curve into the place which is to be my home for three months. Forehead pressed against the cold glass of the window I watch the city awaken as the train glides through the rail yard, whistle hooting, then creaks to a stop in the station. Salonica terminus; end of the line. My long journey into the Balkans has begun, a journey of short distances which will lead me deep into history, and carry me across a landscape disfigured by the battle for land and identity.

      FROM MY SECOND-FLOOR BALCONY I look on as life unfolds in the tiny square below. Waiters deliver cups of coffee to the season’s last, hard-core outdoor customers at the Café Doré, older men in overcoats, their collars turned up against the wind as leaves from the plane tree flutter to the ground. Nearby, three drunks carefully spread rolls of corrugated cardboard before flopping down on the park benches to snooze in the sunlight. A cat stalks, then attacks and captures a butterfly. A blond-haired young woman dressed in tights and high-heeled boots paces back and forth impatiently, then stalks off. The buzz of small-displacement motorbikes runs like the obbligato of a million wasps over the bass roar of automobiles and buses. Or is the din I hear simply the concentrated conversation of the city, the distillation of one hundred thousand domestic quarrels and coffee-house altercations, market disputes and lapel-tugging street-corner encounters?

      My neighborhood is a petrified forest of apartment buildings. Light rarely penetrates to street level, and on weekends when the municipal garbage collection crews are not at work—or during one of their frequent strikes—rubbish rapidly piles up on the sidewalk, drawing hungry cats, stray dogs, and at this proximity to the waterfront, harbor rats. At street level are nightclubs whose patrons are wont to block the narrow sidewalk with their motorcycles and affect an arrogant swagger, their narrowly post-pubescent lady friends a practiced pout.

      There is, I learn after a few weeks of residence, a profound consistency about the place. Back in the days before the Café Doré and the apartment buildings, these few square blocks formed one of Salonica’s toughest districts: a place where its rebetiko music milieu lived, performed, fought, occasionally prospered and more often went hungry over cheap wine in makeshift tavernas, or got high in hashish dens. Here was the “Koutsoura” (“the stumps”) of a certain Mr. Delamangas, later to be immortalized in Vassilis Tsitsanis’ late-’40s hit Bakché Ciftliki. In the song, named for a Turkish estate which flourished as a summer bathing spot back when the water was clear, Tsitsanis leads us on a musical excursion, self-referential before such things became fashionable post-modernist devices, through the high spots and the low-down dives of the Salonica shoreline underworld.

      Come

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