To the Lake

by Kapka Kassabova

  Nick stood beside it, sombre-faced, elbow bent in the Communist fist salute. We didn’t point out the sad irony of this moment because it went without saying. Neither of us was under any illusion about the ideology that had driven the Greek Communist Party’s high command. Under Zachariadis, a Stalinist, they had highjacked the struggle of the left, hobbled their own cause through the brutality of their methods, and stamped the war with their particular brand of fanaticism and incompetence. They had planned a Stalinist-style dictatorship in the event of victory. Greece would have been gripped by the same tyranny its neighbours were already suffering under. But history had decided that it would be gripped by a different kind of tyranny.

  Above a village called Orovo that didn’t exist any more, Nick and I stumbled across another surprise monument, brand new.

  ‘Oh my God, Vera Foteva!’

  She was the figurehead on the granite slab. This meant nothing to me, but Nick had grown up with photographs of her and other partisans on the walls of diaspora culture halls. She was a hero in the DSE pantheon, and by all accounts a remarkable woman. Here was a monument to the Second Congress of the Pan-Hellenic Democratic Union of Women.

  ‘The Communists had a way with words, didn’t they!’ Nick said.

  Vera Foteva’s story tells of the moral and political morass that was the Civil War. By September 1949, the Greek Communist Party under Zachariadis had capitulated. In a typically untruthful turn of phrase, Zachariadis proclaimed a ‘temporary ceasefire’. Foteva and her comrades fled to Albania and later to the USSR. But the KKE, who regrouped in Tashkent, then in the USSR, undertook internal purges in the 1950s, ostensibly in search of those culpable for the failure of the Civil War. Foteva was accused of being an American spy. If the Communists wanted to frame you, you went down either as American spy or as Titoist, a punishable offence after the Stalin–Tito split.

  ‘As an ethnic Macedonian and a woman, she was an easy scapegoat,’ Nick said. He knew her biography by heart. She was tried in the USSR and did five years in the Gulag, after which she was internally exiled to Alma-Ata.

  ‘But she never lost her spirit,’ Nick said. ‘Eventually, she was allowed into Yugoslav Macedonia where she married, formed a folk band with other refugee women from here called Kosturchanki, Women of Kastoria, and remained a Communist to her dying day!’

  In 2004, a few years before her death, the Greek government announced a general amnesty, and blacklisted refugees like her were allowed back into Greece.

  ‘For nine days.’

  Then they had to leave.

  ‘Even the KKE betrayed us, once the war was over,’ Nick said. ‘They have never acknowledged the mass participation of ethnic Macedonians in the war. As if we never existed.’

  Out of all the DSE combatants, up to forty per cent had been ethnic Macedonians and Bulgarians, including Muslims. With a lump in my throat, I photographed Nick with Vera Foteva, stony against the mute Aegean sky.

  The following day, we drove south to Lake Kastoria of fur-trading fame and once on a trade route linked to Ohrid-Prespa in the north and Epirus in the south.

  ‘The Communists banned love,’ said a man in a village where many of the handsome houses had dissolved in the rain down to red stumps, with holes like gouged eyes. Others still hung on to their elaborate façades with dates, owners’ names, and balconies.

  ‘The punishment for love was death,’ said his friend.

  They were born during the Civil War. We had found them sitting in the shade of an old walnut tree. One of them had had a partisan mother and a father in the Nationalist Army – but this didn’t mean much when so many conscriptions on both sides had been forced. Women between the ages of seventeen and forty were swept into the Democratic Army. In the last desperate year of the war, boys as young as ten were taken. The other man’s siblings had been evacuated by the partisans to Romania. The father had survived Makronisos. Now a hundred and five years old, he’d never talked about it.

  ‘What happened on that island can’t be put into words,’ he said.

  I had read some documents and memoirs of Makronisos and had nightmares afterwards. Male rape and torture were commonplace.

  ‘But the Communists were bad too,’ said his friend.

  ‘They shot their own.’

  ‘Zachariadis brought katastrofata to this country,’ said a massive old man with a young man’s spark in his eye, who’d driven by in a tractor and stopped to chat.

  ‘Greece has been devoured by her own,’ said the man whose parents had fought on opposing sides.

  ‘We all took a bite at Greece, and it has been eaten away,’ said the massive old man.

  ‘The dead outnumber the living,’ said a younger man. ‘See the cemetery by the church? There’s a good twenty thousand souls buried there. And how many of us are alive? No more than thirty.’

  Even his own daughter had left for America. He’d not finished primary school, back in the 1950s, because he had to look after the animals in the orman, he said, using the Turkish word for forest. The dialect here was full of Turkish words like asker for army, and of countless archaic Bulgarian words. They said sinora for border, a Greek word.

  ‘It’s true,’ the men agreed. ‘Our language has everything: Bulgarian, Turkish, Albanian, Greek.’

  The many-coloured blossom of Macedonia, clinging to the bitter soil.

  ‘You’re looking for stories? My story is a short one,’ said the massive old man.

  He was one of the twenty-five thousand detsa begalci removed by the Democratic Army to Eastern Europe. He’d ended up in Poland, aged fourteen.

  ‘We arrived in Gdansk in winter. We walked in the streets, but—’

  His face suddenly twitched and tears came from his blue eyes, which he wiped with a cracked hand, then cleared his throat.

  ‘But there was nothing left. No streets, no buildings, no people. Just big rags of snow falling from the sky. I thought to myself: My God, the Germans have really done it.’

  He learned a trade in a factory and lived in a home with other refugees, Macedonian- and Greek-speakers. They helped rebuild Poland. He’d enjoyed his years there, he said, it gave him a chance to learn the ways of the world. ‘Eight years later, they started allowing some of us back and I wanted to see my mother. I never went back to Poland. Here it’s always been poor, but it’s my home. This is the story. A short one, like I said.’

  How do you sum up your life to a stranger two generations younger than you? He got back into his tractor and drove away with a cheery wave of his huge hand.

  In a process known by the sinister word paedomazoma, ‘the gathering of children’, children had been taken from their families by the KKE, who feared, correctly, that the kids would be either killed in cross-fire or removed by the Government Army and placed in the government re-education camps known as paedopolises, children’s cities. Twenty-five thousand kids in fact ended up in these camps, under the tutelage of the monarchy, where they were provided for, educated, and indoctrinated in absolute loyalty to the Greek monarchy and Church. The only permissible language and identity was Greek. Like the refugee kids sent to the Eastern bloc, they were separated from their parents for years, sometimes forever.

  Paedomazoma was historically associated with the dreaded Ottoman ‘blood tax’, and still strikes a note of dread, just like the expression detsa begalci sends cold shivers down the generational spine. And while the word paedomazoma contains the sorrow of forced departure from the homeland, detsa begalci contains the sorrow of impossible return.

  ‘There is nothing here but orman and fighting,’ said the younger man. His grandfather had been an officer in the Bulgarian army. The other man’s grandfather too. ‘I am paying for my parents’ war. Can you tell me why?’

  His daughter would never come back, he said. She didn’t speak nashe, only Greek, and her child didn’t speak Greek, only English. She wanted it all to cease.

  ‘And I wish her well,’ he said, with a bitter expression.
r />   ‘But,’ smiled the man whose father was a hundred and five, ‘visitors make us happy. Thank you for visiting.’

  Nick and I drove on to Kastoria in silence. He was used to this level of psycho-geographic blight, from previous visits to northern Greece. I wasn’t.

  Greek Prespa was a naturalist’s paradise, but life here had been harsh for generations. The men under the walnut tree told us how superstitious the people here had been. Once, a villager was seen walking the opposite way to where he was going before turning back onto the right track. What are you doing? one of the men had asked him. Trying to trick the evil eye, the villager said, so it won’t find me.

  The war ‘transformed the villages of northern Greece from homes where children led difficult, but safe and secure lives into battlefields of random violence and sudden death’, write the anthropologists Loring Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten in Children of the Greek Civil War. Many of the refugee children in witness accounts said that ‘the People’s republics’ had opened their eyes to the world. Likewise, many of those housed in the government camps cherished the education and worldliness it had given them, in exchange for the stony besa of village life where you are forever paying for someone’s war.

  By 1905, in the wake of the Ilinden Uprising, the lie of the political land was clear to perceptive outsiders. Henry Brailsford, passing through Prespa, wrote that the traveller’s impressions of ‘the Bulgarians of Macedonia’ were ‘rarely favourable’. They were a people ‘with few external attractions; and [they] seldom trouble to sue for sympathy or assist the process of mutual understanding … [The Bulgarian of Macedonia] will not call on you unbidden at your hotel, or invite you to his schools, or insist that you shall visit his churches.’

  This syndrome of obscurity was aggravated by the fact that ‘all their best men are exiles in free Bulgaria. There is no educated class left to leaven the rest, or to represent the nation to the traveller.’ Macedonian towns were like the people: silent, stubborn, inscrutable. Until, one evening in Pelagonia, he happened on a peasant family and heard them sing ‘a song of revolt’: ‘From that evening onwards the air was always in my ears. Sometimes it was a schoolboy who whistled it in the streets; sometimes a group of young men who chanted it, with all its daring words, within earshot of a Turkish sentry.’

  Doubly battered by the Greek clergy and the Ottoman regime who colluded when it suited them, too oppressed to even sing openly, the land sang for them. The mountains, the lakes, the forest glades vibrated with a spirit that couldn’t articulate itself except in a ‘song of doom, sung by the land itself’.

  We could hear it still, in the empty valleys of Prespa.

  Shockingly, Macedonian song lyrics seem to be banned from official events in Greece to this day. A great fear must lie behind this. But what lies behind the fear?

  ‘The Greek term for Macedonian folk songs is tragoudia dihos logia,’ Nick said. ‘Literally, songs without words.’

  At official events, people were still forced to play the songs instrumentally, moving their lips voicelessly. As if their tongues had been cut off. That was the aim, it seemed – to render them dumb, voiceless.

  Xenophobia: fear and loathing of the other.

  ‘Of course, private parties are another story,’ Nick said.

  The present-day ‘Macedonian Question’ of the name, as well as the politics of silencing, were a direct consequence of unresolved bilateral, and national, trauma from the Greek Civil War. Danforth and Boeschoten call this ‘memory wars’ and the moving case histories they present – of both Macedonian and Greek exiles – shed light on the depth of the wounds that people sustained before, during and after those tragic years. And on why the political ghosts of this little-known war are, in effect, Europe’s ghosts.

  I was intrigued to find that Aegean Macedonia and Thrace to the east (an ancient region shared today by Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey) were identified by the late pioneering historian Jean Manco as the original homeland of what in linguistics is often called the Balkan group of languages. This is the homeland of the speakers of the unknown proto-parent of Armenian, Greek, Illyrian and Thracian – our dimly remote ancestors who had migrated here from Asia. The cultures of Macedonia and Thrace – that is, the southern Balkans – were born out of a diversity that survived many empires and thousands of years, only to be assaulted in the last few generations by nation-states with a taste for the biscuit-factory line of history, as Neal Ascherson has called it.

  The result? Human and environmental monoculture, and rapid decline.

  But we were in for a surprise. In a village above Lake Kastoria, a man with sad blue eyes was delighted to have customers in his cafe and told us, when asked, that his five siblings had all been sent away during the war and two had never returned. Nearby we discovered a cemetery with a locked church and a lake view. Above the door, St Nicholas’s name was scratched out and he was left nameless as well as eyeless, but among the graves we stumbled across a black marble slab that stopped us in our tracks.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Nick said.

  The man’s name was written twice: in Greek and in Cyrillic. A common sight in Albanian Prespa which was openly bilingual, it was unheard of here – not only for having been done in the first place, in defiance of the seventy-year-long ban on Cyrillic, but also for not having been defaced. The man had died a few years ago.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Nick kept saying, in shock. ‘I never thought I’d see this in Greece. I wish my grandmother could see it!’

  And tears welled up in his eyes. As they had in hers, when he’d written his first Cyrillic letters. They were the same tears, filtered by time as if by the karst. In the Cyrillic-Greek letters of this man’s name was the hidden story of Aegean Macedonia, with its vanishing dialects, people, place names and songs. We stood by the grave of this man whose story we didn’t know but whose face on the marble was stamped with endurance, and I was reminded of Edith Durham’s sketch of an acquaintance in Ohrid: ‘Being a Balkan Christian he has inherited a tendency always to expect the worst.’

  ‘Yep!’ Nick said and we laughed, though I too was crying now, for company. Though I’d never met Nick’s grandmother or mother, I felt as if I knew them.

  The Balkan Muslims had it worst in the second half of the twentieth century. Either way we, the distant offspring of this land, were not conditioned for good news. This quiet glimpse of tolerance in a landscape disfigured by denial choked us up. Good things brought us an unfamiliar sensation. Joy was a precursor to grief. Reunion brought fear of parting. And parting was like death.

  We must have stayed by that tombstone for only a few minutes, but it felt like a long time. Small acts of kindness go a long way.

  We drove for two days up and down the hills of Prespa, rarely meeting a soul. The only sound was the bells of goats we never saw, nor their shepherds.

  For centuries, Prespa had been the domain of pastoralist shepherds known as Sarakatsani or Karakachani (from the Turkish kara and kachan, ‘black smugglers’, referring to their nomadic ways and black woollen dress, and their uncanny border-crossing skills). Here, they’d come up from Thessaly and the Pindus and spend the summer in reed huts above Prespa. Many others were based in the Rhodope Mountains to the east, and there is even a breed of Karakachan mountain dog in Bulgaria. They were an old subculture of the southern Balkans, deeply connected with nature’s cycles. A handful of such families survived near Prespa, who’d gather in the centre of lakeside villages like German at the end of the season, with their cattle, then depart back to the south. They sold their milk to locals, for small-scale cheese production.

  Dotted along the empty roads and packed with political symbolism were numerous monuments to senior Greek military figures from the Civil War. Some bore the Byzantine eagle that stands for ultra-Orthodoxy and the far right, and a couple were even inscribed in Katharevousa – literally, ‘purified Greek’. ‘Katharevousa on a military monument is a statement of ultra-nationalism in the Metaxist mould,’ Nick said.
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  There were no monuments to those from the losing side, except a slab in a village listing the names of children killed by mines, and one memorial to a young partisan, just before the Albanian border.

  ‘Rainbow tried to put a small memorial at Mount Vicho [Vitsi] next to the existing one, commemorating the Macedonian fighters,’ Nick said.

  Rainbow was a political party in Florina, representing the ethnic Macedonian minority. Their offices had been set on fire several times in the past twenty years. The monument was defaced instantly, then destroyed. Today, the far-right Golden Dawn gather at the summit every year.

  ‘Every time we come here we swear it’s the last,’ Nick said, meaning northern Greece. ‘It’s like they’re waiting for us all to die.’

  ‘When you say we, who do you mean?’ I asked.

  Nick was quiet for a moment.

  ‘Me and my mother,’ he said. ‘And my grandmother.’

  Then he added: ‘And my great-grandmother. ’Cause here’s the thing: it doesn’t even end with death!’

  When his great-grandmother died in Adelaide and the family asked the local Orthodox priest to do the forty-day service, he refused.

  ‘Because he was Greek and we were Macedonian.’

  He’d called them Skopianoi, a Greek slur targeting their neighbours whose capital is Skopje. Even when they were in Australia. This contempt had a history, though not a very long one. But it is precisely these relatively modern Balkan agonies that get written off as ‘ancient hatreds’.

  In the Kastoria of the early twentieth century, Henry Brailsford met a Greek bishop who told him that the town hospital was for Greeks only, and Muslims and foreigners at a pinch, but that he would rather see Bulgarian-Macedonian women and children die than be admitted. ‘Because they are our enemy,’ the bishop explained, an answer ‘so frank, so primitive’ that the author despairingly concluded Kastoria to be ‘the home of lost causes’. Meanwhile, since the majority of people in the Florina district didn’t speak Greek, the Greek bishop was obliged to conduct the church service in Turkish as a compromise – which strikes with its comical absurdity.