In which your humble correspondent finds that all is not what is seemingly “shown and told” in Nis, Sofia, Ruse, Thessaloniki, Kalambaka and Athens, depending on who is doing the showing and telling, what may have been stolen or left behind over previous centuries of contested history, and whether or not anyone is actually around to open a museum in winter...
The two previous posts about this journey can be found at:
Balkanised 1:
Balkanised 2:
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“Due to the desperate economic situation travel on international trains is dangerous, as they now attract thieves and bandits, especially at night. Tickets issued outside Yugoslavia may not be honoured, so you may wish to consider an alternative route via Bulgaria/Romania... If necessary to travel to or through Yugoslavia couchette/sleeping car accommodation is recommended for better security (though still far from safe) and you are advised to take appropriate precautions.”
- Thomas Cook European Timetable, December 1996.
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Nis station, eastern Serbia: 1970’s regional Brutalist grandeur surrounded by crumbling cement pavers and a circumference of disintegrating concrete steps. They lead from the rusty queue of overgrown steam locomotives at the level crossing into a vast, deserted, two-storeyed bare beige-and-brown atrium, with one distant booking office widow, lit and staffed, vacant lines of blue plastic bucket seats, and upstairs, a few blue-painted signs on very closed glass doors promising coffee from circa 1978, and not a lot since.
Outside the little red diesel to the border was warmer and more welcoming, with its fading, battered seasonal holly-branch wreath under the windscreen. It quickly accelerated soon after 11am into a morning of chugging through dark grey ravines into dry-red ploughed valleys and ridges to a tableland surrounded by rounded snowy hills. Each station stop (many) had its cream-coloured station house, uniformed officer at greeting our arrival attention, before adjusting large black wheels at the station door to set signals for the next section of the climb, under close supervision of a station dog in the milky sun.
The smart new parallel freeway suggests that the Serb government’s transport priorities may lie elsewhere: “No Express Trains Until June...”. Along the single track are small villages of brich houses with large wooden winter barns: hay bales at the top, cut wood and chickens below, farm families chopping wood or preparing vegetables out in the sun on snow-flecked fields as we roll into Dimitrovgrad: three and a half very pleasant hours (and thank you to the Man at Seat 61website for recommending such a pleasant experience: https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/belgrade-to-sofia-by-train.htm
... and for assuring me that this was all possible.)
Land border number 5:
The large Dimitrovgrad station is (just) inside Serbia: early 20th century crumbling grandeur “rebuilt with the support of the European Union”: no bar, no refreshments, no information, in hazy late afternoon light. The Bulgarian train - the usual Balkan Soviet-era electric loco tied to a couple of graffitied cars, parked 800 metres to the west - suddenly groaned and roared past... 800 metres to the east. The dozen or so passengers with bags, shopping trolleys, children; grandparents, scrambled down onto the track and up on to the opposite platform in pursuit of a couple of warm open 2nd class carriages with back-to-back commuter bench seats.
In the usual sullen silence of a border check, the Serb officials worked through the train: seriously efficient. With one soft “peeep” from the loco we were then jolted off to the border. This is the old Communist-era arrangement: effectively caged into a couple of sidings between security fences and large floodlighting towers, awaiting the pleasure of Bulgarian officialdom, (as trucks on the highway border are stopped and customs-checked in a parallel security area).
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BULGARIA:
The gaunt old lady sitting opposite tries to make conversation: leaning forward and touching my knee she says: “Are you going to Istanbul?” She is, and needs someone to lug her bags off and on to the train in Sofia.
It is some time, in the otherwise silent train, before the Bulgarian “uniforms” appear. With more than an hour timetabled to sit here, there is no hurry... We can hear the banging of doors and the distant questioning as they work through from the front of the train. They, like the Hungarians of 2 weeks ago, are opening train panels and checking for contraband items/bodies with penlight torches, unpacking shopping bags and opening rubbish bins. There is no interest in any of the locked luggage at all... “How Many Days in Bulgaria? Holiday?”. Our passports are taken away. We sit (at least it is warm as dark slowly descends upon our security zone, and adjacent trucks gradually crawl westwards).
Passports are returned by checking photos against faces. Sadly my photo (the kind that could only be taken by a vindictive ex-student in a Katoomba photo shop) matched.
The fresh stamp tells me where I am enjoying an my warm welcome: “KALOTINA”. It’s 4pm, and the timetable says we leave here at 5.25. Back to reading:
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Misha Glenny: The Balkans 1804 - 2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers:
“Writing about the Bulgaria of the 1930’s, a noted historian refers how
(F)requently dubbed “the Prussians of the Balkans” or “the Slavic world’s Japanese’, the Bulgarians are considered by outsiders and by themselves to be the most diligent, frugal, sober, orderly, systematic, and correct, as well as practical and alert people of the peninsula. They prided themselves on sustaining a “robots-work [drone and drudge] culture, in contrast to the Serbs’ haiduk-hero culture or the Romanians’ and Greeks’ alleged mercantile-ingenuity culture... While such generalisations about national character may be overdrawn, the Bulgarians are, on balance, rather impressively utilitarian and hard-headed.”
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Extended reading is interrupted by fusty ticket checking and much tapping about on an iPad by the Bulgarian conductor, including several photos taken of my Eurail pass. From 5.25, an hour and a half of sold darkness with occasional extended dimly lit stops for tired-end-of-day commuters begins as we climb through mountain passes towards the capital.
Sofia:
It was a grand 1970’s brutalist architectural statement, Sofia station, when the socialist masses (with little choice) travelled by train, passing under the massive and gaudily red/green floodlit stylised concrete mother and child pillar through arcades from buses and trams to the vast station. There are few people in the station now, apart from those lurking for warmth before being moved on. Once out of the main doors, enter a dark Hades of abandoned and graffitied shopfronts across uneven paving to vandalised elevators and stalled escalators. There are a couple of single-bulb illuminated bakery/takeaway windows operating to the background sounds of a disembodied female voice eerily calling amplified bingo numbers from an underground casino; the only bright and welcoming light here is from the metro station doorway. My hotel is just ahead, if I can just find a way out of this dim maze...
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Misha Glenny: The Balkans 1804 - 2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers:
“By the Autumn of 1940, Germany dominated a Balkan Peninsula which was nominally at peace. Hitler had his wheat, his soya, his minerals, his oil. And since 1940, France had been an occupied country, the most important victim of Totalkreig. Hitler had no need for war with the Balkans. Yet six months later, over two dozen divisions of the Wehrmacht were marauding across the region. Belgrade had been bombed to ruins; with Yugoslavia cut to ribbons; and German soldiers were patrolling territory as far south as the Peloponnese and Crete.”
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The chirpy pub receptionist proffered FREE VOUCHERS to the hotel’s tiny casino and referred me to a local Bulgarian specialty food restaurant for late dinner (“...just two blocks to the left, past the park and down the lane: only two blocks!”) after checking in to a very new/comfy American-style motel room with air-con set to “Arctic” (fixed in my dinner absence to: “Sauna”).
So I stumbled along an uneven pavement with few streetlights in the welcoming sleet of an unfamiliar city, past the prone park-bench bodies, turning left into a narrow, Dickensian lane of wooden houses to one side and a discouragingly ill-lit 60’s high-rise minimalist slab-concrete hospital to my right. Five hundred metres along was a wooden Bulgarian Chinese restaurant (surely not...), and at the next corner a massive two-storeyed, wooden upmarket place with multifarious seasonal flashing lights. Past 20 or so smokers and in through ornate carved wooden doors to laughter and warmth and great slow-cooking aromas and wine and: “You have not booked, Sir, so you will be upstairs in the annexe”... led up several circuitous stairways to a large and largely empty attic to be wedged in a far booth next to a French family (also late arrivals) who were inquiring a possible time that their food might arrive...?
A wait of 30 minutes for the menu to be personally delivered by the ebullient manager: waiter becoming increasingly tetchy as he would like to serve, but is “not allowed”. Apart from the finger food and grog, the entire menu is in fluent Bulgarian with no illustrations as it is “seasonal”. Weary waiter not keen to practice translation skills beyond basic French, so it’s a case of “what would you like, then this is what you will get” in a combination of English, French, dumb-show and, I assume Bulgarian. By now the adjacent French were swamped with several meals’ worth of massive tureens of roast meat and root vegetable platters: things were looking goooood!
Slow cooked beef in seasonal vegetables with local red: arrived quickly -excellent.
You’ve seen those cold war movies set in Central Europe, where no-one can be entirely trusted and swarthy strangers buttonhole others in dark corners to conspire... this waiter was lurking with intent, and a TripAdvisor card. Would I please review the restaurant, pointing out that my meal was delayed because the manager wouldn’t let him do his job unless the menu was personally delivered by the slow-working manager who was unable to translate the contents, and that the food and waitering was fine (mixed English/French/Bulgarian/elegant mime...)?
I pondered this as I took a well-lit main road wander back to the pub past the international hotels each with their own sad, gaudy casino leering through the fog.
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Misha Glenny: The Balkans 1804 - 2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers:
“I was talking to a wealthy peasant who came from a neighbouring village to Monastir market. He spoke Greek well, but hardly like a native. ‘Is your village Greek,’ I asked him, ‘or Bulgarian?’ ‘Well,” he replied, ‘it is Bulgarian now, but four years ago it was Greek.’ The answer seemed to him to be entirely natural and commonplace. ‘How,’ I asked in some bewilderment, ‘did that miracle come about?’ ‘Why,’ said he, ‘we are all poor men, but we want to have our own school and a priest who will look after us properly. We used to have a Greek teacher. We paid him 5 pounds a year and his bread, while the Greek consul paid him another 5 pounds; but we had no priest of our own. We shared a priest with several other villages, but he was very unpunctual and remiss. We went to the Greek bishop to complain, but he refused to do anything for us. The Bulgarians heard of this and they came and made us an offer. They said they would give us a priest who would live in the village and a teacher to whom we need pay nothing. Well, sirs, our is a poor village, and so of course we became Bulgarians..
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The main square of Sofia is, at first blush, a demolition site surrounded on three sides by Stalinist “Socialist Classical” architecture, anchored by the plush Sofia Hotel Balkan and a huge plinth where a black and gold vision of a female “Sofia” figure has replaced a surly bronze Lenin. Walk closer and what you are seeing is eight streets of Greek, Roman and Byzantine archaeological sites - with one small early Christian basilica exposed and restored, a late medieval church, mosaic floors and plumbing from 4th to 6th century AD. Further archaeological sites, including a set of Roman city gates, are strategically roofed to protect the remains from development and Metro diggings. Concealed within the Communist-era buildings are further religious sites, deliberately hidden from public temptation in the streets outside. This was a heavily bombed section of the city in World War II so the Communist architecture replaced largely destroyed tenements to create a new “Lenin Square”, now Serdika Square. Boxy Communist-era trams trundle through, older models announcing their approach with a loud “Vooom, VOooM, VOOOM....” racket of large cylindrical fan heaters roaring from under the plastic seats inside the trams, with occasional frowning, donated dark-green “gerkin” Swiss trams from Basel trundling past.
So, in a new city, you might use a spare hour do the “take-a-tram-to-the-end-of-the-line” thing just to get a bit orientated. Usually this is pleasant enough, rolling along enjoying people watching and street sights. Sometimes: not so much...
From my pub, route 6 travelling to something called Obelya-2 looked an easy ride in one of the boxy old local trams (“Vooom, VOooM, VOOOM....”) from the interior barrel-fan heaters as it crawled towards the stop. And it was, at first, until it gradually became clear that the further north out of town we rumbled, the further we were travelling into crumbling post-Communist disadvantage through increasingly depressed markets (and used clothing stores and down-at-heel casinos) into a jungle of seedy anonymous slab-concrete Communist-era apartments. The dwindling number of passengers exited at the Obelya metro stop, to be replaced by a large woman with several small, grubby kids: the wife and children of the tram driver (whose 12 year old son was already accompanying him on the shift, filling the sand boxes, kicking stray doors shut and keeping Dad company on his cross-city afternoon roster). While the family chatted, we ground through the last couple of stops to, literally, the edge of the city where the apartments abruptly stop at waste ground with a few overgrown, derelict industrial sites.
Here, I would normally wander and take some atmospheric photos of tram-in-environment... particularly evocative here in the crumbling remnants of authoritarian city planning. It was a not-bad-shot to take, disturbed only by the “Vooom, VOooM, VOOOM....” and some other, lower-pitched growling behind me: a pack of five large, teeth-bared, black and unwelcoming dogs lined up in the long grass... and no other human in sight apart from large wife and happy family on the tram. The nearby Metro station surrounded by scrappy shops and a fast return to downtown Sofia was looking immediately verrrry good.
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The wisdom of Sofia’s City Walking Tour Guides:
“As a child, the biggest thrill about coming from the country to a holiday in Sofia was to Ride The Escalator at our only department store, and it was free”. The adjacent Communist-era hard currency store was privatised, but couldn’t survive real competition. This building has now become the very “high-end” designer emporium for the city.
“This is the 5pm Bar: the former Secret Police HQ. Our government is yet to decide what to do with the three levels of basement interrogation cells. They do Happy Hour.”
After the revolution, the Stalinist National Assembly Building had its huge Red Star removed by helicopter to be replaced by the new national flag. You can see enjoy it at the Museum of Socialist Art”. (I did).
“We were not ordered to stop attending religious observance, however groups of men in suits with clipboards would be standing around outside of churches, not doing anything, just watching you... On Christmas Day, the government TV channels broadcast blockbuster movies during church hours to encourage our wise choices.”
“Most of my generation learned English from cartoons on TV”
“These guards of the Presidential Palace are selected from the slowest of our soldiers: they will be here for one hour before being replaced by more of the same”
“That is an actual Yellow Brick Road: the Hapsburgs provided yellow bricks to pave and modernise our city, but they are glazed and too slippery to be safe. We still have them: they are the Official Parade Route: be careful...”
“You’ve seen the Red Square May Day Parades in Moscow? We had a mausoleum on that patch of grass over there to our first Communist leader: Georgi Dimitrov. He died after 3 years so they built this huge mausoleum. The Central Committee used to stand there to take the salute from the parade, except for one year, when they were all called away to an important meeting. That was just after Chernobyl when the marching armed forces and the proletariat were exposed to nuclear fallout while our brave leaders were in a shelter. It took three lots of explosives to finally demolish the mausoleum of our unloved Communist leader”.
Mulled Wine Break (after viewing the Russian Memorial of happy Bulgarians Welcoming the Soviets liberating the country from Nazism, near Sofia University): “The truth is more complex as the Bulgarians had changed sides before the end of the war, expecting the UK or US to liberate them. Then we got the USSR”. It was during this break that the others on our small tour, a Croatian couple, compared Bulgaria to their former Yugoslavian state (“very similar”) but discussed how the Croatian government was being pressured by an increasingly agressive Catholic Church to make the state religion compulsory to be taught in all schools.
Our Bulgarian guide pointed out that within two blocks around Serdika square were the Orthodox Cathedral, the modernist Catholic Cathedral, the Central Mosque and the Synagogue all remaining in harmony, and that Bulgaria under the Nazis was successfully pressured by the Orthodox Church and key leaders to avoid sending the Jewish population to the death camps. “The King kept making excuses and delaying decisions until the Nazis had effectively left...” As he was speaking, the (softened) muezzin’s call to prayer was broadcast across Serdika Square from the Central Mosque: “The government does have a say about the volume, however...”.
What was NOT said - but extensively covered in the museums in Greece - is that the Nazis gave the Bulgarians contested territory in northern Greece and Macedonia to govern during the war, and the Jewish population from those areas was quickly “resettled” to Treblinka, while official “Bulgarisation” coerced the Greek population to move south over the new border into remnant Greece, especially after their 1941 uprising.
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Mark Mazower: THE BALKANS, From the end of Byzantium to the Present Day:
""' When a Christian kills a Moslem, it is a righteous act; when a Christian kills a Christian it is an error of judgement better not talked about; it is only when a Moslem kills a Christian that we arrive at a full-blown atrocity”
- Quoting Edith Durham’s description of one-sided European reporting of the “Bulgarian Horrors” during the Greek War of Independence. P. 12.
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“The establishment of Communism was ‘assisted’ by two years of violence and chaos until the population, in effect, voted for an option that promised peace. The collapse of Communism was another era of chaos with the rise of the mafia and hyper-inflation and the massive loss of social security benefits, which are still ‘officially’ paid by businesses...” or not...
“Many but not all of the symbols of Communism have been removed, but not all, as Bulgaria becomes a functioning democracy within the EU. Many Bulgarians pine for the security of the past..."
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Overnight journey to Ruse/Rousse (depending on your choice of map...):
An early dawn climb through the steep, layered valleys of the barren, snow-capped Balkan Mountains: villages and towns clinging to valleys and ravines, followed by the broad plains of north eastern Bulgaria through a series of industrial railway junctions on the express to Bucharest, lands you into a colossal Stalinist edifice of Ruse station. We are on the southern bank of the Danube River forming the Romanian border. Here is the Communist imperial power of the state expressed in the pompous decorative style of the Moscow Metro, with vast archways and chandeliers, their impact much reduced by meagre electric lighting.
The usual dingy arcade of seedy barber shops and an old men’s card club and climb of stained marble stairs brings you to a regional main street. The Kosmos Hotel: with its smoky business bar and smokier restaurant downstairs; grunting, smoking reception bloke; smoking barman and free wifi in the worn 70’s era guest rooms, (but only if you have a Cyrillic keyboard). I’m here to experience smaller-town Bulgaria and apparently some of the best museums in the country, Roman ruins and pleasant early 20th century streetscapes in a place where ageing French and Greek trolleybuses come to die on a system that seems utterly impenetrable to a non-Bulgarian visitor.
The Tourist Information Office at 2pm: A large “CLOSED” sign is on the unlocked door. The furtive figure behind the counter ducked and hid as I glanced in. I was grudgingly offered a map, assured there were no buses where I wanted to go (I later found they were a block away), then hustled out of the place. Fortunately the wander around the old city, found the misty Danube shoreline (looking through the haze to slow, massive barges yellow-giraffe like dock cranes into Romania) and Mladezhki Park. Here was well preserved Communist-era statuary and the transport museum I had come to see. A trolley bus line led seemingly back into town.... well actually briefly to the edge of the city then suddenly onto 2km of freeway to the eastern mountain suburbs. It was a long, slow rutted ramble back, avoiding the black ice, to the smoky Kosmos.
Tuesday morning: back at Mladezhki Park and the trolley dropped me outside the Vseh Svyatih church “(1899 - 1975, demolished by the government for “The Pantheon of the Bulgarian national revival artists, rebuilt after the revolution with public conscriptions and sanctified in 2017)...” Walking between the mini-Gorky Park-style pavilions and heroically untruthful Russian Liberator Memorial and compulsorily frolicking Socialist Realist Happy Girl to the National Transport Museum in the former station on the banks of the Danube: thick fog, 2 degrees; the paper sign invites me to ring the bell for entry.
Two floors above a head appeared: “Five minutes!”. Quickly dressed and combed, the harried female face reappeared at the door to the old station waiting room to take my entry fee. I was then effectively stalked for half an hour as I wandered the old station displays: lighting (but not heating) clicking on and off from behind me as I trudged each room, with the creepy creak of floorboards shadowing my progress... I was soooo tempted to impose a swift “U Turn”.
Once into the yard, I was firmly locked out in the Danube fog and handed to a hi-vis guard who appeared to be living in one of the “preserved” carriages. He parked on the stoop of his carriage and taciturnly smoked as I wandered the old platform and remnant passenger cars from the early 20th century, and rustier remains of engines and carriages from the 1950’s.
An enjoyable ramble across the old Ottoman/Hapsburg city centre to the Roman Fort (closed), current freight port and another smoky Kosmos lunch took me back to the Stalinist architectural overkill of Ruse station, and the 6 hours of express train back into Sofia. I’d paid the extra $4 for first class: the blowsy conductor of a certain age (broader than short, long blonde hair, unquestionably in absolute control of her slightly tatty train of old compartment cars) ordered the security guard (who spoke English) to herd me out of unheated first class to much more comfortable second class: then segregate the few other passengers well away from contact with the foreigner.
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Sofia Station (for the final time):
The International Reservations woman laughed, lots, directing me to the 3.30 train towards the Greek border. Given the vast history of warfare and territorial/ethnic/religious conflict between Bulgaria and Greece and Turkey and Macedonia..., it’s hardly surprising that a kind of political “trackwork” standoff is in place, making border crossings interesting.... From the rubbish-strewn tracks through the Sofia suburbs, what started as a crowded commuter train gradually emptied through large towns and slow twilight until our boxy steeple cab engine and couple of carriages ground to a halt near the Greek border.
Time to catch up on some reading:
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Misha Glenny: The Balkans 1804 - 2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers:
“The great powers made a final attempt to avert full scale war between the Greek army and Kemal’s nationalist forces at the London Conference in March 1921. Five days later it ended in failure...
On 9 September, the inhabitants of Smyrna woke to the news that the Greek army (in retreat) was streaming towards the coast and that Kemalist forces were bearing down on the port at great speed.
“The entire city was ablaze and the harbour as light as day. Thousands of homeless were surging back and forth along the blistering quay, panic-stricken to the point of insanity. In a frenzy they would throw themselves into the water and some would reach the ship... Fortunately, the quay wall never got actually hot enough to roast these unfortunate people alive but must have been terrific there to have been felt on the ship two hundred yards away...”. - Lieutenant A. S. Merril, US Intelligence Officer in Smyrna.
... Alarm soon turned to panic... By 3 September, 30,000 terrified refugees were arriving in the city every day, seeking shelter, food and above all the reassurance that they could escape the hardened, unforgiving Turkish army now racing towards Smyrna. What none of its inhabitants knew was that the British, French, American and Italian commanders of their ships had not the slightest intention of interfering with the conquest of Smyrna....
... the peace negotiations in Lausanne, chaired by Lord Curzon agreed that peace would be underwritten by the Great Population Exchange. Some 1.3 million adherents of the Orthodox faith would be expelled from Turkey to Greece, while nearly 800,000 Muslims would travel the other way... Under the eye of Britain’s senior diplomat, two Balkan nations agreed to end the conflict that British diplomacy had inspired, by setting a terrible precedent. It would be decades before the Greeks would recover from the Great Population Exchange; but the principle of partition and forced removal would be imitated again and again.”
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Kulata/Kalotina (depending which side of the border you are you are standing):
We little band of of cross-border travellers: Canadian theatre techie gal, skinny Greek transsexual with scarlet fingernails and laced-camisole-over-black-leggings-with-sheepskin-boots with young sporty partner, chinless 30’s German businessman in 1970’s goggle spectacles obsessed with laptop, gentle Greek grandmother returning to Thessaloniki from a new year family visit, and a young student couple from Malaysia... was bundled into a van (baggage forcibly suppressed by the weight of four bodies until the boot would jam closed...), and hastily driven by a taciturn fat controller out on to the main street with its several-kilometre queue of idling lorries to Bulgarian Immigration. Here, the welcoming Greek bouzoukis music was turned down to create another one of those tetchy, creaking border silences as our driver enjoyed a reflective smoke outside... before we were processed as a “car load” to avoid the trucking/bussing queues.
Surly Bulgarian officialdom arrived, taking passports and wandering away to some distant office... returning suddenly to curtly remove the Malaysian bloke: “Why do you not have a permit? You come with us!” He must have been convincing, returning within 15 minutes to his concerned partner, with the “uniforms” and passports.
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Greece:
Our driver turned up the welcoming Greek music for a second swift passport check and a zip along 3 kilometers of freeway passing parallel northbound idling truck queues, before zipping down a dirt track to quickly dump selves and bags on the unlit gravel of a simple station building. Strimon: a half whitewashed office with ticket window plastered in curled, hand-written notices; half dazzling-white-tiled and slowly warming waiting room where, in a combination of languages, we introduced who we were and settled in for the more than 2 hour wait for the 8.30 train to Thessaloniki, expected at 9.10 (apparently... from one of the shabby ticket window notices).
At 9.15, the station officer flicked on the platform lights, herding us into the pitch dark and across 4 rough-ballasted tracks as a diesel from Alexandropoulos roared into sight. Hurriedly climbing up the wire steps into the single open doorway with bags and packs and boxes and remnant food and drinks from Bulgaria, we were confronted with a dark, overheated carriage of soldiers from “somewhere near the Turkish border” sprawling across seats (and strategically stretching further as they spied the our loud, laced and red-nailed travelling companion barking at them to shift so our group could get seated). Wedged in stifling heat between piled bags, the entertaining Canadian theatre techie gal and a grubby window, it was a stoic, sweaty slow rumble and 15 station stops across northern Greece towards midnight in Thessaloniki.
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Thessaloniki/ (Salonika), depending on the age of your map...:
After a day wandering and grazing in this brilliant Aegean port city, I was feeling less dour and “Balkan” and a bit more “European” (and starting to understand Sydney’s Brighton-le-Sands street life at a much deeper level... I can see some of my more Cougar friends and colleagues having rather too good a time in this town....). Most of the city was destroyed by fire in 1917, and the place is now elegant town squares, Greek Art Deco, promenades and multi-awninged apartments, embracing Ottoman and Byzantine and Roman and Ancient Greek historic sites within its city wall.
Memo to the aggressive African tout on the Thessaloniki promenade:
Calling out “Hey Grandad!” to attract passing Australian trade is never a good plan.
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Misha Glenny: The Balkans 1804 - 2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers:
“In 1492 the Christians drove the Sephardim out of Spain.. Expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula was completed five years later when the Jews of Portugal were also hounded from their homes... Sitting on the north-eastern edge of the Aegian’s largest natural harbour, the bay of Thermaikos, the city was more than a haven for the Jewish community - it practically belonged to them... Salonica was a different world where the Sephardim dominated most aspects of economic, social and cultural life and where, because of their economic clout... held political sway over the Turkish governors.
The wealthier Jews lived in villas close to the medieval perimeter walls, cheek by jowl with the Turkish quarter: the upper town. This proximity reflected the close relationships binding the elites of both communities...
The most renowned Muslim chronicler of Ottoman life, Eliza Celebi, observed that. ‘All of them [the Salonica Turks], even the old men, have the same deep red face and bright vermilion forehead. They attain great ages and enjoy long lives. At the age of seventy, they still happily mount horses, draw their sabres and practise the conjugal act’ “
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The Jewish Museum of Thessalonika is in a low-key building in a quiet street lined with citrus trees. Only when you approach the door do three local loungers identify themselves as Security and check you in through double security doors inside “No Photos!”. Inside, a thriving community (within the separate/parallel religious/ethnic communities that were the Ottoman city organisation) is carefully, lovingly documented before the sudden arrival and forensic onslaught of the Nazis.
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Misha Glenny: The Balkans 1804 - 2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers:
“One hot morning in 1942, Dr Max Merton, Salonika’s corrupt administrator, ordered all Jews between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to report to Eleftherios Square in the centre of town at eight o’clock in the morning. This was he spot where in 1908 the Young Turks had issued their manifesto celebrating brotherhood and equality in 10 languages, The Germans wished to select several thousand men for forced labour brigades, but this was also an exercise in ritual humiliation. In extreme heat and fully clothed, 9,000 men were compelled to take part in a gymnastics drill lasting six and a half hours. Under the threat of being beaten, whipped, shot or set upon by dogs, they had to gaze fixedly at the hot July sun for minutes at a time, without making the slightest movement, either of eyes or of body. If anyone lowered his eyes or turned his gaze aside through sheer physical necessity, he was whipped until the blood ran... the SS ordered their victims to go back to their homes and required them to run the first 150 metres or to go on all fours, turning somersaults or rolling in the dust. In the following days, several men died of brain haemorrhages or meningitis.
These “games” and the forced-labour program were designed to soften up the Jews, not yet for deportation, but to rob them. The twenty-eight year old Merton was, above all, an extortionist. He allowed thousands of Jews drafted into forced labour to purchase an exemption for the equivalent of twelve thousand pounds in gold.”
Within two years the Jewish population of Thessalonika had been strategically confined, community-by-community, to transit ghettoes near the railway station, watching their cattle trains arrive before being exported with cold precision to Poland
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From the glistening seafront promenade (and a local dog-walker very upset that I was very obviously photographing his encouragement of his Alsatian to shit on the Jewish memorial, before they both slunk off...), to memorials and Political offices keeping the contested understandings of “Macedonia” a very much alive, to the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman remains along the upper town city walls (where else would a 14th century Turkish hammam now be an outdoor cinema?), it was an excellent day’s wander. My basic business pub was “handily” located between metro diggings, unemployment and down-at-heel immigration offices (many smoking men with nowhere much to go...) and Chinese import offices: ready for a quick getaway to the Kalambaka trains in the morning.
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Kalambaka:
A 10th century Byzantine fortress, now a pleasant one-main-street-town (rebuilt after being burnt down by the Nazis). Maybe the restaurant-fringed squares and low-key pubs and tourist shops at the foot of spectacular natural “fingers” of the sandstone Meteora Peaks, topped by 24 isolated monasteries would be less somnolent in high tourist season. My one spare day between Thessaloniki and Athens brought me here to stay in a very Greek hotel and to explore the mountain top monasteries which date from the 12th Century:
Meteora:
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The daily (tourist-day-trip-from-Athens) express trains to and from Paleofarsalos, appear to be worked by very persistent teams of beggars (morning train: hungry adolescents; evening train: slightly disfigured older men). I was very grateful to morning crew because their persistence finally, eventually, after 45 minutes, made the Chinese woman in the seat in front stop serially yelling into her mobile phone as they would not leave until she paid them some attention. She was deeply offended. Her husband thanked them (for some peace? I was grateful!), and was generous.
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Athens:
Voula: the “Athens Riviera” or “Florida”, feels like a Hellenic Rodeo Drive at the end of a sinuous coastal tramline following the beaches of the Saronic Gulf, with excellent Sunday-at-leisure-glossy-locals-with-primped-dogs-and-equally-glossy-children-watching along the grassed main street of brasseries, delis, upscale restaurants and what appear to be prosperous shopping malls... until proceeding inside. Beyond the ground-floor façade of prosperity are lines of empty or underused shopfronts and laid-back security guards wondering why you are there, disturbing their peace. The extensive graffiti or down-at-heel street life of other areas of Athens, as well as the legendary pickpockets and recently arrived migrant street hucksters, may be testament to the financial crisis, down here the impact seems more genteel...
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Acropolis: 8am:
I am the third entry for the day and wander, largely alone, retracing my own cultural education in reverse as I climb towards the sky:
- Greek drama and the Theatre of Dionysos (University Drama I and more lessons taught to senior students than I care to recollect),
- Odeon of Herodes Atticus and Beule Gate (and teaching Year 8 Ancient Roman History lessons: lots of drawings),
- The Porch of the Caryatids at the Erechtheion (and my own student detention torture of being forced to draw and redraw one of the maiden-columns as some kind of bizarre interminable punishment for my own over-exuberance during year 8 Art lessons: caning looked like a good option at the time);
- The overwhelming emotional impact in the presence of the Parthenon (and those compulsory art lessons where we recreated Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns as bad adolescent copies or tracings, to be forever taunted by objective test questions about which-might-be-which right through high school Art tests to Year 12).
But mostly, and strangely, I am reminiscing about my mother’s weekly newsagent purchase of the “Round the World Program” series of booklets - “A Different Country Every Week” during my primary school years.
If you are of a ‘certain age’, you will remember these little booklets which were in less than exciting stapled monochrome, with a colour insert of deliciously colourful moisten-the-back-and-stick-in-the-numbered-square illustrations. The first booklets were Greece and Italy... followed by scores of “national” books which arrived relentlessly over the years... with an increasingly hit-and-miss picture-sticking career, and even more hit-and-miss actual reading efforts (my mother’s worthy intent).
It was the luminous stick-in colours and the gradual collecting of “nations” on the bed-head bookshelf... that is possibly what led to the travel bug (and eventually to travel ramblings like this...). Or I could just blame Alan Whicker and Stina’s Diary on the ABC of my suburban childhood.
What was missing from the benign newsagent travelogues, and especially from the BBC view of the word is what is not at/on the Acropolis, but in the spectacular adjacent museum. Above the floors of excavations and ancient treasures is the record of hundreds of years’ plunder during the chaotic more recent history of this part of the world. A complete floor mimicking the Parthenon frieze panels are hanging actual-sized replica representations of what has been ripped away and carted off to various museums and collections, with the clear message that the Greek nation, rightly, wants its heritage returned.
Adjacent to this massive rectangular display was the inevitable coffee shop: impressive “departed” replicas to the left, and the plundered site immediately atop the exterior cliffs to the right, dominating the modern city as it spreads north and east towards snow dusted mountains, and south to the sea...
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Misha Glenny: The Balkans 1804 - 2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers:
“Not only did the German Government encourage companies like Siemens to sell billions of Euros’ worth of substandard telecommunications equipment to Greece in the late nineties and early noughties - but also the company paid almost one million Euros in bribes to Greek politicians to ensure these sales went through. Well may have the German press excoriated feckless spendthrift Greek politicians a decade later as Athens sought sought vast bailout funds to prevent a massive default. But those same outlets would have done well to remind their audience that it was those same Germans who were enticing them into corruption. Probably the most scandalous event was the sale of four submarines (complete with a defective electronic steering system) to the Greek navy for a staggering 1.8 billion Euros.”
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Kiatos: A sleepy town on the gulf of Corinth, and the current limit of travel in the much reduced Greek rail system (recently sold off to the Italians). After a wander of the pebbled beach looking out over the luminous blue sea then back to the station café, I find myself confronted by a very excited old man. He’s recently arrived and gesturing wildly in three directions around the crowd boarding the Patras bus. When he pauses for breath, I mutter I’m a tourist and speak only English. “But you look so Greek!!” he yells.
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Piraeus: the massive port for Athens, the very grand end of the line for the impressively graffitied metro trains from the city, and (apparently) a good museum of electric transport in the station which utterly defeated me. First attempt: I arrived after 2pm and it was firmly closed (Winter hours). Second attempt on a following morning: closed, apparently as no-one turned up that day. Third attempt: “Closed for a private birthday party”. (!)
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Flying out of Athens, after spectacular views across the city to the Corinth Canal and towards Patras, I was nearing the end of the holiday reading:
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Misha Glenny: The Balkans 1804 - 2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers:
“In October 2008, assassins planted a bomb under the car of Ivo Pukanic, editor of the Croation investigative magazine: National, which killed him and one other. In response the Croation, Serbian and Bulgarian governments launched a cross-border investigation on an unprecedented scale, leading to the arrest and conviction of some of the most Notorious gangsters in the Balkans. Events such as these brought several Balkan governments who only a few years earlier were at war, much closer together and, astonishingly, cross-border cooperation on a whole range of issues has become more effective than it has ever been in the modern history of south-eastern Europe.”
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Seoul stopover:
South Korea is a nation that knows more than a bit about contested borders, 20th Century colonial excess and imperialist cruelty, Cold War politics, dictatorial governments; aggression....
At Seoul Museum of art (the former Japanese Colonial Supreme Court: which dispensed “justice” to Koreans who were considered to be second-rate Japanese in the colonial scheme of things...) were several contemporary exhibitions. One was Korean artists’ responses to the huge human cost of the government’s massive drive for Korean economic expansion (including preparation for the Olympic Games in the 1980’s).
On the top floor were recent middle eastern artworks including Palestinian photographers’ record of the impacts on Palestinian border town’s population town of forced Israeli settlements. This included being unwillingly “walled-in”, appropriation of property, intrusive control by the Israeli army, Israeli army directives making the use of motor vehicles illegal on the main shopping street (forcing the closure of 400 businesses) and the casual stoning and shooting of the windows of Palestinian houses by the “settlers”. The local population increasingly, relentlessly constricted and confined by a hostile occupying force: there was no labelling of this as a “ghetto”... the imagery was eloquent enough.
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