Salonica Terminus. Fred A. Reed
and the air after a rain was fragrant with the perfume of the soil; the island villages, cubist in their geometrical imperfection: all were vanishing, to be replaced by polluted water, urban sprawl and raw concrete. Once objects, the grizzled fishermen, the peasants, the proletarians, the leftist students had taken on human forms, individual and collective personalities, had become subjects. Friendship and enmity, class solidarity and fratricidal conflict, lust and jealousy, hunger and satiation, oppression and resistance lurched across the land like the disjointed figures in a karaghiozis shadow puppet play, life-size, compelling, threatening.
Greece had become “real,” had acquired in my less innocent eyes what it had never lacked: a present. This present was more, however, than a space to be inhabited. I hungered to understand what had shaped it, and was determined to seek out its history by traveling not across the landscape, but by burrowing down into it. As I did so I began, metaphorically, to unearth relics. These relics could take the form of bones, of concealed images, of ruined buildings and dead cities. They could also take the shape of myths of primordial power.
The country was also, I came to realize over three decades of constant returning (interrupted only by the seven wretched years of the American-inspired military dictatorship) an imaginary construct. Greece’s founding mythology, though ostensibly logical and linear, was more complex, tortuous and ramified than the genesis of the Olympian pantheon, more arbitrary and intense than the passions of the Homeric heroes and demi-gods. Reaching deep into the past, it had appropriated the social, intellectual and moral heritage of Athens, Sparta, ancient Macedon, Rome and Byzantium, reconciling the irreconcilable—Athenian democracy and Alexander the Great, pagan polytheism and Orthodox Christianity—as it went. In its representation of identity it suppressed dissenting myths, silenced counter-narratives, consigned subversive versions to oblivion, wiped away centuries. Ultimately the myth secreted the tyranny of the absolute: All who are not with us are against us; all who are not of us do not exist.
Myth sustained the nation in its darkest hours and nourished some of its greatest creative spirits. In symbiosis with European nationalism, creature of the Enlightenment, it transmuted itself into a powerful identity-producing mechanism, and, in the early years of the nineteenth century, laid the foundations for an exclusionary, expansionist state. Greece alone in all the Balkans was able to call on the historical sophistication that devolved to the self-affirmed heirs of ancient Athens and Byzantium. But it was soon to be challenged by its Romanian, Serbian and Bulgarian neighbors; later by the Albanians; latest of all by the Macedonians. All hastened to mobilize their own heroic traditions, their founding myths. A fury of national parthenogenesis—what Stefan Zweig calls the megalomania of the small—wracked the southeastern extremity of the continent. Legitimacies began to clash; identities to deny one another. Modernity, that undifferentiated catalyst, was available to all, who would use it in sharply differentiated ways.
THE BALKANS TODAY are the bastard child of the Ottoman Empire and Western imperialism. The name of the region derives from the Turkish word for mountain. It is, for the most part, a mass of rugged, irregular ranges which have exerted a determining influence on social, economic and political development. Until recently, the peninsula was administered not by nation states, but by two multinational empires, the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans. What set the Balkans apart from Western Europe was that the peoples who settled there had been able to preserve their identity down to the present. When, driven by the flood tide of nationalism which arose early in the nineteenth century and has yet to crest, the identity of one began to impinge on that of the other, the result was predictably disastrous.
Conventional wisdom tells us—as do expert analysts and mainstream journalists—that the latest Balkan catastrophe which began in the early 1990s with the collapse of Yugoslavia and the violent partition of Bosnia, was the work of a handful of ruthless, power-hungry regional demagogues wielding nationalism as the Grim Reaper wields his scythe. It was if the rational West could not bear to hear of blood enmity, of ancient hatreds and myths, those building stones of its own cultural identity. Yet my travels in the southern Balkans persuade me that the failure of Yugoslavia is not simply the gruesome work of Slobodan Milosevic or Franjo Tudjman, though it is that too. The agony of Bosnia, the Damoclean sword suspended above the head of Macedonia, the coming upheaval in Kosova, are not merely the poisoned heritage of Tito’s Yugoslavia, though they are that too.
Tito’s was the second attempt to construct, on the basis of the mutual consent of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, a state of the South Slavs which also encompassed non-consenting Albanians. The first Yugoslavia was founded in 1918; its borders and the status of its minorities were legitimized by the peace of Versailles, Europe and America’s poisoned gift to humanity, synthesis of Wilson’s 14 Points and Great Power greed. It collapsed 20 years later amidst the debris of dictatorship as Nazi Germany thrust southeastward into the Balkans, setting up an independent fascist Croat state as it went, a development uncannily reflected in Christian Democratic Germany’s hasty recognition of an independent Croatia in 1991. Events in Albania, occupied by fascist Italy, followed a similar course.
Nationalism, as much a creature of the Enlightenment as the world culture which now bids to replace it, had already been at work for decades, transmitted by the codification of national languages and the creation of national histories and pedigrees. Nationalism, and the passions it released, was also the sword wielded by the European powers—France, England, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia—in their mortal struggle against the Ottoman Empire, and in their expansionist drive to capture new markets. Had the Ottomans actively proselytized for Islam, had not Ottoman misrule provided it with the fertile ground of rancor and poverty, nationalism of such particular virulence might less likely have taken root in the Balkans. But they didn’t, and it did.
There was more. Oil, the viscous black liquid that lights men’s eyes and kindles their avarice, lay beyond the end station of the Berlin-Baghdad railway, across the shipping lanes that radiated from Salonica harbor, the great Balkan terminus. The once-feared empire whose capital spanned two continents stood as the great barrier blocking European access to the newly discovered petroleum resources of the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf. There, the precious commodity which lay beneath the land was soon to be portioned out by men meeting in secret chambers: Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot.
The Ottomans represented yet another encumbrance: they were Muslims. Weak, corrupt Muslims to be sure, but bearers of a creed that posits a non-national model of social organization. Ottoman cities, in comparison with the mode prevailing in Europe, were havens of cosmopolitan tolerance. Places where people of all three monotheistic religions, and of a huge diversity of languages and ethnic attachments, coexisted in relative peace. These cities had names like Üsküb (Skopje), Sarajevo, and Selanik (Salonica).
As the empire withered, driven south and eastward by encroaching, oil-thirsty Europe and devoured from within by a virulent strain of Turkish nationalism, Sarajevo, Salonica and Skopje survived like islands on the land. Capital of tiny, fragile, landlocked and debt-ridden Macedonia, Skopje still preserves its national ambiguity and multiethnic harmony, but jagged fault lines run just beneath the surface. Sarajevo is a smoking ruin, the head of a corpse being systematically picked apart by the vultures of the international financial establishment.1 Salonica, second city of two empires, once known as the Sepharade of the Balkans, had long ago been reduced, in a long spasm of exclusion and ethnic cleansing, to a unidimensional provincial capital.
The journeys through the Balkans which form the armature of this book begin and end in the city on Salonica Bay. There, I hypothesized, I would find keys to the calamity of Sarajevo and insight into the future of Skopje, perhaps even penetrate the secret of Macedonia. Acting on Edward Said’s admonition, I did not accept the politics of identity as given, but attempted to “show how representations are constructed, for what purpose, and with what components.”2
SALONICA TERMINUS IS ITSELF A BALKAN STORY, bypassing analysis for the random, chaotic fascination of events. It forsakes straight-line travel for the baroque pleasures of looping back, of retracing steps; eschews the linear view of history for a relativist perspective dictated not by the fickle fashion of a postmodernism, already disappearing into the rearview mirror with the speed of last year’s advertising slogan, as outmoded as last year’s digital prodigy, but by the very nature of