Reviewing Kapka Kassabova’s Writing on the Southern Balkans

Historical Memory and Trauma in a Contested Region: Reviewing Kapka Kassabova’s Writing on the Southern Balkans

By Justin Paul

Scotland-based Bulgarian journalist Kapka Kassabova has written two magisterial books that tackle the breadth and depth of the Balkan region through a mixture of historical analysis, travel writing and memoir. “Border: A Journey to the End of Europe: covers the Greek-Bulgarian-Turkish border, whereas the second book “To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Piece” deals with the Bulgarian-Macedonian relationship with forays into Albania and Greece.

“Border” remains a timely book given the ongoing refugee crisis on Turkey’s western border, and is structured in a way that combines on-the-ground observations with historical analysis. Early on the tone is set to illustrate how borders have shifted and spit people in and out based on the arbitrary whims of political leaders. This is exemplified when Kassabova visits a former Greek village in what is now Bulgaria inhabited by Bulgarians who had been expelled from Turkey, but which is nearby a former village emptied of Turks. She refers to this tangled web of multiple ethnic expulsions as a “mirthless merry go round.” Throughout this book the cruelty of how political forces would push ordinary people across borders remains. Borders were often redrawn to push people out, but also to keep people in. She documents how for those trapped behind the iron curtain and its totalitarian regimes, getting over the Bulgarian border to Greece or Turkey (both of which underwent periods of illiberalism or semi-democratic rule) was a source of escape from a purer form of totalitarian terror. However, this journey to a comparatively open society was dangerous and could be lethal, as one example provided; a 19-year-old German DJ from Leipzig was murdered by a Bulgarian border guard. Technology on the other hand is often uninterested in borders, as she weaves near the border with Turkey to see a controversial tomb of the ancient goddess Bastet she gets greetings on her phone from Turkcell. Others come from much further away, later she meets villagers who told her they saw two Palestinians crossing through the forest the other day. Whereas now the border is a gateway to the EU, Kassabova reminds us of the tens of thousands of ethnic Turks who fled into Bulgaria in the other direction. In the Bulgarian border town of Svilengrad, she notes many of the visitors are either engineers or Turks and Greeks trying to satisfy their addictions, be they gambling or alcohol. These white-collar workers have the privilege of coming and going, whereas poor migrants fleeing both war and poverty have no such luxury.

There’s also discussion of what the geographic term “Thrace” truly means and she notes that Thracians left very few written documents, but lots of material evidence. A visit to the Turkish Thracian cultural hub of Edirne includes a puzzling observation of a “nominal alcohol ban” which would be puzzling to many who know the region’s famed love for raki. But she shows a nuanced understanding of the city’s political disposition when aptly noting that a pro-government demonstration in the city had to include partisans bussed in from out of town because not enough locals could be wrangled up, such is the strong grip of the opposition CHP in the three Turkish Thracian provinces. She manages to visit one of the city’s few remaining Bulgarian Orthodox Churches, in which the long-time caretaker lived just long enough to see it restored, and intriguingly it is the former caretaker’s son who is now the priest. Another profound border experience was at a place known as Ali’s Café, the owner being from Rize (reasonably close to Georgia, albeit no border city), full of refugees coming and going. Ali says from his two decades running he is haunted by the memory of all those who passed through, often to unknown and cruel fates. He tells Kassabova that it’s at night when the café “really fills up” and all he sees are “ghosts” of those who passed through. She then meets an Iraqi Kurdish couple who married as teenagers and quickly had several children. They hope by getting to Western Europe their children will not be brought into a social pattern in which they marry early, and instead go on to higher education. Kassabova goes on to mention that this couple’s lawyer is a local Turkish woman who feels a duty to help them because she is the descendent of refugees from the Balkan Wars. This is a poignant example of how solidarity is often paid forward. She meets more Syrians in a Bulgarian border town called Harmanli. These range from an upper-crust Syrian whose first wife was Bulgarian, to a younger man named Kemal who fell in love with a French woman he met while working in Morocco, but then got marooned due to a visa lapse after the love affair fell apart.

Perhaps most heart-wrenching are the stories of the plight of those who did not fit into any one ruling state’s national narrative. The Pomaks, who are Bulgarian speaking Muslims, are one such example of this. They were regarded as too Turkish for the Bulgarian state and too Bulgarian for the Greek state and repeatedly had assimilation campaigns waged against them by whichever state was in control of their contested homeland. Some Pomaks who left for the USA would become very wealthy, such as Shevket Chapadijev and Hamit Rusev, who would both make a fortune in Chicago. Their families had been deported and jailed by the Bulgarian state for opposing name change laws. It is only now that Chapadijev is a multi-millionaire in Chicago that Bulgarian officialdom embraces him as one of their own. Amongst those who stayed in Bulgaria, there are those who retained a strong Islamic identity, but with room for heterodox practices. Kassabova relates a humorous story of meeting one Pomak who drank raki because as a youth he’d gotten bored of parties with lemonade. Still, the chains of past oppression weigh heavily, as in the Greek Pomak villages she notes that people would only speak their native Bulgarian/Macedonian dialect at home. In visiting the fortifications of the Metaxas Line on the Greek-Bulgarian border, named after the fascistic Greek Dictator, she notes Metaxas was “no friend of books, liberals or minorities” and that he deported many ethnic Bulgarians and Pomaks from the region. Later in Turkish Thracian villages, Kassabova is disappointed by how allegedly “liberal” Turkish Thracian villages are conformist. She comes across some stunning juxtapositions, including a rock monastery just down the road from a mock “Kurdish village” meant to be used for “counter-terrorism practice.” In some final observations, Kassabova traces some common themes in the observance of mourning rituals across the border and across ethnic lines in both Bulgaria and Turkey. Perhaps this is fitting as with the tumultuous history of state and nationalisms tossing people across and discarding humans, there is much to mourn.

“To the Lake” is a more personal journey which deals with Kassabova’s family’s own history in Macedonia. She starts off near Macedonia’s famed Lake Ohrid by reviewing major themes in Macedonia’s identity crisis, including the name dispute with Greece and the conflict in which Bulgarian nationalists claim there is no real Macedonian league. Kassabova herself interrogates what Macedonia is, noting its history as a Roman Province, a Byzantine province, an Ottoman Region and a Yugoslav province before settling on a sixth Macedonia: “an imaginary one, one that does not exist anymore except in the desperate desire for a great past that is required to infuse the diminished present with meaning and value.” In evaluating the Macedonian struggle, Kassabova reminds us that the sheer ethnic diversity of the territory would have been a thorn in the side of Ottoman rule. She links ongoing feuding between ethnic Greeks and Bulgarians/Macedonians to the political conflict between the Greek Patriarchy and Bulgarian Exarchy back in Istanbul in the 19th century. The echo of the Ottoman past is also visible on the shorefront of the town of Struga, near Ohrid, as statues include an Albanian who supported the Young Turk revolution and the great Polish patriot poet Adam Mickiewicz, who died in Istanbul, as the Ottoman Empire gave him refuge. Kassabova visits the house of Konstantin Miladenov, a famous Bulgarian writer who died in an Istanbul jail having been betrayed by a Greek priest. She then traces a leading Balkan Sufi whose influence was felt in local Sufi practices of both Albanians and Turks and undertakes a further investigation of the Turkish community of Ohrid, which leads to a conversation with a family that traces its roots back to the Seljuk period. These various anecdotes all serve to prove the long reach of the imperial center of the Ottoman Empire to its former restive province of Macedonia.

The underlying historical tension that Kassabova encounters is both intra-religious and inter-religious. As she visits more Macedonian villages she encounters street baring Slavic names of old towns in “Aegean Macedonia,” which is now Northern Greece and has been ethnically Hellenized. She encounters a couple whose mixed marriage (she a Vlach and he a Sufi Turk) caused scandals in both communities, even though it occurred in the era of communist Yugoslav rule. This scandal was further compounded when the wife faced a bogus show trial in which she was accused of “Albanian separatism” in the Yugoslav area. Kassabova is baffled in discussions with her own extended family in Ohrid, including an uncle who says Bulgars are descendants from Asiatic tribes, but really Macedonians are descended from Macedon. She later comes across Torbesh (Macedonian speaking Muslim) villages and finds these communities have their own issues with the Orthodox Christian nationalism of the Macedonian state, but also a fear of Albanisation from their Albanian Muslim neighbors. As another example of intra-religious tension, Kassabova recounts the story of four Ohrid families who were said to be “cursed for all time” because they assisted the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy. Past betrayals, real or imagined, are neither forgotten nor forgiven in local lore. Another grim story related from the late Ottoman era is of a Greek Orthodox Priest in Kastoria in whose church-run hospital no ethnic Macedonian was admitted for any treatment whatsoever because “they were the enemy.”

When Kassabova crosses Lake Ohrid from the Macedonian side into Pogradec, Albania she encounters a more recent history of strong totalitarian repression from the brutal regime of Enver Hoxha. She goes past the old house of a prominent local poet Lasgush Poradeci, who suffered an “internal censure”, his crime being a refusal to publish sufficiently “socialist realist” poetry, and whose spirit was broken by this. Later she meets a local named Lirion who fled the communist Albanian state for Greece. He is of the view that Bektashi Islam was a liberalizing influence on Sunni Islam, but then notes that since he raised his kids in Greece, his daughters became Orthodox, in part for social status advancement. Another Albanian she meets named Bahir left for much further afield, going to Australia. He came back a decade later having been successful in business, but due to Albania’s isolation, the closest he could get to his homeland was to look at it through binoculars across Lake Ohrid. This exile also notes the contrast between Greece and Albania regarding Slavic place names, Greece wanted them erased whereas Albania was content to let some remain.

Her final section looks at Lake Prespa, which is between Macedonia and Greece and which lent its name to the agreement that saw the adjective “North” added onto Macedonia’s name. On the Macedonian side of the lake, she encounters old buildings that used to house political prisoners, “either Bulgarian identifying” or “bourgeois.” One man she encounters in the region, an ethnic Albanian named Nezmi, says there is ancient Illyrian script here, which shows who “really came first,” by which he means Albanians. Nezmi left for America, and says many Albanian houses were burned in the 1960s. Kassabova then explores the syncretism of the region where one village could be Christian and the next one over could be Bektashi. One woman says wives are practically widows because their husbands are gone on “gurbet,” the word for exile in Turkish. On the Albanian side of Prespa, she notes the presence of politicians representing the Macedonian minority, something one would not find in Greece. She meets one villager who complains how in the Communist period the problem was the inability to escape Hoxha’s totalitarian terror, but now the problem is too much emigration. An Orthodox Church in this particular village has been paid for by the Macedonian government, which shows tolerance from the Albanian state. In the Greek part of the Prespa region she meets an old man who bemoans the region was always fighting, “first the Turks, then the Germans, then brother by brother.” He refers to the population’s decline and it takes Kassabova time to realize that by “fighting” he means the Greek Civil war era. His historical memory and sense of time seem frozen in the distant past.

The chance meetings with fascinating characters weighed down by the cruel legacies of history keep coming in droves. She meets an ethnic Macedonian-Australian man named Nick whose family was expelled into Bulgaria by the Greeks from Aegean Macedonia and then persecuted by Bulgarian communist officials. As Kassabova journeys through formerly Slavic villages in Greece with him, he recognizes a monument to a partisan fighter from the KKE (Greek Communist Party). Nick knows of this woman from family stories and recounts how she was blamed for the KKE defeat and suffered during exile in the USSR, only years later was she able to come back to socialist Yugoslavia. He also gets emotional when he sees a gravestone in both the Greek alphabet and Cyrillic script, the latter of which would have been impossible to see in his grandmother’s time growing up in the region. Ethnic animosity spreads to the diaspora too. Nick grimly recounts a great-grandmother in Adelaide who was refused a funeral service because the Greek priest didn’t want to help a Macedonian. She encounters an ethnic Macedonian boatman on the Greek side of the border who said people still speak the Macedonian language but “just not near the police building.” He, despite being Macedonian, said he’d been called an Albanian while in Greece and a Greek while in Albania. Labels and identities seem to randomly shift at times. As such, we ought not to be surprised that the local dialect is full of words with different etymologies, as one example Kassabova encounters a Macedonian man who uses the Turkish words “asker” and “orman” but the Greek word for “border”.

After weaving this rich web of stories and anecdotes, Kassabova somberly argues that the tragedy of this region is “fragmentation”, which she argues “begins as a state of mind” and finishes as “destiny.” These two books are evocative and full of stories of the relentless drive of the human spirit to preserve diverse and unique ways of life. Yet time and again cruel headwinds of nationalism and state power have wielded their force to crush, divide and exile communities who they deemed to be alien, foreign, or “the other.” Taken in tandem, “To the Lake” and “Border” offer a breathtaking window into a region still fraught with ghosts of the past and the legacy of overlapping historical injustices.

Justin Paul has a background in History, Law, and English Language Teaching. Originally from Milwaukee, he lived most recently in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then in Kadikoy municipality of Istanbul. He is currently based in Columbus, Ohio.