Amazon, Set Thy House in Order

A recently recieved email:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Dust have also purchased MACEDONIA IS GREECE on DVD. For this reason, you might like to know that MACEDONIA IS GREECE is now available. You can order yours for just $33.00 by following the link below.

MACEDONIA IS GREECE Prof. Paul A. Kapetanopoulos Price: $33.00

No, Amazon. I would not be interested in your Greek propaganda. Good lord, I've become a Macedonian partisan. . . .

Highly Recommended

Christopher Deliso, often referred to as 'the Lonely Planet Guy' in my various adventures in archaeology, has a really terrific interview here with Prof. Viktor Friedman on various Macedonian issues.

Prof. Friedman, of the University of Chicago, is the towering figure of Balkan linguistics, the adviser and mentor of Eric, and an all-around wonderful human being. He's spent the better part of his professional life studying the languages of Macedonia, and touches on almost every major political and cultural issue being thrown around today. Excerpt:

CD: From what I understand from different stories, this is because it is not helpful to advancement in Greek society, and can even be a strongly negative factor-

VF: Yes. The Greek government is effectively carrying out ‘linguicide’ on the Macedonians of Greece. And it has been a long-running policy. For another example, I have a photo of a sign in Greek, from the 1950s, printed up in blue-on-white, urging people to forbid anyone from speaking in ‘Vlahika, Makedonika etc.’ There used to be many such signs in Greek Macedonia.

CD: Really! That is quite compelling. Do people know about this?

VF: I don’t know-a friend sent the photo to me, I am finally getting around to publishing it in a review article in the journal Balkanistika next year.

But the Greek policy was always trying to kill the language. It was especially horrible in the 1930s. Macedonian kids would go to school, and if they spoke their language, the language they learned at home, numerous ‘corrective’ methods were used: teachers beat them, or stuck their tongues with needles, or rubbed a hot pepper on their tongues; anything to make them stop speaking Macedonian.

I really suggest you read the whole thing . . .

How Tito Killed Christmas . . . with Santa

When winter first rolled around, I noticed that the McDonald's in downtown Skopje began to put up a large, American-style Christmas tree. I just assumed that, since McDonald's is the unofficial American cultural embassy, they were just following the corporate line.

Since that time, Christmas shops - Western, Santa-and-sleigh, Rudolph and all - have been popping up all over Skopje. There is now a Christmas tree in the main square, and one in the main shopping center. People are selling Christmas cards (which say Mary Christmas - close enough) for charity.

This is all extremely unsettling - our American-style Santa isn't even that prevalent in Western European countries, as they generally have their own Santa-like traditions (or, in his place, a frightening goblin-demon that eats terrible children). So how did our over-commercialized, Holiday TV-special, Bing Crosby Christmas transplant itself wholesale to the Balkans? A professor at my institute was able to provide the answer:

The communists did it.

Communism is, of course, a materialist, atheist sort of philosophy that stomps out religion wherever it can. Yugoslavia was no exception. So imagine you are the communist dictator of a country full of deeply-ingrained religious and folk beliefs. Christmas, with all its traditional neo-pagan folk connotations and overt Christian meaning, is going to be tough to take down. You could pull a Stalin and just start shooting people out behind the barn, but that isn't your style. You need some help. Has anybody else successfully undercut the religious aspects of Christmas, and turned it into a completely secular, materialist holiday?

Can you see where I'm going with this?

The Yugoslav government adopted our secular Santa, our materialist 'X-mas', to help knock the Christ out of Christmas. Traditional Orthodox practices and folk celebrations were discouraged, subverted, or absorbed entirely into a new set of holiday 'traditions' in which good old Kris Kringle played a large part. He's known as Grandpa Frost here, by the way, since the real St. Nicholas was martyred in Turkey - a little too close for comfort.

Obviously, I find this absolutely hilarious, and not just because a nominally communist nation adopted the symbol of the most commercialized, capitalistic time of year in America. I find it very amusing that, in doing so, they were able to strip our Santa tradition down to the most fundamental elements - secularism and materialism - and use him to undercut a real religious tradition.

Because, after all, this is something that was put upon the people here by the communist government. We created and adopted this sort of Santa ourselves . . .

How does that reflect on us?

(Full disclosure: I'll be spending the evening at the British Ambassador's Residence, eating mincemeat pies, drinking port and mulled wine, and enjoying some Victorian Christmas caroling . . . the perfect start to the expatriate holiday season.)

Greece, again

I was reading this extremely interesting commentary on the Greek riots in the Telegraph today. In it, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard suggests that while the rioting may have been initially triggered by the shooting death of the teenager, it is being fueled by the tremendous debt pressures that most of Greece is under, due to the Euro. To summarize: Greece has the highest proportion of public debt in the Euro-zone, and while this was ignored for awhile due to the housing bubble, now that the bubble has popped everything is going to hell.

This confirms most of what Prof. John Younger told me during my time in Greece. The country hadn't been on the Euro for very long, the housing bubble was in full swing, and there were as many new Mercedes on the street as there were day-laborers waiting on the corner, desperate for work. It didn't seem to match up. Turns out that everybody was doing the whole 'mortgage + hope' equation, sinking themselves into debt, and expecting the rest of Europe to help fix things if they went badly. There are a lot of economic conditions a nation has to meet before it joins the Euro, and it's generally acknowledged that Greece fudged their numbers to join the currency before they were ready.

It's going to be interesting.

In case you're interested. . .

. . . in reading an excellent article providing an overview of "greater" ethnic areas spilling over national borders, here it is.

And Eric has yet another interesting post up, this time on the relative value of money.

Greece

Greece is rioting, again. The details seem rather sketchy, but apparently two police officers shot and killed a teenager in the Exarchia neighborhood in Athens, which set off Greece's very large anarchist community. Now, there are molotov cocktails being thrown about, the Christmas Tree on Athen's main Syntagma Square has been burned down, and there are pitched battles with police in Larissa and Thessaloniki.

I don't want to downplay the violence, or the death that sparked it. It's all terrible. But since it is getting play on CNN, perhaps American is getting just a glimpse of our not-so-friendly southern neighbors, beyond the beaches and feta. I'm always irked by the idea that Greece is a sunny bit of Western Europe, and across the northern border is the Slavic 'Dark Heart of Europe'. Greece is a Balkan country. It may have escaped communism, but at the expense of a bloody civil war and subsequent military dictatorship. Of course, this was during the Cold War, so the USA - and specifically, the CIA - was extremely supportive of those uniformed clowns. Combine that with a few hundred years of overly-romanticized Hellenism, and most people have an image of Greece that is very far removed from reality.

I should also say that the Greeks tend to riot and protest quite a bit. Greece has a very, very long political tradition of communism/leftism/anti-establishmentarians/anarchy, which eventually helped to bring down the military government in the 70's, after several bloody protests. These groups didn't fade away, though; there were terrorist attacks throughout the 80's and 90's by small leftist cells, usually without much injury. Every now and then they would torch a diplomatic vehicle, or launch a rocket at the US Embassy. No biggie, right?

Even during my brief stay in Athens, students staged a bloody riot on Syntagma, and lobbed a molotov cocktail at a bank building near the Polytechnic University. An interesting note on this Polytechnic University - the riots that eventually brought down the military government started here, after a few students were gunned down. When the Greeks brought about their new government, a law was passed that no police officer could ever enter the grounds of the Technical University, as a sort of token protection for that revolutionary spirit. Therefore, during these riotous times, students or other protesters tend to occupy buildings on campus, without fear of arrest. It also means that quite a lot of drugs are peddled on campus . . . more so than a normal university, anyway.

Greece is a beautiful country with an amazing history. I'm happy to be in Macedonia, partially because I can take an easy vacation to Greece. And these riots are really terrible, and I hope they settle down soon, with minimum damage. But the media coverage - the English language coverage, that is - has an underlying premise of - "Riots? Christmas trees burned? How could this happen in sunny, white-marbled Greece?!"

Well, there are riots in Greece because there are always riots in Greece, because it is a complicated country of 10 million people, where there is a long history of violent protest against any and all types of authority. Hotels, package tour operators, and the Greek tourism industry are pretty careful to ignore that part of the country, for obvious reasons. Greece tries very hard to separate itself from the idea that it is 'Balkan'; it wants to project itself as just another EU country. This can make problems like political instability or riots seem like unexpected, surprising, unprecedented events, especially when reported piecemeal by the Western press. They puncture through a false - or, at least partially false - image, and that understandably makes people nervous.

Context, though, is key.

Stalked by the Ghost of Elvis

I have heard the Elvis song "Suspicious Minds" more in my two months here in Macedonia than in the rest of my 23 years combined. To be honest, I don't think I had actually heard the song at all until I arrived.

I have heard this played by cover bands, on Euro MTV and Euro Vh1, on the radio in taxis and grocery stores, on bar playlists, and most recently sung by an overweight Northern Irishman in a British pantomime play. I think it also made an appearance on the playlist for the after-party for that same play.

Of all the songs - no, just of all Elvis songs - why "Suspicious Minds"? Why is this song following me around the country?

It's like a disturbing recurring dream, that must have some greater significance. Time will tell.

All I know is, I can't go on forever with such a suspicious mind.

These tiny pieces of paper confirm me as an adult.

I've been very busy over the past few days with actual work - meeting with archaeologists, traveling around Macedonia, assisting in drafting grant proposals - which is the reason for a lack of posts.

I'm off tomorrow to a conference of Macedonian archaeologists in Kicevo, and may be out of communication for a few days because of this. This is the reason I finally got around to making business cards, as you can see above, as it is far more professional than the little pieces of notebook paper with my email address that I previously handed out.

And there'll be a new Adventure in Archaeology when I get back . . .

A Belated Happy Thanksgiving

As may have mentioned before, as a Fulbrighter, I get treated really, really well by the staff of the American Embassy - including an invitation to Thanksgiving Dinner at the residence of Ambassador Phil Reeker and his wife. It was difficult to find the place, because I told the taxi driver to look for a house, and he refused to believe that anybody could live in the fortress-like mansion that the Ambassador calls home.

Dinner was traditional and delicious. The only confusing point was the dessert list; nobody at my table could figure out what exactly "Maple Pie" could be. When I asked the Macedonian guests, thinking it to be a mistranslation of a local specialty, they shrugged and said, "It must be like apple pie, but made with maples." Explaining the difference between a fruit (the apple) and a tree (the maple) seemed like too much effort. Luckily, the pumpkin pie was spectacular.