Border porosities: Movements of people, objects, and ideas in the southern Balkans 9781526140647

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Border porosities

RETHINKING BORDERS

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Series editors: Sarah Green and Hastings Donnan

Rethinking Borders focuses on what gives borders their qualities across time and space, as well as how such borders are experienced, built, managed, imagined and changed. This involves detailed and often richly ethnographic studies of all aspects of borders: finance and money, bureaucracy, trade, law, new technologies, materiality, infrastructure, gender and sexuality, even the philosophy of what counts as being ‘borderly,’ as well as the more familiar topics of migration, nationalism, politics, conflicts and security. Previously published Migrating borders and moving times: Temporality and the crossing of borders in Europe Edited by Hastings Donnan, Madeleine Hurd and Carolin Leutloff-Grandits The political materialities of borders: New theoretical directions Edited by Olga Demetriou and Rozita Dimova Intimacy and mobility in the era of hardening borders: Gender, reproduction, regulation Edited by Haldis Haukanes and Frances Pine Border images, border narratives: The political aesthetics of boundaries and crossings Edited by Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman Medicalising borders: Selection, containment and quarantine since 1800 Edited by Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer and Paul Weindling

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Border porosities Movements of people, objects, and ideas in the southern Balkans Rozita Dimova

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Rozita Dimova 2021 The right of Rozita Dimova to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 4063 0  hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Jamie-Lee Grady / Unsplash Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

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За Виктор

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Contents

List of figures page viii Acknowledgements ix List of abbreviations xi Preface xii Introduction: the name dispute and the Prespa Agreement 1 1 Railway porosity across the border: from Ottoman railway lines to contemporary migrant transportation 19 2 Desirous borders and consumer porosities: beauty, entertainment, and gambling in the EU periphery 48 3 The sedimentary porosity of tourism, ownership, and child refugees 79 4 Porosity of environmental activism and transnational mining companies: struggles against open-pit mines on the border 100 5 Tidal porosity: displaced borders in Skopje and the Colorful Revolution 124 Conclusion: porous trails at the border 143 References 150 Index 160

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Figures

0.1 Vuggy and moldic pores in a rock (Angela Nastevska) 9 1.1a–c Migrants walking or resting on the railway tracks in RN Macedonia in 2016 (photo: Tomislav Georgiev) 21 1.2 Migrants stuck in the no-man’s-land between Greece and RN Macedonia block the railway line (photo: Ognen Teofilovski) 42 2.1a–b The border crossing at Bogorodica–Evzoni (photo: mia.mk) 51 2.2 Princess hotel-casino (photo: Snezana Stankovic) 54 2.3 Flamingo hotel-casino (photo: Snezana Stankovic) 55 4.1 Protest against the Eldorado Gold company Skouries mine in Halkidiki, November 2014 (photo: https:// soshalkidiki.wordpress.com) 104 4.2a–b Protests against Kazandol, the copper mine on the Kožuf mountain (photo: www.facebook.com/SOSValandovo/) 108 5.1 The Colorful Revolution on the streets of Skopje (photo: sdk.mk) 132 5.2 Protestors preparing to throw paint during the Colorful Revolution (photo: sdk.mk) 134

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Acknowledgements

Many people have participated in the making of this book. First and foremost, the interlocutors, some of whom I met only once and for only a brief period, others of whom I got to know well in the course of my research, and some of whom I’ve known well for many years. The research for this book spanned many locations along the Macedonian–Greek the border: from Dojran, to Gevgelija, Valandovo, Polycastro, many holiday destinations on Cassandra-Chalkidiki, as well as Bitola, Florina, Resen, Dolno Dupeni, and Psarades/Nivitsi. I also spent a significant time in Skopje and Thessaloniki. I am grateful for the generosity of the people who permitted me to ask questions and inquire about sensitive issues. The research was funded by the German Research Council (DFG – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) grant that was housed at the Department of Slavic Studies at Humboldt University. Professor Christian Voss was a wonderful project leader and collaborator whose enthusiasm for our project was encouraging and contagious. I am indebted to the Humboldt University, team especially to Snežana Stanković, Lumnije Jusufi, Sevasti Trubeta, Christina Kunze, Roswitha Kersten-Pejanič, Marek Slodička, Natasha Tolimir, Gal Kirn and many others. The collaboration with the COST IS0803 EastBordNet Network was instrumental in developing many of the ideas in the book. I am grateful to Sarah Green for her intellectual guidance and personal encouragement. I am immensely indebted to Olga Demetreou and the work we did together. Tuija Pulkkinen, Jane Cowan, Stef Jansen, Zaira Lofranco, Ljupčo Risteski and Dimitra Georgiadou have taught me a lot about borders and collegiality. My heartfelt thanks also go to Kostas Kanakis, Chiara De Cesari, Anna Zadroźna, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgios Angelopoulos, Vasilka Peitse, Jelena Tošić and Christina Kramer.

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x Acknowledgements As always, Victor Friedman listened to my ideas, read my analysis and provided feedback that shaped the text of the book. The book was completed at Ghent University, where I would like to thank many colleagues and students, especially Spomenka Brašić, Semra Daca, Tom De Deker, Atdhe Hetemi, Hasan Isikli, Noëlla Hanssens, Dieter Stern, Sabina Van Cauwenberghe, Aleksey Yudin, Slobodanka Moravčević, Miglena Dikova-Milanova, Jovana Simić, Raissa De Keyser, Helena Saelmen, Vjosa Musliu, Marlene Schäfers, Koen Stroeken, Chia Longman, Katrien De Graeve, Katarzyna Marek, and many others. I am especially indebted to Mark Boone, Andreas Niehaus, and Ben Dhooge, whose ferocity has been stimulating as it opened up new theoretical avenues for thinking about borders, boundaries, abuse of power, fear of change, mediocracy, and complacency – an experience that has inspiringly given rise to a new book project. I want to thank the editorial team at Manchester University Press, especially the Rethinking Borders editors Sarah Green and Hastings Donnan, as well as Tom Dark, Lucy Burns and Judith Oppenheimer. For years Angela Nastevska, Biljana Dimova-Nastevska, and Jovica Nastevski have endured my presence and constant inquisition during their summer holidays in Polichrono Halkidiki. Aware of the nuisance I created by accompanying them everywhere – to other Macedonian friends, owners of real estate in Greece, to handymen, lawyers, state institutions while paying bills or arranging cleaning – I want to thank them for their hospitality. Many details in this book were captured due to their willingness to tolerate my presence. Finally, to my parents – my father Nikola and late mother Vera – who, with their modest sense of adventure and genuine care, took the entire family to Greece summer after summer, even when getting the visas was a formidable challenge and money was short. The childhood memories of the foldable camper Brako and the sandy beaches in Kalamaki, the excitement of having gyro in Platamona or the new scuba-diving mask, have inspired in me a life-long excitement and desire around crossing borders, as well as a special attachment to Greece that remains to this day.

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Abbreviations

BIRN DSE FYROM GDP IMF NGO SDSM VMRO-DPMNE

Balkan Investigative Reporting Network Democratic Army of Greece Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia gross domestic product International Monetary Fund non-governmental organization Social-Democratic Alliance of Macedonia Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity

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Preface

The main objective of this book project is to explore the border between Greece and the Republic of North Macedonia that has been obscured by the highly publicized dispute between the two countries over Macedonia’s name. In this book, I choose to use the abbreviation RN Macedonia just as many scholars, myself included, have abbreviated earlier names – for example, SR (Socialist Republic of) Macedonia and FYR (Former Yugoslav Republic of)Macedonia. For both practicality and consistency, the new name is similarly abbreviated. Although the name dispute appeared to have erected an insurmountable barrier between the two countries – as evidenced, for example, by Greece’s illegal embargos of the 1990s – it seems that the border between them has been melting. New opportunities for economic, human, and symbolic exchanges have been opening up in ever increasing numbers and with different intensity since 1994, when the embargo ended. Specifically conceived as an analysis of the border regions and a variety of border regimes between Greece and RN Macedonia in temporal frames, the book brings together material collected from research carried out intermittently from 2010 until 2017, although I also address the period prior to 2010. The main part of the material was collected during the 2010–15 DFG- (German Research Council) supported project “Melting Borders: An Ethnography of the Movement of Peoples, Goods, and Symbols in Border-areas between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia”, which focused on the border between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia with the main aim of documenting the effects of the name dispute between the two countries among people living in the border regions. As the project unfolded, however, and as new points of interest emerged, I embraced new analytical tools and topics and continued to carry out research during the migration wave in 2015–16. This ethnography is based on interviews and participant observation as it highlights the individual conflicts and interdependence of two adjacent

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Preface xiii nation-states deadlocked in a dispute over the name Macedonia. For the project I conducted 43 interviews with people from both sides of the border, in Greece and in what is now RN Macedonia. The interviews were conducted in Macedonian, English, and German. In addition, Dimitra Georgiadou, who assisted me during a part of this research in the spring of 2015, brought important insights to the research with Greek citizens. The fieldwork research has revealed intensive economic and social exchange between the local populations, driven by the financial crisis in Greece and the more persistent economic crisis besetting the Macedonian economy since the independence of that country in 1991, a crisis to which Greece contributed with its embargos of the 1990s. The Greek crisis at the time of the research resulted in a boost for Macedonian dental and other health and medical industries, casino entertainment, beauty services, and everyday grocery shopping. In addition to this, a law was passed in Greece in 2013 that permitted non-EU citizens to purchase real estate, allowing many nouveau riches from Macedonia to purchase coastal properties in Greece. In many cases, what started as a pragmatically driven border-crossing gradually turned into intensive interaction that often propelled the neighbors to engage in more elaborate relationships. In these circumstances, the name issue would usually become irrelevant and invisible. The book was also developed through the series of workshops and conference panels organized as part of the EastBordNet, a scholarly network connecting researchers working in the northeastern regions of Europe (Baltic and surrounding regions), with researchers working in the southeastern regions (Balkans and environs). The objective of the network was to form a scholarly community that would examine borders and their meaningfulness across space and time. COST IS0803, the research network that became the EastBordNet project, was officially launched with a management committee meeting in Brussels in February 2009, bringing together researchers from 16 countries meeting at 23 separate workshops and three conferences spread over a period of four years. The EastBordNet has been fundamental for the theoretical and empirical grounding of this book. The possibility to participate fully in the network has given me the conceptual and technical vocabulary to understand that Greece and RN Macedonia have been struggling with what is, according to some, the most trivial, and for others, the most existential, battle, defending “the very core” of the Greek or Macedonian identities. Each side has been using inflammatory rhetoric in accusing the other of irredentism, appropriation, historical falsification, negation and dismissal. And yet, the efforts undertaken in 2017–18 by the leftist governments, Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) under Alexis Tsipras’s leadership in Greece, and the Social-Democratic Alliance of Macedonia under Zoran Zaev’s leadership in RN Macedonia, seemingly

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xiv Preface managed to resolve the name dispute. Some have argued that this effort contributed to Tsipras’s loss of power at the elections in July 2019 in Greece, albeit he lost power primarily because he was unable to deliver on his economic promises, and the Greek people elected the opposition, who, as many have pointed out, ironically were the ones who had brought on the crisis in the first place. Zoran Zaev similarly has been facing many problems in RN Macedonia as the opposition attempts to portray him as a grave betrayal of the Macedonian national core, selling out the country to Greece and Bulgaria. Although the signing of the Prespa agreement promised a resolution of the three-decade conflict, the oppositions to the agreement in both countries have gained ground and are able to mobilize crowds. The opposition has been to the name change: in RN Macedonia to adding the geographical determinant “North” to the name Macedonia, and in the Greek camp to the presence of the term Macedonia. The recent corruption scandal1 in RN Macedonia, related to bribery and corruption of the Special Prosecutor, as well as to the rise of populism in the EU that has lent support to right-wing politics, are also important factors staining the success of the resolution of the name dispute. The popular reactions against the Prespa Agreement grew stronger when France vetoed the start of accession negotiations for Albania and RN Macedonia at the EU leaders’ summit in Brussels on 22–23 October 2019. The main reasons for the veto, according to Macron’s explanation at the summit, were the necessity of reforms within the EU before taking in new members. In the period following the veto, the opposition party in RN Macedonia demanded early elections, which were initially scheduled for 12 April 2020.2 Because of the Coronavirus pandemic the elections were rescheduled for 15 July 2020, when the coalition Можеме (We Can), led by the Social Democrats, won with a majority of only two MPs over the coalition led by the opposition VMRO-DPMNE party. With the 2019 French veto on beginning negotiations, the NATO and EU rhetoric not only became discredited but also turned into a main weapon in the hands of the opposition in showing the inability of the Social Democrats to “achieve a good deal with the EU if the price for the accession is as high as changing the name. This way we changed the name for nothing” (Interview with an employee from the Ministry of the Interior).3 The minimal victory of the Social Democrats in the July 2020 elections reveals the persistent division in society in both the Macedonian and Albanian blocs, as well as the conspicuous EU presence on the political scene either as an ultimate goal or “manipulator” affecting Macedonian sovereignty. The research and most of the writing for this book was completed before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book therefore does not address the massive change in border porosity that the pandemic has caused since March 2020. The absence of visitors and consumers from Greece has

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Preface xv affected the life and economy in Gevgelija and Bitola beyond recognition. The border between Greece and RN Macedonia has been completely closed, allowing only trucks and commercial transport. Since March 2020 the only way to travel to Greece has been through the border crossing Kulata/ Promachonas between Bulgaria and Greece; entry is permitted only to EU citizens, who are obliged to carry a negative COVID PCR test certificate not more than 48 hours old. Many property owners from RN Macedonia who have been unable to check up on their apartments and houses, or to pay bills and property taxes, have been forced to seek help from Greek citizens and entrust them with the care of their properties.

Notes 1 This so-called extortion scandal, revealed in August 2019, implicated Bojan Jovanovski, owner of the 1TV channel, and RN Macedonia’s chief Special Prosecutor. The two were allegedly extorting cash from a Macedonian oligarch in exchange for a promise to help him avoid a jail sentence, or at least to get a lighter sentence, by using their alleged influence over the prosecutor running the case. The scandal dealt a blow to the credibility of this crime-busting institution, which on November 2019 ceased to exist. All court cases from the Special Prosecutor’s office, along with the other prosecutors in the office of the Special Prosecutor were transferred to the regular prosecutor’s office, the section for high corruption. 2 Rhetoric using the words “betrayal” and “humiliation” dominated the public discourse of RN Macedonia after France’s veto in 2019. Surveys conducted by the media and research agencies revealed that the nationalistic VMRO-DPMNE, which was in power from 2006 to 2017 had and advantage over the Social Democrats, whose main rhetoric during the national elections in 2017 and the local elections in 2018 was centered on EU and NATO membership. The 2017 elections were precipitated by the wiretaps of 2015 that revealed massive and systemic eavesdropping by the top members of VMRO-DPMNE, and this scandal was the main reason for the SDSM coming into power. 3 “Да постигнат подобар дил ако веќе цената е толку висока како промена на името. Вака го сменивме името за ништо.”

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Introduction: the name dispute and the Prespa Agreement

The 271-kilometer border between Greece and RN Macedonia is the same state border that was established in 1913 by the Bucharest Treaty when it divided the region of Macedonia between Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria (Hall 2000). Prior to the treaty, this region was part of the larger unit governed by the Ottomans named Rumelia and spread over the territory of Southeast Europe (Mazower 2000, Stoianovic 1994). At the time of partition, there were two vilayets, Selânik and Manastir. The border between Greece and Serbia ran through these two vilayets and assigned the northern sadnzhaks to Serbia and the southern ones to Greece. While the length of the border has remained the same, significant socio-political changes took place in the course of its almost century-long existence: in 1918 the border became a state border between Greece and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1927). On 29 November 1943, with the establishment of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslav, it became a state border between Greece and socialist Yugoslavia (Djokić and Ker-Lindsay 2010). The dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation at the beginning of the 1990s paved the way for the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, which was approved in a popular referendum on 7 September 1991 and became official with the passing of the Constitution on 17 November 1991. During the 1991–2019 period, the border carried different names depending on who was speaking: the border between Republic of Macedonia/Greece when denoted by the Macedonian government and citizens, and also by the majority of the international public; or the border between Greece/FYROM when referred to by the Greek side (this was the acronym of the official UN name, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, that was accepted as a temporary solution in 1991). Finally, after 27 years, a possible solution circulated among the Macedonian public. The prime ministers of Greece and the Republic of Macedonia

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embarked on intensive negotiations to finally resolve the ongoing name dispute. Their initial meeting at the economic forum in Davos in February 2018 opened up tangible expectations that the intractable name conflict could finally reach its resolution. Matthew Nimitz, the appointed UN mediator in the conflict, serving in this post since 1997, along with the negotiating teams of both countries, shared in the optimism that the two countries could finally reach a mutual agreement and resolve the name dispute. This conflict had propelled Greece to prevent Macedonia’s international inclusion in EU and NATO structures (this latter in violation of the UN interim agreement), and with the signing of the so-called Prespa Agreement on July 2018 the EU representatives had (almost) explicitly promised that the country would start the official negotiations for accession to NATO and the EU. At the NATO Bucharest summit in November 2008, despite strong US support and the announcement by US president George W. Bush that Macedonia would receive an invitation to join the alliance, Greece vetoed the country’s membership under the temporary name of FYROM. The veto was in breach of the interim agreement, but Greece suffered no consequences. After that, the resolution of the conflict seemed almost impossible. The veto propelled the Macedonian government, led by the conservative VMRODPMNE1 and its leader Nikola Gruevski, who was in power from 2006 until 2017, to adopt a more radical approach and demonstrate the historical “right” to the name Macedonia. What followed was an open challenge to Greece’s exclusive appropriation of antiquity. The naming of the airport in Skopje “Alexander the Great” in 2007 and the main freeway running through Macedonia “Alexander of Macedon,” and especially, the construction of the project “Skopje 2014” in 2009–10, marked the turning points in Macedonia’s adoption of this “non-apologetic and non-compliant attitude,” as Gruevski said in one of his many statements. The change of government in May 2017, when the Social Democrats came into power, marked yet another turning point.2 One of the first initiatives as a goodwill gesture towards resolving the conflict was to rename the airport and the central freeway: the airport became International Airport Skopje and the freeway was renamed as “Friendship Freeway.” There are ongoing discussions on how to treat the monuments from the Skopje 2014: “Warrior on a Horse” (representing Alexander the Great) and the statue of Philip II situated in central Skopje (for more see Chapter 5). According to the Prespa Agreement, all monuments referring to antiquity have now received new plaques that declare their connection to Hellenic ancient history.3 On 15 August 2019, for instance, the 28-meter monument on the central square of Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, received a new plaque stating:

Introduction 3 In honor of Alexander the Great, a historic figure belonging to ancient Hellenic history and civilization and to world cultural and historical heritage. Here he is presented as equestrian warrior.

The same was done with the monuments to Philip II and Olympia, the father and mother of Alexander the Great. Olympia’s monument also has a new plaque that says:

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In honor of Olympia, a historical figure belonging to ancient Hellenic history and civilization and to world cultural and historical heritage.

The installation of new plaques complies with Article 8, paragraph 2 of the Prespa Agreement, which states: “Within six months of the entry into force of this Agreement, the Second Party shall review the status of the monuments, public buildings, and infrastructure on its territory and if they in any manner whatsoever refer to the ancient Hellenic history and civilization, which forms an integral part of the historical or cultural heritage of the First Party, shall take appropriate corrective action in order to effectively address the issue and ensure respect for such heritage.”4 With the Prespa Agreement, Greece and RN Macedonia terminated the previous Interim Accord of 1995 and also the earlier Final Agreement for the Settlement of the Differences as Described in the United Nations Security Council resolutions 817 (1993) and 845 (1993). As the main international acts mediating and regulating the conflict between the two countries since 1993, these agreements were not specific and left room for different interpretations. The Prespa Agreement, in contrast, defined precise obligations with specific timelines for their realization. Many of the replaced plaques were repeatedly vandalized in the days following their replacement on 15 August 2019. The new copper plaques were placed under constant guard and video surveillance.5 The process of resolving the name dispute after the change of government in RN Macedonia in April 2017 was preceded by several options for the name of the country: Republic of New Macedonia, Republic of North Macedonia, Republic of Ilinden Macedonia or Republic of Macedonia (Skopje). Prior to reaching the final decision in the Prespa Agreement on 17 June 2018, both sides shared cautious optimism that a final resolution could be reached. Optimism spread that resolution would enable RN Macedonia to receive an invitation to join the NATO alliance at its upcoming summit on 11–12 July 2018 in Brussels. The months leading to the final signing of the Prespa Agreement were bursting with tension and uncertainties. One of the main points of dispute among Macedonian politicians and citizens was Greece’s insistence that the solution should be erga omnes and be used in all domains, domestic as well as international. This would inevitably require changing the constitution

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and the constitutional name Republic of Macedonia. Any constitutional change in turn required a two-thirds majority vote in the parliament, and that appeared to be an almost impossible objective, given the slim majority that the governing coalition had achieved with the 2016 elections. Another point of dispute between the negotiators, and also among the political parties, was whether the new name would also necessitate renaming the language. Despite these dilemmas, on the tenth anniversary of the Bucharest summit of 2008, many viewed the upcoming NATO meeting in Brussels as a historic new opportunity to settle the conflict and facilitate the EU and NATO integration of the Republic of Macedonia. All this was potentially achieved with the Prespa Agreement, signed on 17 June 2018, when the Macedonian government agreed to name the country Republic of North Macedonia. In return, the Greek representatives agreed to recognize a separate Macedonian nation and language, and also to enable RN Macedonia’s NATO and EU membership and accession. Moreover, there was a commitment that Greece would be one of the main supporters of these accession processes and would protect Macedonian skies with its planes. Regardless of the positive or negative reaction to the Prespa Agreement, in my last research visit of the Prespa region, in December 2019, I was struck by a recurring theme that came up with most of the locals I talked to, namely the Prespa Lake and the fall in its water level. These past several years, the Prespa Lake has decreased from its average level by more than 10 meters. This fall appeared to be by far more significant for the local population than the Prespa Agreement itself. Many of them shared the disturbing news that the beaches along the lake have become covered with the reed beds. The lake coast has exposed rocks and weeds that used to be underwater, while most of the local docks have been swallowed up by sand. Evidently the Prespa Agreement has brought a new form of state presence to this area that, for many locals, has corroborated the marginal position this region has occupied. As a border zone the Prespa region is famous for the ubiquitous presence of the lake. The Agreement has put the region on the political map of the world, but instead of it bringing empowerment and emancipatory changes, many of the local people felt betrayed by the one day of attention during the signing of the Agreement and the utter neglect in the following months and years. While acknowledging the symbolism of the Prespa region as site for the ceremonial signing of the Agreement, the interviews documented the disappointment and feeling of abandonment. The locals’ expectations of the politicians and the Agreement in protecting the lake have not been taken into consideration. These reactions show that the lake and its waters are conceptualized and constituted through complex social, environmental, economic, and political processes on both sides of the lake.

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Introduction 5 Indeed, the location where the Agreement was signed, the village of Psarades (Nivitsi in Macedonian), was carefully selected, as was the location of the lunch after the signing, when the international guests crossed over the Prespa Lake border to the Macedonian side at the village of Oteševo. This crossing of the lake was also a highly symbolic move that marked the first entry of a Greek Prime Minister into the Republic of Macedonia since it declared independence in 1991. The village Psarades has occupied a significant place in the history of this region and its name was changed by the Greek government to Psarades in 1927. Situated 36 kilometers northwest of the town of Florina (Lerin in Macedonian), the village occupies the northern-most part of the area on the south bank of the Prespa Lake, 903 meters above sea level.6 In K’ncov’s census of 1878, Nivitsi had 30 houses and was inhabited by 92 people, while in 1900 there were 400 residents with Slavic background (K’ncov 1900). According to 1878 study, Nivitsi, with a male population of 1,873, was considered a “purely” Bulgarian village as at that time “Macedonians” did not count as a separate group.7 After the Ilinden Uprising in 1903, the village passed under the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Exarchate. The 1927 Greek Government Legislative Edict declared in the official Gazette that there were no non-Greek people in Greece. Hence, 804 names of Macedonian villages, towns, regions, and so on were changed, together with the surnames of ethnic Macedonians, into Greek versions. The Greek state has systematically replaced geographical and topographical names of non-Greek origin with Greek names as part of a policy and ideology of Hellenization. The main objective of the initiative has been to assimilate or conceal geographical or topographical names that were considered foreign and divisive toward Greek unity or indicative of a “bad Greek.” Names regarded as foreign were usually of Turkish, Albanian, and Slavic origin. Most of the name changes occurred in ethnically heterogeneous northern Greece and the Arvanite settlements in central Greece (Bintliff 2003, Karakasidou 1993). Before the beginning of the Greek Civil War in 1946, about 770 residents of Macedonian background lived in the village. They were employed in raising livestock, fishing, agriculture, and other important activities (Richter 2015). During the Greek Civil War, between 1946 and 1949, the residents actively took part in the National Liberation Front (NOF). The second NOF Congress, on 25–26 March 1949, took place in the church of St Mary in the village of Psarades (built in 1893) when 700 representatives came together (Richter 2015). With the participation of party leader Nikolaos Zachariadis of the Communist Party of Greece, a resolution was announced: “the unification of Macedonia with a united, independent and equal Macedonian nation within a people’s democratic federation of the Balkan peoples” (Richter 2015, 36). In his speech, Zachariadis referred to the achievements

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of the Macedonian people and pointed to the need for NOF’s coherence and the preservation of unity among the Greek and the Macedonian people for the common victory, which he described as difficult. Moreover, the congress explicitly underlined the unity of the Greek people with the “Macedonian” people (Sfetas 2003–4, 240). After the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949, and mass emigration from the village and expulsion of villagers who were associated with the Communist Party, the number of residents fell significantly. The Greek census of 1991 recorded only 144 residents in the village (Synvet 1878, online edition). The usually quiet village became the center of attention on 17 June 2018 when the Prespa Agreement was signed. As already mentioned, the erga omnes principle required a two-thirds majority in parliament to change the constitution and also to allow for the change of name from Republic of Macedonia into Republic of North Macedonia. This majority was achieved by persuading eight MPs from the opposition party VMRO-DPMNE to vote for the changes. Officially, the eight MPs argued that the main incentive for agreeing to vote for the changes was their support for the EU and NATO integration processes, which, without changing the constitution, could never been achieved. Unofficially, each one of these eight MPs or their close relatives was embroiled in legal procedures for a variety of legal offenses committed during the VMRO-DPMNE rule from 2006 to 2017, as were many other VMRO-DPMNE politicians. Several of these MPs were also involved in the violent attack on parliament on 27 April 2017. Hence, they allegedly received a promise that they would avoid conviction if they voted for the constitutional changes. Despite the prime minister’s reassurance that the rule of law remained intact and the government did not meddle with or influence court decisions, the fact that most of the legal cases against these MPs were dismissed corroborates the wide suspicion of a deal struck between the government and the opposition MPs. For many, this was a deplorable suspension of the rule of law and a betrayal of the main tenets of the Colorful Revolution that precipitated the elections that removed the criminal VMRO-DPMNE from power in the December 2017 elections: “Nema Pravda, Nema Mir” (No Justice, No Peace) (for more on this see Chapter 5). All Albanian parties and MPs voted for the constitutional changes that would allow the name change, explaining their decision by the necessity of departing from the Yugoslav past. Most Albanians regarded the Yugoslav legacy as fiercely anti-Albanian, hence most believed that leaving the name FYROM behind would be a step forward, bringing the country closer to EU integration. Thus, this was a change related to the border, which now is the official border between Greece and RN Macedonia, “two friendly neighbors that treat each other with respect and will not hinder the NATO

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Introduction 7 and European future” (Zoran Zaev in a statement for Telma TV on 7 July 2019 during prime minister Tsipras’s visit to Skopje). I find it necessary to explain these recent developments related to the name dispute so as to set the ground for the ensuing analysis. However, this book will most certainly not attempt to provide a total history of the border in all its temporal and spatial details. Too many events took place in the course of the more than 100 years since the Bucharest Treaty in 1913, following the Second Balkan War that ended with the victory of Serbia and Greece over Bulgaria.8 The name conflict has deservingly preoccupied politicians and scholars from different disciplines. Certainly, one of the most creative ways to think about the border and the name issue is the artistic project “The Renaming Machine.” This project focuses on the complex entanglements involved in the political and cultural processes of renaming. I partake in this project’s reflection of the crucial need to question “the way these processes have influenced the construction and destabilization of the memory of national, cultural and personal identities in the former Yugoslavia and South-Eastern Europe over the past two decades” (Milevska 2010, 11). Examining the “clandestine ideological patterns” of the “desiring renaming machine” at work behind the dominant and visible social machines, this project stressed that, as a region overburdened with changes in its state borders, the Balkans possess a history that abounds with the politics of renaming. With the break-up of Yugoslavia, the renaming “apparatus” erased and overwrote most traces of the Tito era, including the Yugoslav leader’s own name, which had been attached to many places in the former country. The region itself has been called by different names – the Balkans, the Western Balkans, and SouthEastern Europe and so on – depending on geopolitical interests and attitudes regarding its integrity or dismemberment. (Milevska 2010, 11)

This project underlines that alterations of names of institutions, people, ethnicities, languages, locations, and even nation-states are usually viewed as the first step in the process of appropriation, or erasure, of national, cultural, and personal identities, as well as a way to protect long-term political interests and ensure domination over a territory. The “battle of wits” between Greece and Macedonia resulted in an international conceptual and diplomatic battleground that was best exemplified in the ideology of renaming: how the endlessly postponed event of renaming can produce a “state of exception” whereby the power of the “renaming machine” is either underappreciated or overrated (Milevska 2010, 11). By acknowledging and keeping in mind the theoretical innovations offered by the “Renaming Machine” approach, I would like to turn my attention now to another theoretical concept, namely that of porosity. This concept

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Border porosities

will allow me to look at the border and the name dispute beyond the conventional approaches in the border genre.

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Porosity in action If we could identify one common feature of this border in the 100-plus years since its establishment, it is its porosity. Regardless of the regimes on both sides of the border and the historical and political events taking place in the region, this border has been porous, allowing a continuous “leakage” of people, goods, ideas, or capital. Deriving from the Greek word pore, meaning “passage,” porosity is the quality of being full of tiny holes. Liquids or other matter go right through solid matter and materials that are porous. The size of these tiny holes or voids conditions how porous a given material is. Used primarily in geology, hydrogeology, soil, and petroleum engineering, the porosity of a porous medium (for instance a rock or sediment) describes the fraction of void space in the material, where the void may contain air or water (Schön 2015a, Schön 2015b). Tests measure porosity or, as it is technically called, the “accessible void”, the total amount of void space accessible from the surface. Porosity or void fraction is a measure of the void (i.e. empty) spaces in a material, and is a fraction of the volume of voids over the total volume (Schön 2015b, 21). To put it in simpler terms, porosity consists of elongated or vuggy pores and round concentric or moldic pores (Figure 0.1). As it represents the ratio of pore volume to the total volume of the primary matter, porosity is controlled by different factors such as rock type, pore distribution, cementation, diagenetic history (the chemical changes of sediment before the final conversion to rock or lithification), and composition (Horgan 1999, Horgan and Ball 1994). In sum, porosity is a complex process that depends on a variety of circumstances. Earth sciences and more traditional models regard porosity as continuous (Asgarinezhad, Asgarinezhad, Tokhmechi et al. 2016, Horgan and Ball 1994). And yet, studies have shown that this approach fails to account for anomalous features. Furthermore, it cannot help to model the influence of the environmental factors which affect pore geometry. Thus, in addition to the conventional approach to porosity, recently a number of additional complex models have been proposed, including fractals, bubble theory, cracking theory, Boolean grain process, or packed sphere (Asgarinezhad, Asgarinezhad, Tokhmechi et al. 2016, Horgan and Ball 1994). Textbooks on porosity stress that well-sorted materials such as grains of approximately all one size have higher porosity than similarly sized poorly sorted materials (where smaller particles fill the gaps between larger particles).

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Introduction 9

Figure 0.1  Vuggy and moldic pores in a rock

For instance, alluvium is loose, unconsolidated (not cemented together into solid rock) soil or sediment that has been eroded, reshaped by water in some form, and redeposited in a non-marine setting. Alluvium is typically made up of a variety of materials, including fine particles of silt and clay and larger particles of sand and gravel. When this loose alluvial material is deposited or cemented into a lithological unit, or lithified, it is called an alluvial deposit, such as lake sediments (lacustrine), river sediments (fluvial), or glacially derived sediments (glacial till) (Glasbey, Horgan and Darbeyshire 1991, Horgan and Ball 1994). Consolidated rocks (e.g., sandstone, shale, granite, or limestone) potentially have more complex dual porosities, as compared with alluvial sediment, which can be divided into connected and unconnected porosity. Connected porosity is more easily measured through the volume of gas or liquid that can flow into the rock, whereas fluids cannot access unconnected pores (Schön 2015b). I choose to discuss these technical details of the natural science approach to porosity because, as I was trying to learn more about the specific meaning of the term porosity, this literature illuminated both visually and conceptually porosity’s ontology, fluidity, function (im)penetrability, and

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Border porosities

persistence. Moreover, the description of porosity profoundly corresponds to the way I have been thinking and understanding the border where I have been doing my research. Without becoming too technical, I want to stress that the relevance of porosity for analyzing the border between Greece and RN Macedonia is visual, conceptual, and metaphoric. Moreover, the literal explanations of porosity reveal it as an inevitable process and a necessary attribute when different matters come into contact under specific circumstances. Regardless how solid one matter is, there are always conditions that create some sort of necessary porosity that appears in one form and then can gradually, under different circumstances, transform its shape, form, and content. The frequent alterations of the border regimes in the Macedonia region of the Balkan Peninsula in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are most vividly captured by the term porosity. Although my main objective in this book is to analyze this border by using the concept of porosity as a main analytical lens, I continue to rely on border theories that initially ignited my interest in studying borders. Porosity does not refute the political and social aspects that were introduced with the new approach to borders in the groundbreaking publication of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza in 1987, which introduced a new way for how to think and talk about borders (Anzaldúa 1987).9 By stressing that ambiguity and uncertainty, rather than being viewed as predicaments, can actually become assets, Anzaldúa argues that “[the new mestiza] has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. […] The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (Anzaldúa 2007, 79). Although acknowledging the violence and “linguistic terrorism” inflicted on Mexicans or Mexican-American people, Anzaldúa moves away from the narrative of victimhood and brings agency, empowerment, and political struggle into the picture. With this, she opened up the possibility for the rise of border studies that followed the trajectories of “race” and “gender,” and then “nation” and “sexuality” (Anzaldúa 2007, Michaelsen and Johnson 1997). Many of the border works that drew on this influential work analyzing the US–Mexico border region – which, as Renato Rosaldo has argued, is beyond a doubt the birthplace of border studies – have insisted that borders produce politically exciting hybridity, intellectual creativity, and moral possibilities. The borderlands, in other words, become the locus of struggle and hope for a better world where “not only does she [the new mestiza] sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (Anzaldúa 1987, 79).

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Introduction 11 The excitement that followed border works building on Anzaldua’s writings found its way into the discipline of anthropology primarily through the work of Renato Rosaldo, who, in his 1989 book Culture and Truth, fleshed out the emergence of a subset of anthropology called “borderland anthropology,” centered on questions of identity, cultural citizenship, and linguistic and cultural hybridity. Rosaldo emphasizes that US–Mexico border studies would be careful not to minimize the violence within the US–Mexico borderlands, stressing that the significance of this geographic area is in its theoretical and political intervention on how we view borderlands. In Culture and Truth he writes: Gloria Anzaldua has further developed and transformed the figure at the crossroads in a manner that celebrates the potential of borders in opening new forms of human understanding. In making herself into a complex persona, Anzaldua incorporates Mexican, Indian, and Anglo elements at the same time that she discards the homophobia and patriarchy of Chicano culture. In rejecting the classic “authenticity” of cultural purity, she seeks out the many-stranded possibilities of the borderlands. By sorting through and weaving together its overlapping strands, Anzaldua’s identity becomes even stronger, not diffused. (Rosaldo 1993, 216)

And yet, as most of these authors have also acknowledged, borderlands remain places of violence and exclusion. In an exciting book entitled Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, Michaelsen and Johnson explore the philosophico-political limits of border theory (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997). Their attempt is not to take the border for granted, either as an object of study and analytic tool or as a privileged site for progressive political work, but to argue that “for all of border studies’ attempts to produce a cultural politics of diversity and inclusion, this work literally can be produced only by means of – can be founded only upon – exclusions” (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997, 3). They build on Bhabha’s criticism of the ideas of multiculturalism or cultural diversity – the celebration of culture as an “epistemological object” where the multicultural model relies on acknowledging and respecting the other’s identity in all its alterity (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997, 4). Ideally, multiculturalism rests on the premise that one should not presume much of anything about the other, as it also should not produce a system of hierarchies. Multiculturalism should rely on benign and friendly judgments, without content and/or value. And yet, as Michaelsen and Johnson remind us: We know this to be theoretically impossible. Such judgment, inevitably, is exclusion, and is necessarily made from a position entirely incommensurate with the other. It is always already a kind of prejudice, and the very possibility of more familiar forms of such – the determining of categories of and candidates

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Border porosities

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for the inferior, the unnatural, the debased. As a model for multiculturalism, it is ineluctably exclusive: constructive of borders around identities, the fault lines today being precisely those differences that seem to matter and “make a difference” – gender, race, color, ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality, to name the most obvious. (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997, 5)

Michaelsen and Johnson remind us of Bhabha’s insistence on distinguishing between “cultural diversity,” on the one hand, and “cultural difference,” on the other. This “is the process of the enunciation of culture as ‘knowledgeable,’ ‘authoritative’, adequate to the construction of systems of identification” (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997, 7). Cultural difference is, then, the process of signification through which statements of culture and on culture differentiate, discriminate, and authorize the production of fields of force, reference, applicability, and capacity. Cultural difference would thus be the “foundation” for any possible cultural diversity, but it remains problematic, ambivalent (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997, 6). Inspired by the scholarship on the US–Mexico border, Ballinger also critically remarks on the use of the term “hybridity,” confirming that the literal and metaphorical border zones have been viewed “not as analytically empty transitional zones but as sites of creative cultural production giving rise to hybrid populations that subvert, contest and destabilize forms of domination” (Ballinger 2004, 2). Hybrid identities thus become disruptive forces against authoritarian and imperial discourses, enabling political mobilization that leads not only to new ways of perceiving political and cultural practices but also to the forging of a new cosmopolitanism. By using the Julian borderlands in Istria (between Croatia, Italy, and Slovenia) created after World War Two with the partition of Istria between Italy and socialist Yugoslavia, Ballinger rightly points out that the borderland anthropology inspired by the Mexico–US scholarship has failed to consider areas like the Balkans or Eastern Europe, despite the fact that since 1989 these regions have been fertile sites in which anthropologists might study the redrawing of actual political boundaries (Ballinger 2004, 2). One reason for this omission is that the examples from the Balkans, such as the Istrian case, hinders the enthusiasm attributed to political acts of resistance and subversion. Drawing on McClintock (McClintock 1995), Ballinger insists that the importance of hybridity has been the eagerness to acknowledge the passage from a dark, colonial past into a safe, secure state of post-coloniality and hybridity. She asks what this passage does “to our vision if, as we enter the room of hybridity, we find (at worst) a bloodbath or (at the very best) an exclusionary regime based on authentic hybrids and Others?” (Ballinger 2004, 20).

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Introduction 13 Moreover, Ballinger persuasively shows that although the hybridity discourse of the regionalists appears to challenge state forms in Croatia, it nonetheless remains closely connected to the hybridity ideologies that have been central to earlier state-building projects, such as the earlier state formations of imperial cosmopolitanism and autonomism such as Yugoslavism. While providing a significant political alternative in the Croatian context, hybridity ultimately does not subvert the dominant nation-state ideology that relies on the concept of the authentic hybrid, which in turn replicates both “conceptually and in everyday life, the logics it ostensibly opposes. It does so by revealing the mutual constitution of discourses of purity and hybridity within the context of historical state-building projects in the region” (Ballinger 2004, 1). In this book I also acknowledge the relevance and build on the growing literature on borders in contemporary Europe. Stimulated by the rapid changes that have been taking place on the continent after the Cold War, and with the enlargement of the EU with its new members in 2004 (the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; Hungary; the Czech Republic; and Slovakia), 2007 (Bulgaria and Romania) and 2013 (Croatia). A growing number of scholars have studied the socio-economic and political implications of these changes, as well as policy initiatives trying to manage the situation. This research has generated considerable data and improved the understanding of the region, while the policy-related work has often fueled innovative approaches towards overcoming the difficulties and utilizing the opportunities presented by shifting borders.10 As in my previous work (see Dimova 2013), here, too, I utilize literature on neoliberalism, tracing how neoliberal political-economic regimes are reconfiguring relationships between the nation-state and its subjects, the governors and the governed, through shifts in the nature of sovereignty, territoriality, power, and knowledge. For this study too, the reconfiguration of contemporary states by the increasing privatization of former state functions and by the growing number of private authorities involved in transnational economic investments is of major importance (Anand, Gupta and Appel 2018, Appel 2019, Burchardt and Kirn 2017, Eriksen 2016, Mitchell 2011, Ohmae 2005, Ong and Collier 2005, Pijpers and Eriksen 2018, Sassen 2006, Sassen 2014). The contemporary globalized and neoliberal transnational circuits that are redefining the functions of nation-states are inseparable from the processes of governance and nationalism along border areas, revealing that often political disputes coexist with intensive economic, symbolic, and human exchanges across borders. While I highlight the specificity of the border between Greece and RN Macedonia, and the name conflict that adds a unique dimension, I also

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Border porosities

insist on the complex articulation of recent political-economic changes that calls into question reductionist views of unidirectional economic exploitation, political hegemony, or state nationalism. This book’s contribution to border studies literature is thus in insisting that borders, infused with political, economic, and symbolic features, can simultaneously become the terrain for both exclusionary and emancipatory practices for the actors who are involved in border crossing on an everyday level and also be affected by larger political and symbolic disputes. To be able to grasp these ambivalent, contradictory, and often blurry features of the border, I return to the scholarship on porosities. With this approach I do not feel forced to choose whether the border is more a place of furthermost exclusion or a place of hybridity and cultural ambiguity that offers empowerment and liberation. Despite their rigid portrayal, strangely, I find an immense value in the distinction made in the field of petroleum engineering that separates different types of porosities depending on the types of the pores or the time of deposition (the time when the minerals/ materials are formed as rocks). Primary porosity, for instance, can be intergranular porosity formed within the pores themselves, where the pore spaces are connected one to another by throat passages. Then there is intragranular porosity within one and the same pore. This is porosity found between two or more reservoirs and has good interconnectedness and good permeability. Secondary porosity is caused by the action of the formation fluids or tectonic forces on the rock matrix after deposition (their formation as rocks) (Asgarinezhad, Asgarinezhad, Tokhmechi et al. 2016) As an illustration, fluid may create and enlarge the pore spaces while moving through the interconnecting channels in the limestone formation, dissolving its materials and creating vugs or round moldic pores. The porosities caused by these formations are known as vuggy and moldic porosities. As exciting as it has been to dwell on the detailed classifications and measurements of different porosities developed by earth science, my intention with the porosity metaphor is more to offer a visual and rhetorical template to explain the complicated events and processes that have taken place at the Greece–RN Macedonia border along temporal and spatial axes. In this vein, each chapter examines how different porosities of the border have been produced and shaped vis-à-vis historical and contemporary events.

Outline of the chapters Chapter 1 examines the effects of the 1871 construction of the Thessaloniki– Mitrovica railway line that connected the Ottoman towns of Thessaloniki, Gevgelija, Veles, Skopje, Mitrovica, and, later on, Niš and Belgrade. This

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Introduction 15 railway line played a crucial role in the connection and mobility of people, military equipment, food, and other commodities, and, as has happened in other regions, was a form of a vuggy or elongated porosity that was the main factor facilitating the modernization of this area. I examine the construction and completion of this main railway line and the history of the turbulent end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century that evidently pulsates around the line. This history tells a story of the last decades of Ottoman rule, as well as the final defeat of the Ottomans during World War One. The socialist period also enabled strong vuggy porosity by linking Yugoslavia with Athens on the south and to Munich and points further to the north, putting Gevgelija and its train station on the map for many travelers. With the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the train services became, at best, less reliable, but they were nonetheless crucial for the transfer of migrants in 2015–16. The current disruption of the train service between Thessaloniki–Gevgelija, when the passengers cross the border by bus, marks the first instance since 1879, when the line was opened, that the service has not been available to people on both sides of the border. Chapter 2 focuses on Gevgelija’s transformation from a small town previously known only as the last point on a freeway (once called Bratstvo i Edinstvo, “Brotherhood and Unity”) linking the former Yugoslav capitals of Skopje, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana with Thessaloniki. Gevgelija is now called the “Balkan Las Vegas,” where Greek citizens cross the border on a regular basis to obtain cheap beauty and health services, and also to shop for everyday produce and groceries. This surge of visitors from Greece who come to shop and to gamble has transformed the face of the town. The presence of casino-hotels has enabled Gevgelija to become one of the most economically successful places in Macedonia, with one of the lowest unemployment rates. Chapter 3 examines the intersection of formal and informal economies during socialism. I also address tourist practices during the socialist period and the visibility of the border for people living in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia. By drawing on the importance of class during the socialist period, I describe the lower middle-class habit of spending camping holidays in the area of Northern Greece around Paralia, Leptokaria, and Platamona. I contrast this with the current rise of Macedonian nouveaux riches who own seaside property in Greece, mainly in the area of Halkidiki, who become “sediments,” as for most of them it was the holidays in Greece that impelled them to make these purchases. By examining the legal changes that allowed non-EU citizens to purchase real estate, and the financial crisis in Greece that prompted many owners to sell their property to avoid the new property tax, I will contrast the current neoliberal modalities of the two states with those prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s and the role of

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Border porosities

tourism in dissolving or intensifying the borders. In this chapter I also focus on the child refugees who left Greece during the Greek Civil War as “human sediments,” deposited all around the world, whose presence is important political factor as well. Chapter 4 analyzes the recent protests and non-governmental organization (NGO) activities against the open-cast gold and copper mines in the Valandovo–Bogdanci–Gevgelija and Halkidiki regions. In the most fertile region and the center of organic food production in RN Macedonia, the local population and environmental activists organized protests and four referendums against the construction of an open-cast copper/gold mine where the extraction of gold and copper would be done using sulfuric acid and arsenic. A similar open-cast gold mine was constructed on the Halkidiki peninsula in Greece, which prompted collaboration between eco-activists on both sides of the border porosity created by transnational mining corporations and environmental activists opposing the corporate interests. Chapter 5 revisits the question of nationalism by examining the “Skopje 2014” project. I employ the concept of the border as a “tidemark” that sweeps over spatial and temporal axes and leaves material, visible, and invisible traces (Green 2009). This conceptualization of the border allows me to expand my enquiry beyond the immediate border region when the “Skopje 2014” project serves as a border zone that arches from the capital of the Republic of Macedonia to its state borders and beyond. “Skopje 2014,” as a project of material embellishment of Skopje sponsored by the VMRO-DPMNE government, was actualized through the construction of new buildings and monuments, and thus allows me to revisit the role of aesthetics and materiality in the tidal porosity that is created in the center of the Macedonian capital. Moreover, I discuss how the materiality of buildings and monuments operates as a bordering device not only across state lines vis-à-vis Greece, but within and among different political and social circles within RN Macedonia as well. The Colorful Revolution and its supporters created porosity in the city that facilitated tangible social transformations.

Notes 1 VMRO-DPMNE stands for the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (in Macedonian: Внатрешна македонска револуционерна организација – Демократска партија за македонско национално единство). The name was initially used for the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party for National Unity – a name

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Introduction 17 used by a party founded in 1893 in Thessaloniki with an agenda to fight for Macedonia’s independence from the Ottoman rule. On 17 June 1990, with the dissolution of Socialist Yugoslavia and Macedonia’s independence, VMRODPMNE was founded as a new political player in the newly multi-party political scene in Macedonia, claiming a legacy from the historical VMRO, and adopting a pronounced ethno-nationalist ideology. For more on the histоry of VMRO see Катарџиев 1985, Катарџиев 2000, Пандевски 1993, Пачемска 1985, Тодо ровски 2014. 2 The Social-Democrats came into power after having revealed the wiretapped recordings of Gruevski’s government that sparked a popular uprising. This scandal and the uprising, which I discuss in Chapter 5, was called The Truth about Macedonia (Вистината за Македонија). 3 www.mkd.mk/makedonija/politika/celosen-transkript-od-dogovorot-megjumakedonija-i-grcija (accessed 12 September 2019). 4 Prespa Agreement available at https://vlada.mk/sites/default/files/dokumenti/ spogodba-en.pdf (accessed 3 November 2018). 5 https://english.republika.mk/news/macedonia/warrior-on-a-horse-becomes-ahellenic-monument/ (accessed 12 September 2019). 6 A Greek travel website describes natural and carved cavities in the rocks surrounding Psarades that were often used as hermitages and retreats, with frescos painted on the rocks and two churches. The first church is “Metamorphosis” (Transfiguration), and dates from the early thirteenth century. The other, accessible only by boat, is “Panayia Eleoussa” (The Virgin of Charity), dating from the end of the fourteenth century and characterized by remarkable wall paintings, is dedicated to Agios Petros (Saint Peter). Between these two monuments, is the hermitage of the Mikri Analipsi, located high up in a small cavity in the rocks and dating to the fifteenth century. Kape Roti is at the end of a picturesque footpath starting from Psarades and heading north. Here one stands directly on the border of Albania and RN Macedonia, which cross Lake Prespa, and looking over the lake at its deepest point (www.gtp.gr/LocPage.asp?id=13602). 7 Етнографија на вилаетите Адријанопол, Монастир и Салоника. The book was published in French in 1878 and was prepared by the intellectuals Methodi Kusev and Georgi Gruev with the intention to promote the Bulgarian roots of the population in the regions of Adrianople, Thessaloniki and Bitola (Monastir). Also known as Exarchist Statistics, this survey appeared as a response to Alexander Synvet’s book Les Grecs de l’Empire Ottoman. Etude Statistique et Ethnographique (Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. Statistical and Ethnographic Examination), published in 1878. Synvet was accused by many Bulgarian historians of intentionally exaggerating the number of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. It is important to note that at that time the Bulgarian side considered all Slavic-speaking Macedonians to be Bulgarians (https://anemi.lib.uoc.gr/php/ pdf_pager.php?rec=/metadata/8/e/b/metadata-388–0000002.tkl&do=121610.pdf &pageno=3&width=841&height=595&maxpage=42&lang=en). 8 The First Balkan War ended in 1912 with the Balkan allies’ victory over the Ottomans.

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Border porosities

9 Rosaldo 1993, Hicks 1991, Behar 1993, and a collection of literary essays by Calderón and Saldívar (1991). 10 For more see, for instance, Anderson and Bort 2001, Armbruster, Rollo and Meinhof 2003, Assmuth 2005, Ballinger 2017, Berdahl 1999, Berdahl, Bunzl and Lampland 2000, Bray 2005, Burawoy and Verdery 1999, Donnan 2017, Donnan, Hurd and Leutloff-Grandits 2017, Donnan and Wilson 1999, Donnan and Wilson 2003, Goddard, Llobera and Shore 1994, Green 2012, Green 2013, Green 2015, Green 2018, Kaiser and Nikiforova 2006, Leontidou, Donnan and Afouxenidis 2005, Maddox 1997, Meinhof and Galasinski 2002, Meinhof 2003, Mihaylova 2005, Pelkmans 2006, Scott 2006, Scott and lu 2006, Wilson and Donnan 2005.

1

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Railway porosity across the border: from Ottoman railway lines to contemporary migrant transportation

Vug is a term used in geology referring to an elongated cavity formed by cracks and fissures opened by tectonic activity. Vugs can be filled by different materials such as minerals or they can remain empty cavities that allow water or other liquid to permeate through the rock. This vuggy character of porosity created by tectonic, environmental, or chemical processes bears similarity with the protractive, elongated porosity triggered by the first central railway built in the early 1870s between Thessaloniki and Mitrovica.1 Constructed with the initial intention to speed up transportation of passengers, soldiers, various merchandise, but also weapons and post, this railway has enabled intensive exchange since its construction until today, opening a durable crack on both sides of the border (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). Often, the railway had unintended consequences, other than those initially planned. On the one hand, the Ottoman army used the railway to transport soldiers and weapons during the period of uprisings in this region in the early twentieth century, thus enabling much better mobility and speed. The rebels and revolutionaries, on the other hand, made the railways and bridges targets of their attacks, thus affecting the military potency of the Ottomans. The importance of the railway has endured until contemporary times, although the dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation in 1991, and the ensuing financial crisis of Greece and RN Macedonia, have gravely affected the railway transport and infrastructure. The most striking recent porosity took place during the migrant and refugee wave of 2015–16, when over 300,000 people crossed the country, many on foot but many using trains through the Balkan corridor on their way to Serbia and further, to Western Europe. The public became aware of the Balkan corridor on 6 November 2014 when, in broad daylight at around 2 p.m. near the town of Veles in central RN Macedonia, a father and a seven-month-old baby from Afghanistan

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were run over by the express train traveling from Thessaloniki to Belgrade. This was the first incident, marking a trend that would claim many more lives in the months to come. On 23 April 2015, 14 more migrants were run over and killed by the evening express train near Demir Kapija in Southern RN Macedonia. The victims, economic migrants from Afghanistan and Somalia, used the railway to orient themselves on their passage from Macedonia to Western Europe. Coming from Greece, where they had initially arrived on one of the Greek islands, many of the migrants and refugees were transported by boats and buses to Greece’s northern border. At the border they were prohibited from entering RN Macedonia legally and using public transport. This prohibition forced hundreds of refugees and migrants to enter the country illegally and walk the 180 kilometers across Macedonian territory. To be sure that they were on the right path, most of them followed the railway tracks going north to Serbia (Figure 1.1a–c). The train accidents occurred when, exhausted and dehydrated, the migrants did not hear the approaching trains. In the period between January and April 2015, 27 migrants – half of whom were children – were run over by trains while crossing Macedonian territory. The horrific images in the media of dismembered and decapitated victims lying on the railway tracks prompted calls from local NGOs and activists, and also from international humanitarian organizations, to amend the Macedonian asylum law and allow the migrants and refugees to enter, transit, and exit the country legally. After considerable pressure, the Macedonian parliament revised the asylum law and its new version was passed in May 2015. The new law allowed legal entry and 72 hours of free movement through Macedonian territory, pending mandatory registration at the border. This law therefore allowed the refugees and migrants to legally use public transport, and also to apply for asylum in Macedonia if they decided to stay longer than the 72 hours.2 In the period from the passing of the law until November 2015, when the border was closed to economic migrants, hundreds of thousands of people entered, passed through, and exited RN Macedonia. The majority used trains as their main means of transportation, which made the Macedonian railway company crucial in the transportation of migrants and refugees. This activity came after a long period of decline in the amount of transport and profits. Nowadays trains and railways are managed by two state-owned companies: Macedonian Railway Transport and Macedonian Railway Infrastructure. The two companies have 1,200 employees each, a total of 2,400. In a report prepared on the state of the Macedonian railway, Al Jazeera identified the employees of these two railway companies as the oldest in Europe: the average age is 60 years. The same report reveals that both companies have

Railway porosities

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Figure 1.1a–c  Migrants walking or resting on the railway tracks in RN Macedonia in 2016

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experienced a constant decline: in 2008, for instance, the number of passengers was 1,440,000 and in 2016 it dropped to 663,000. The same trend applies to the transportation of freight: in 2008 the amount of goods transported by trains was 4.2 million tons, and in 2016 it was 1.3 million tons. The Railway Transport company has suffered the largest loss in the country: €11 million, and the Railway Infrastructure has incurred an €8 million loss, meaning an overall loss in 2017 of €19 million.3 This changed briefly during the migrant crisis and the need for transportation in 2015–16. The fact that the company used old trains dating from Yugoslav times that could not run faster than 20 kilometers an hour made the travel excruciating. At the peak of the migration wave in 2015–16 the state-owned railway company increased the price of a ticket from Gevgelija to Tabanovce – a journey of 180 kilometers – from €5 to €23 per person. With 4,000–5,000 people entering the country daily, media reporters estimated that the profit for the railway company increased drastically. As no receipts were issued for the tickets, it was difficult to estimate the overall profit. The railway company also abolished the regular discounts for families traveling together that had existed prior to the migrant crisis. After the border was closed – first for economic migrants in November 2015 and then for all others in March 2016 – the railway continued to be used by local people in the country, and prices went down significantly. The reasons for the crisis in the Macedonian railway companies are not unique to RN Macedonia. This is the case in all Former Yugoslav countries which did not manage the transition of their railway companies well. Overemployment, lack of investment coordination with the other types of transport, and refusal to privatize the state-owned companies have been pointed out as the main reasons for the decline of railway transportation and maintenance of the infrastructure.4 What was a pleasurable trip from Greece through Yugoslavia (Macedonia to Serbia and further north or west during socialist times), became a more complicated undertaking in the 1990s due to the wars and other turbulent political events. Owing to the political and economic crisis in Greece, passenger services were suspended from 2011 until spring 2014. The beginning of the migrant crisis put a stop to the operation of the direct train, and the migrants and refugees were transported by bus to Idoumeni, the last point in Greece. The final 1.2-kilometer stretch to Gevgelija they crossed on foot, arriving at the railway station in Gevgelija and waiting to board one of the three trains traveling north to Tabanovce and the border-crossing with Serbia. The direct train on the route Belgrade–Skopje–Gevgelija–Thessaloniki resumed in 2016 when the migrant wave subsided. But due to the technical problems of the railways and the low number of passengers, the train stopped again. It was reestablished only briefly during the summer months of May–September 2019.

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Investigating the vuggy and moldic porosities enabled by the central railway line and train system that crossed the border, from its initial construction in the early 1870s to the contemporary use of trains in the transportation of displaced people through the Balkan route in 2015–2016, I zoom onto gateways created by the railway system established since the construction of the first railway in 1871. The railway shows the importance of this porosity through the inter-bellum, the socialist period, all the way to independence and contemporary times. By looking at the modifications of the railway in different periods, one discerns the historical, technological, political, economic, and humanitarian landscapes of this region, and the relevance of the border for the continuous change. The porosity of this region began to intensify with the railway that started operation in 1873, when a new line was constructed to connect Skopje and Thessaloniki. The hundredth anniversary in 1973 resulted in a detailed study sponsored by the state-owned Macedonian Railway company that included a team of historians, social scientists, and engineers who conducted comprehensive archival, ethnographic, and technical research to examine the relevance of the railway for the development of Macedonia since Ottoman times (El-Din​ 2009, Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). The analysis provides a detailed study of the challenges due to the various geomorphological configurations that included canyons, valleys, and geological formations that were not easily overcome, and also of the economic, military, and social advantages brought by the railway system (Битоски, et al., 36).

The railway in Ottoman Macedonia In the mid-nineteenth century the economy of the Ottoman region of Macedonia was heavily impaired by the bad roads used to transport goods and commodities by camel, donkey, and buffalo (Wilkins quoted in Gounaris 1993, 32). In a detailed analysis, Gounaris describes the economic struggles of Ottoman Macedonia in the nineteenth century prior the construction of the railways. Underdeveloped, with “wretched roads” that held back the economic progress of the region, Macedonia nonetheless possessed extensive and unused agricultural and mineral resources, especially silk, tobacco, and cotton (Gounaris 1993, 31). Arguably, it was the lack of efficient overland communication that created the region’s isolation and was the main obstacle to its exploitation. Gounaris (1993) even points out that it would not have been surprising if the local Ottoman politicians still maintained a backward view that bad roads and limited access to the hinterland strengthened their control over their provinces:

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In any case, the successive emancipation of the Balkan nation states and the continuing penetration of western capital in the Empire in search of new markets greatly enhanced the importance of the Ottoman European provinces. Particularly after the Crimean War and the opening of the Suez Canal, Macedonia assumed the triple role of a rich resource deposit, an extensive market and a crucial transit area. (Gounaris 1993, 32)

Further on, Gounaris describes the foreigners’ impressions of the soil fertility, the lush forests, the abundance of expansive pastures, the quality of some agricultural products (when compared to European standards), supported by plentiful water supply and a favorable climate. These conditions would undoubtedly guarantee a prosperous agricultural economy and a developed agricultural class. Notwithstanding the advantages in terms of natural resources, there were limited prospects for human activity, which profited from only a small measure of nature’s resources. “According to a rough estimate only one-tenth of the agricultural potential was systematically exploited. In most places cultivations were kept to a limit which was determined by the level of local demand. Cereals were the main crop. In the early 1860s wheat, maize, barley, rye, and millet fields covered almost 90 percent of the cultivable land in the district of Salonika. Cotton occupied only three percent” (Gounaris 1993, 38). Ottoman officials recognized the need to develop transport and infrastructure. To get the best of the natural resources, it was evident to the Ottoman authorities that railways would offer the best solution, given the successful rise of railways in the West. Sultan Abdül Aziz and his grand vezirs Ali and Fuad were therefore committed to constructing railway and telegraph communication as a priority. These projects aimed at attracting western capital, but also at stimulating the local agriculture and industry. With a hope that they would eventually improve the living conditions of the local people, the Ottoman authorities envisioned a revenue increase that would in turn improve tax collection (Gounaris 1993, 38). The first ideas for building railways in the Balkans came from the French–German geologist Ami Boué, who wrote in his 1852 book that the construction of the railways in the Balkans should be done by foreigners, who should be not only sponsors but also engineers and specialized artisans (Boué cited in Gounaris 1993, 39). He argued that there should be four lines connecting Belgrade to Istanbul, Scutari to Belgrade, Larissa to Belgrade via Thessaloniki, and Istanbul to the Adriatic Coast (Gounaris 1993, 37).5 Although there were initiatives by the French and British consuls in Salonika in the 1860s, the first tangible initiative took place on 31 March 1868 with the signing of the preliminary contract between the Ottoman government (Sublime Porte) and Laugrand Dumonceau, representative of a Franco-Belgian group consisting of the firm Van der Elst and Co., the

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French Crédit Foncier, and a London consortium. This project conceived by the grand vezir Ali Pasha envisioned the construction of a main line from Istanbul to Belgrade via Adrianople (Edirne in Greek) and Niš and two additional branch lines between Niš–Thessaloniki and Adrianople–Varna. Although the contract was canceled due to unfulfilled requirements, only five days after the cancelation, on 17 April 1869, a new contract was signed (Gounaris 1993, 42). The finances for the construction were provided by Brussels banker Baron de Hirsch with loans from French and Austrian banks, as he founded two new companies to finance the construction of the line. The signing of the contract between the Ottoman authorities and Baron de Hirsch enabled one of the most ambitious public works in Ottoman history to begin: to construct a railway line of 1,550 miles throughout the European provinces of the Empire. Part of the scheme was a 225-mile-long branch line which was to cross Macedonia and link Thessaloniki to Priština. Up until 1896, following various conventions, negotiations, and conferences, a network of 730 miles of railway was laid in Macedonia by foreign companies with foreign capital, and connected Thessaloniki with its extensive hinterland. The construction was completed roughly in three stages. Baron de Hirsch built the first section from Thessaloniki to Mitrovitca via Skopje (219 miles) between February 1871 and June 1874. He also realized the second part, a 53-mile-long branch line from Skopje to Vranje, which was constructed between August 1885 and May 1888 connecting Thessaloniki to the European railway network. The last stage included two projects built with a promise of extremely high returns per mile: the Thessaloniki–Bitola line, built with German capital (May 1891–June 1894) and the Thessaloniki–Alexandropoulous junction supported by French and Dutch capitalists (June 1893–April 1896) (Gounaris 1993, 144). The building of the railway between Thessaloniki and Mitrovica via Skopje (which initially was meant to run to Priština), began on 9 February 1871, giving hope for a promising future including the state-of-the-art in the field of railway construction. The subcontractor was the Italian firm Bariola. Despite a delay due to the harsh winter conditions and floods, the first 62 miles, crossing the plain between Salonika and Gevgelija, were opened for traffic in July 1872 (Gounaris 1993, 44). Due to revolts and uprisings in the Ottoman Empire in the course of the 1870s, Baron de Hirsch changed the conditions of the contract, ending the line at Mitrovica instead going to Priština and thus reducing its length. He formed a new firm which was later sold to Austrian and German banks. In order to change the contract, the line had to be checked by two separate committees (the first one consisting of three Austrian and German engineers, and the second commissioned by the Ottoman government consisting of two British engineers).

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Both committees agreed that the line was in order and that no better or more modern line was needed in the Balkans. Gounaris maintains that both reports were biased and unfair to the Turks, and the technical flaws of the line would have negative consequences for the economy of the region, affecting the local population, the Ottoman rulers as well as the Western investors (Gounaris 1993, 50). The Salonica–Mitrovica line connecting the Balkan region enabled considerable porosity of people and goods, and also of capital and investment as Western investors were main players in developing the Balkan railway system. The development and expansion of railways in the Ottoman Empire therefore has to be analyzed in the context of the history of international railway development. The main world powers competed to gain political/economic influence in the declining Ottoman Empire while preserving the unwritten rule of respecting Ottoman territorial integrity. As a result, each world power built and developed its own railway networks in a manner which, to some extent, represented its interests in the Ottoman Empire (El-Din 2009, 2). This resulted in several different types of autonomous railways: short British lines aimed at linking ports to areas which produced raw materials badly needed by Britain, and French-built series of small networks in the Levant to guarantee economic influence equal to France’s socio-cultural influence in the region. These efforts were dedicated to proving the respective countries’ rights to these areas if the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. The Germans, on the other hand, were interested in long trunk lines for strategic purposes: namely, providing a secure link not threatened by the British Royal Navy in case of hostilities, and a route parallel to the British-controlled Suez Canal. The only exception was the Hejaz railway, which was financed and operated by the Ottoman government (although German expertise was used in building it). In addition, inter-imperial rivalry was evident in the running of railway networks operated by different countries. For example, a French and a German company refused to create a junction between their two railway systems, although they were only a few hundred yards apart from each other, and even deliberately ran their trains on contrary schedules so that passengers always missed their connections (El-Din​ 2009, 7). Going back to the Thessaloniki–Mitrovica line, it is important to note that by 1873, a significant part of the railway line had already been built and was open for service. The line included several bridges across the rivers Vardar and Pčinja. At first built as wooden constructions, later on the bridges were rebuilt with iron. The greatest challenges in the initial construction were two steel bridges: the first was in Skopje6 over the river Vardar and consisted of three 40-meter-long arches. The second was at the stretch between Kumanovo and Romanovce, which required more sophisticated

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engineering and, as such, posed a major challenge for the construction team (Quataert 2005, Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески (1973) explain that soon after this railway was built the Ottoman authorities initiated the construction of another line from Thessaloniki to Bitola7 that was built between 1871 and 1874. This line was an important extension connecting Bitola and Thessaloniki to Niš in Serbia and thence to Sofia in Bulgaria via the aforementioned Thessaloniki–Mitrovica line. These railway connections meant linking the most important urban centers in the territory of Macedonia: Skopje was connected to Bitola with a 136-mile railway. Bitola, unmistakably the most important Ottoman urban center in Macedonia at that time, after Thessaloniki, was now connected by rail to Thessaloniki, the most important Ottoman port after Istanbul.8 Connecting Bitola to Skopje and then going further to Niš and Belgrade in the north was an important achievement, but also a major challenge during the construction process, primarily due to the terrain with its many hills and canyons (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). Between 1893 and 1896, the Bitola–Thessaloniki railway was further extended from Thessaloniki via Dojran, Seres, Drama, Xanthi, and then via Alexandropoulos all the way to Istanbul. In this way, the railway not only provided a direct connection between Thessaloniki and the Ottoman capital, but also connected Skopje and Bitola to that same destination (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 38). The importance of these lines in the region, which effectively recapitulated the Roman roads Via Egnatia and Via Militaris, was enormous: the Thessaloniki–Skopje line changed the course of the region’s development by allowing direct connection between the Ottoman region and the West via Niš, Belgrade, Budapest, and Vienna. It enabled the unprecedented rapid and regular transport of people, commodities, and post (Purcar 2007) and also allowed the transportation of large quantities of goods regardless of size and weight. With this new means of transportation, the cost of transport dropped significantly, as there was a rapid increase in safety of freight transportation. Movement of people and goods was no longer affected by weather conditions that previously were the main obstacle in the process of transportation (Karkar 1972). The Skopje–Thessaloniki railway line gave Thessaloniki an even bigger status: it was already the main political and economic center after Istanbul, and it was likewise the second most important port. After 1873, it became the main railway center as well. The construction of the railway allowed unprecedented movement to the north and to the south. Until 1888, imported commodities would go to the south and exports to the north. With the construction of the railway, however, there was increasing movement between north and south, as both directions were included in the transportation of

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exports and imports (Karkar 1972, Quataert 2005, Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). The railway line from Thessaloniki to Bitola and then to Istanbul via Alexandropoulos (Dedeağaç in Turkish) was also a major achievement. This line connecting Thessaloniki with Istanbul ran through several larger urban centers such as Dojran, Seres, and Drama and connected more than 400,000 people. Moreover, the construction of the railway system had a major positive impact on the vilayet of Selânik (the district of Thessaloniki), as trade became lively and strong. The improved transportation facilitated the development of industries such as cotton weaving, steam mills, and factories for production of different textiles. In addition, the mining of chromium in the region between Skopje and Mitrovica was the most important metal industry in the final decades of the nineteenth century (Quataert 2005, Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). As already noted, the railways built in the Balkans were initially funded by mixed West European capital consisting of French, Belgian, German, and British money. They were fully constructed and supervised by Western engineers and companies (Conte 2014, Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). Until 1912 the Thessaloniki–Mitrovica line, as one of the main arteries in the region, was managed by the Oriental Rails company, which had its seat in Istanbul. The line was supervised and inspected by the European Turkish railway system, with a seat in Thessaloniki, which employed one supervisor, one director, two clerks, one expert and technical manager, three expert clerks, two switch operators, and two signal operators. This line was heavily used by regular travelers, but to an even greater extent it was used by the Turkish army. Because of this, there was a need of proper technical maintenance. There were employees in every major city, and thus the railway company became an important generator of employment (Christensen 2017, El-Din 2009, Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973).

The assaults on and the revolutionary uses of the railway The railway played one of the most important roles in the outcome of the Ilinden Uprising9 of 1903. Even in the pre-Ilinden period, the railways had a negative impact on the Macedonian struggle for independence because the Turkish army could swiftly and safely be transported to different places in the Balkans (Purcar 2007). Prior to the Ilinden uprising, the railway tracks were not targeted by anti-Ottoman rebels and members of the uprising. Arguably, the international companies gave concessions to the Ottoman Empire to use the railways, as it was in the West’s interest to protect and

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preserve the Empire, rather than to destroy it through the individual struggles for independence (El-Din​ 2009). Hence, between 1893 and 1908, which was a period of intensive uprisings in Macedonia against the Ottoman rule, the railway primarily served the Ottoman army.10 Moreover, the railway was essential in protecting and extending the Ottoman rule. Goce Delčev – who was a leading fighter for Macedonian independence (and is now claimed by both North Macedonia and Bulgaria as their own national hero) – was the first to instigate assassinations and to target the railway lines and bridges. There were several attacks on the railways of Macedonia: one of the strongest assaults was on 18 March 1903, when the railway bridge in the town of Drama was completely destroyed. This was among the first attacks and reassured the revolutionaries that railway assaults could be used as effective means for the mobility and the military readiness of the Turkish army (Brown 2003b, Rossos 2008, Катарџиев 1985). The Turkish army was also aware of the negative effects that railway assaults could have for their military success. They therefore invested significant effort in preparing their counteractions. Following the attack on the bridge in Drama, for instance, 150 people were arrested under a suspicion of involvement in the assault or somehow assisting the revolutionaries in executing the attack (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 52). On 28 April 1903, a train coming from Istanbul with 120 passengers was attacked by the anarchist group known as the Salonika Assassins (солунски атентатори or Gemidžii), led by Pavel Šatev who were fighting for independent Macedonia (Пандевски 1993, Пачемска 1985). The assassins used approximately 1 kg of dynamite and destroyed the engine and several compartments of the train. On 28 April 1903, the same assassins used dynamite to blow up the French ship Guadalquivir as it was leaving Thessaloniki harbor (Quataert 2005). On 28 August 1903, the assassins also attacked the daily express from Budapest to Istanbul near the town of Lüleburgaz, with the intention of destroying a bridge and cutting off communication between Edirne and Thessaloniki (Karkar 1972). The attack resulted in seven dead and 15 injured. The Turkish authorities were brutally repressive towards the nearby local population. Dame Gruev, one of the leaders of the political movement for independent Macedonia, wrote a letter to the director of the Oriental Rail in Turkey stating that the Christian population in Edirne vilayet was against Ottoman rule and therefore the railway company should be aware that the revolutionary movement would target the railway lines as they tried to achieve complete liberation from the Ottomans (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, Пандевски 1978). This is the first official document to give a hint of the upcoming Ilinden uprising, which would take place on

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2 August 1903. The director of the railway company, Emanuel Steiner, went to the vali (ruler of the vilayet) and the Ottoman authorities in Thessaloniki to show them the letter and to warn the officials that the Macedonian revolutionaries were targeting the railway and that the safety of the passengers on the Thessaloniki–Skopje line could not be guaranteed (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 83–6). Due to this, the railways were subjected to strict control and surveillance. Nonetheless, a series of railway attacks took place at the village Kravari near Bitola. These attacks also destroyed the telephone wires near the village of Gradsko, where there was also an “interruption” of the railway line. The biggest of this series of attacks was on the railway bridge in Gevgelija, which breached the line and created a crater 900 meters wide (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 84). The Ilinden Uprising, which began in the town of Kruševo in the Monastir vilayet and elsewhere, such as Kastoria (Kostur) and Kleisoura (Klisura) in what is now Greece, was the biggest uprising in Macedonia. It was eventually put down by the Turkish army just ten days after the establishment of the Autonomous Macedonian Republic on 12 August 1903, although rebellions continued well into November 1903 (Banac 1984, for more see Brown 2003b, Jelavic 1983, M.Gilbert 2004). The Turkish army succeeded in defeating the revolutionaries due to rapid transport by train via Thessaloniki to Bitola, and also the massive transport directly from Istanbul on the railway that ran via Alexandropoulos to Bitola. In addition, a large number of Turkish soldiers came from the north via the Mitrovica–Skopje–Gradsko line. It can be argued therefore that the Ilinden Uprising failed because the railway system facilitated the mobility and speed of the Turkish army (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). Although the Ilinden Uprising in Kruševo succeeded for only ten days, and thereafter suffered bloody defeat, the strategy of striking at the railway lines continued after 1903. In March 1904 an explosive charge was set off in a compartment on a train running between Gevgelija and Gumendže (Goumenissa in Greek). One month later, another explosive blasted the line to Thessaloniki. Similar violent activities on the railways continued until 1911, when there was an attempt in the month of May to actually blow up the train carrying the Turkish Sultan Mehmet V Reşâd during his tour through Kosovo and Macedonia. But the local Ottoman authorities discovered the assassination attempt in time, and the sultan was greeted at the Bitola/ Monastir railway station (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). In sum, the construction of railway lines was hugely important for the modernization of Macedonia at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It changed the ways in which the region continued to develop, as it enabled the rapid transportation of both people and freight (Purcar 2007). It was also crucial for the army, which made the railway

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even more important and subject to a variety of assaults. Hence, the railway served a dual function: it enabled economic development of the region, and also subjected the villagers and the population of the surrounding area to punishment and suffering, due to the assaults carried out by the revolutionaries fighting against the Ottoman rule. The Ottoman Empire had well-developed legal ways to protect the normal functioning of the railway system, relying on a firm set of punishments for those who participated in or were in any way associated with the assaults. For participating in these insurgent activities, the penalty was from 1 to 3 years’ imprisonment, if there were no deaths (Djordjevic 1989). If there were deaths, the punishments included death penalties, and also imprisonment for many years. There were also financial penalties for the locals, ranging from 2 to 12 liras, if they interacted with the insurgents (Karkar 1972, Özyüksel 2015, Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). Just as they were during the first decade of the twentieth century, the railways were also hugely important during the Balkan wars (1912–13). The First Balkan War was fought by the allied forces of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece against the Ottomans, to expel them completely from the Balkans. The Second Balkan War was started by Bulgaria’s attack on Greece and Serbia over the division of Macedonia. Bulgaria lost to Greece and Serbia, and Romania and Turkey both took advantage of the situation to (re)gain territory occupied by Bulgaria (Катарџиев 1998, Катарџиев 2000). The main battles of the First Balkan War in Macedonia were fought in Kumanovo on 23–24 October and in Bitola on 17–19 November 1912, when the Serbian army encountered the Ottoman forces. Another battle took place on the Struma River in East Macedonia, where the Bulgarian army fought the Ottomans. At the time of these battles, the railway remained central to the fighting (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). But this time large numbers of the Turkish civilian population fled by train from the areas of Kumanovo, Kachanik, and Skopje, towards Istanbul, due to the obvious pending defeat of the Ottomans. This migration of the Muslim/Turkish population was motivated by a fear of vengeance and of being left without protection (Djordjevic 1989, Hall 2000).11 While the railways continued to be heavily militarized and used for military purposes during the First and the Second Balkan Wars,12 the railway system of the Ottoman Empire remained in the hands of foreign capitalists and the Turkish army had to pay large royalties and fees to for using the railways. It was therefore profitable for the foreign investors and owners to encourage the Ottoman army to use the railways as much as possible. The International Railway Company, the owner of the railway lines in the Balkans, actually earned a great deal of money during the two Balkan Wars (Hall 2000).

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To illustrate, in the period 18–26 October 1912 all trains operating in Macedonia were deployed in the transport of the population and soldiers. The allied forces defeated the Ottoman army and Bulgaria in 1913, and Serbia and Greece came out as the biggest winners. Their victory brought them 90 percent of the territory of the Ottoman region of Macedonia, as a result of the Bucharest Peace Conference in 1913. Here, for the first time, an official state border was set up near the town of Gevgelija demarcating the territories of Greece and the Kingdom of Serbia. In this respect, Gevgelija became a border railway station, and Macedonia was divided between the two countries. Wilkinson’s study (1951) reveals that geographically Macedonia was so conceived by almost all parties. Contemporary RN Macedonia was primarily absorbed by Serbia, although Greece annexed the largest portion of the overall Ottoman region of Macedonia (Катарџиев 2000). In addition to Gevgelija, another border railway town was Dojran (Doirani in Greek). This town was on the railway line to Alexandropoulos and Istanbul. Under the Bucharest Treaty, however, the town of Doirani and its railway station remained in Greece. Only the village of Dojran remained in Serbian territory, without a railway line (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 100–2). With the takeover of the region of Macedonia by Serbia on 26 October 1912, the Serbian army also conquered Skopje. This meant that Serbia became the official “owner” of the railway lines, especially the most important one: Mitrovica–Kachanik–Skopje–Veles–Gradsko–Gevgelija, all the way to Thessaloniki, which was “owned” by Greece. At the beginning of the Balkan Wars there was only one hospital or so-called sanitary train, although the number of hospital trains gradually increased and they eventually managed to transport 110,000 Serbian and allied wounded soldiers. The hospital trains managed to travel around 30,000–40,000 kilometers, connecting places such as Bitola, Prilep, Veles, Štip, or Skopje (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 101). With the end of the Second Balkan War, railway transportation returned to normal, operating both passenger and freight trains. At the dawn of World War One, the number of employees working on the railways steadily increased. The war period was marked by frequent terrorist attacks. This time they were organized by so-called Vrhovisti, revolutionaries sent to Macedonia by Bulgaria with a mission to correct the “injustice” of the Bucharest Treaty and take over the Macedonian territory from Serbia. This fight for the annexation of Macedonian territory to Bulgaria also targeted the railway lines, although no major assaults took place (Катарџиев 2000). The Rail Company that owned the railway lines had 12 engines and 800 traveling compartments. At this time the Serbian Association of Transportation wanted to buy the railway system from the German concessioners; however, the German bank offered the German shares to its Austro-Hungarian partners



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in the Serbian railway. Following the various transactions at this time, the railway ended up in shared ownership between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Serbia (Christensen 2017).

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The vuggy and moldic porosities of the railway during the world wars The railway system in the Ottoman region of Macedonia proved to be crucial during World War One. Between 1914 and 1915 the railways were mainly used by the Central Powers. More specifically, on 1–2 April 1915 Bulgarian officers and Austro-Hungarian pyrotechnicians staged an attack across the Serbian border at Udovo, situated on the river Vardar near Strumica and Valandovo, and near the tripartite border between Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria.13 The president of the Bulgarian government at that time, Dr Stevan Radoslavov, sent a letter to the Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Bulgaria notifying him that he would do all he could to disrupt military supplies intended for Thessaloniki. This first attack of the Bulgarian army in April 1915 was intended to create an insurgency against Serbia and the other Allied Powers, and thus to cut the connections between Serbia, Romania, and Russia (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 120). As during the Ilinden Uprising and the Balkan Wars, during World War One, the railway line between Skopje and Thessaloniki became the main target of Bulgarian forces. Initially, the Allied Powers tried to lure Bulgaria to their side. However, this did not work out because tension between Serbia and Bulgaria became too strong, given the results of the Second Balkan War and the 1913 Bucharest Treaty, when the Allied Powers gave the bulk of the territory of Macedonia to Serbia and Greece (Gilbert 2004). When it became clear that Bulgaria would become part of the Central Powers and partner with Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Turkey, the Skopje–Thessaloniki railway line became crucial for the allied forces. The French Colonel Fournie was sent to check the transportation capability of this line before the heavy battles and offensives actually took place. On 1 April 1915, in a detailed report that is now in the Thessaloniki archives, Fournier wrote to the Special Investigative Bureau of the French army. The report contained details about the railway line Belgrade–Thessaloniki and Skopje–Thessaloniki, such as the number of trains. Of a total of 24 trains between Skopje and Thessaloniki, only one was for passengers and two for military transport. This report reveals that the trains from Skopje to Thessaloniki had a maximum capacity of 34 compartments, and that the railway line was in very poor condition, especially near Skopje and Gevgelija (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973).

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Fournier’s main remarks highlighting the poor condition of the railway stressed that the main reason for this was the initial poor construction of the line. In addition, poor maintenance in the period 1912–15, when violent fighting during the Balkan Wars badly damaged the line, contributed to the dire condition of the railway. These conditions often required improvisations on the line, given that many of the bridges had been either destroyed or badly damaged during the Balkan Wars (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 162). In addition, the train stations had poor supplies of the water needed for the locomotives. There was a chronic deficiency of technical personnel and experts for maintenance of the line and the trains. Fournier and France therefore decided that Serbia needed assistance in running and maintaining its railway transportation. This resulted with the presence of 4,000–5,000 Russian soldiers who were installed in the Gradsko sector near the town of Veles to prevent any kind of insurgencies and to maintain safety during travel (Shorrock 1970, Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 163). On 20 October 1915 the Bulgarian army intercepted the railway line near Veles. This was the reason why General Sarai, who replaced Fournier, insisted that the use of the railway between Gradsko and Gevgelija should be completely taken over by French railway units, part of the French army specializing in the maintenance of the railway. In December 1915 Bulgarian headquarters wanted to take over the Aegean Macedonia and Thessaloniki, part of the Macedonian territory that belonged to Greece. Both the Allied (France, Serbia, and Greece)14 and the Central Powers (Bulgaria, Germany, and Turkey) had vested interests in dominating the railway line (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 164). Most of the damages on the Vardar railway were inflicted by Bulgarian and German forces, especially in September 1918, when it was obvious that the Central Powers were losing the war. As they were withdrawing, they deliberately damaged the infrastructure. They destroyed not only the central railway line but also the railway to Bitola, Voden (Edhessa), Gumendže, and Doirani. Bitola, for instance, which was one of the main centers of fighting, was in such a condition that transportation of civilians was completely disrupted. The railway was used only for the army and the transportation of goods needed for military purposes (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 169). Situated within 5–15 kilometers of both sides of the Greek–Macedonian border there are cemeteries for French, British, German, Bulgarian, and Serbian soldiers killed during the wars. This was the site of the Macedonian Front, also known as the Salonica Front (after Thessaloniki). The front was formed as a result of an attempt by the Allied Powers in the fall of 1915 to aid Serbia against the combined attack of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria. On the eve of breakthrough, the front consisted of 600,000

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Bulgarian, Austro-Hungarian, and German soldiers on the Central Powers side, while Allied troops consisted of 180,000 French, 140,000 Serbian, 135,000 Greek, 120,000 British, 42,000 Italian, and 2,000 Albanian soldiers – 619,000 in total (Mitrović 2007, Pavlowitch 1999). The small town of Dojran on Lake Dojran hosted one of the major battles in World War One in 1916, when both sides used gas shells, making it the first use of this kind of weapon on the Salonica Front. The expedition came too late and in insufficient force to prevent the fall of Serbia, and was complicated by the internal political crisis in Greece (the “National Schism”) (Owen 2012). At the beginning of World War One, this border coincided almost literally with the Salonica or Macedonian Front (Solunski Front), where Serbia, supported by the allied forces of France and Britain as well as Greece, although officially Greece remained neutral during World War One), fought Bulgaria and its allies Austro-Hungary and Germany. The only material traces of the battles from this period are the French, British, or Serbian cemeteries in Bitola, Dojran, and on the mountain of Kajmakčalan. Eventually, a stable front was established, running from the Albanian Adriatic coast to the Struma River, pitting a multinational allied force against the Bulgarian army, which was at various times bolstered with smaller units from the other Central Powers. The Macedonian Front remained stable, despite local actions, until the great Allied offensive in September 1918, which resulted in the capitulation of Bulgaria and the liberation of Serbia. The Macedonian Front is interesting because it was perhaps the most diverse front in terms of the participants on both sides. On the Allied side there were French and British troops (with contingents from their colonies such as Senegal, Morocco, Madagascar, India, and French Indochina), followed by Italians, Russians, Serbians, a small Albanian contingent led by Essad Pasha Toptani, and finally the Greeks who joined the Allied side in 1917. Opposing them were the Austro-Hungarians, Germans, Bulgarians, and for a time even Turks with one army corps (Mitrović 2007). This front also had the highest percentage of casualties on both sides in international terms. The Allied Powers, consisting of France, Britain, Italy, and eventually Greece, came to assist Serbia in its fight against the Bulgarian, German, and Ottoman armies (for more see Palmer 2011). From the allied forces, France suffered approximately 70,000 losses, Serbia 40,000, Britain and Greece around 27,000, and Italy 10,000, while on the opposite side Bulgaria lost 200,000 soldiers. Stretching from the Adriatic coast in Albania to the river Struma in the east, the front line coincides almost entirely with the contemporary state border of the Republic of Macedonia (Palmer 2011, 23).15 Just as the local rebellions demonstrated the importance of the railways during the first decade of the twentieth century, during the second decade the two Balkan Wars and World War One corroborated their importance. This

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resulted in a decision to invest in the reconstruction and solid maintenance of the existing lines. Moreover, recognition of the railway’s importance also led to efforts to start the construction of new lines. This was overseen by the commander of the railway engineers of the German army, entitled the Eisenbauern Truppen von der Mazedonie (Christensen 2017). Additional new lines were built on the stretch from Belgrade to Thessaloniki, and also between Gradsko, Prilep, and Bitola. In his reports, the commander described the heavy damage to the railway and the necessity of building new narrow-gauge lines (tesnolinejki in Macedonian). These narrow-gauge lines were built parallel to the main line from Belgrade to Thessaloniki by a German construction company. Construction began on 26 April 1915 and was finished the following year, on 2 April 1916. The first narrow-gauge lines were built between Prilep and Bitola. This was of special importance, given that it was at the heart of the Macedonian Front where the Central and the Allied Powers had fought their main battles (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). A second narrow-gauge railway was built between Veles and Stepanci in January 1917, with a length of 52 kilometers. This line became most important for the supply of coal. As a matter of fact, supplying coal to the bunkers on the front lines was the narrow-gauge lines’ primary function. Another important narrow-gauge line was built between Skopje and Ohird. Built by Bulgarian military units with assistance from German military units, the construction of this line required a large workforce. The Bulgarian army therefore ordered every village in Macedonia to participate in building these narrow-gauge lines. In addition to the regular railways and the narrow-gauge railways, the Central Powers invested significant effort in building cable cars. Cable cars were almost unknown to the technical units. They were initially introduced by the Bleichert Company of Leipzig, a German engineering firm founded in 1874 by Adolf Bleichert. During the first half of the twentieth century the company dominated the aerial wire ropeway industry. During World War One the Bleichert Company developed a so-called “field cable car,” used by the German military forces during mountain warfare in the Balkans and other areas such as the Alpine and the Vosges regions (Christensen 2017, Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). The Bleichert Company supplied the material for the cable cars’ construction in the Macedonian region during World War One. Construction of the line started in April 1916, and it took only a few months to build the first stretch between Drenovo and Trojačin, which was completed on 10 June 1916. It started to operate that same month between Drenovo and Prilep, a stretch of 36 kilometers (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973; Christensen 2017). Another cable car was built between Pletvar and Prilep and had a

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major military significance due to its proximity to the front line. A separate line was built especially for the Macedonian Front between Demir Kapija, Konopište, and Turožde following the valley of the River Boršava. This line was 38 kilometers long and was completed in March 1917. The construction of these cable car lines required a large labor force. Hence, 850 military prisoners of English, Scottish, Indian, Greek, Slovene, and other national backgrounds were deployed during the construction. The division of the territory brokered by the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest remained in place after the Paris Peace Conference, except for the Strumica Valley, which was ceded by Bulgaria to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and the Alexandropoulous corridor, which Bulgaria had to cede to Greece. Aegean or Greek Macedonia, with its crucial port of Thessaloniki, remained in Greece, Vardar Macedonia continued to be part of Serbia, and the small corner of Pirin Macedonia remained in Bulgaria.16 Many border towns where heavy fighting took place, such as Kilkis (Kukuš in Macedonian), Dojran, Bitola, and Strumica, were almost completely destroyed or badly damaged. The railway was also damaged to the point of not being usable (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). One of the priorities in the interwar period, therefore, was speedy reconstruction of the railway system, especially the repair of the train stations in Gevgelija, Miravci, Udovo, Demir Kapija, and Veles, which had either been totally demolished or required major reconstruction. The Gevgelija train station, for instance, was badly damaged and almost completely destroyed. In 1919 it was deliberately demolished because it was beyond repair, and was then rebuilt on the old foundations (Гевгелија 2016). The train station in the village of Gradsko on the railway line Skopje–Thessaloniki was also entirely rebuilt. In addition to the train stations, most of the railway lines also required thorough reconstruction that proceeded in several stages: first there was a provisional period, then temporary reconstruction, and finally definitive reconstruction (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 172). The improvement in the railway system proceeded fast and was especially visible in the reconstruction of the station buildings. The train station in Skopje, for instance, built by the Ottomans, initially had a ground floor of stone and wooden pillars on the upper floor. The new train station that was built in 1925 (and then destroyed in the earthquake of 1963) was built with beautiful travertine stone from the Volkovo mine, a village near Skopje (Skopje Guide 1998).17 Although the interwar period brought a better quality to the construction of the buildings and infrastructure, it was evident that in the other parts of the Serbian Kingdom the quality of the railway lines and buildings was better than in the Macedonian region (or, as it was called in the interwar period, South Serbia), which remained a territory not fully integrated into

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the Serbian Kingdom. While in some parts of Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria trains could run as fast as 100 kilometers per hour, in Macedonia the fastest speed that the tracks could support was only 60 kilometers per hour (Катарџиев 2000). In addition, there were several incidents that resulted in damage to the restored system. The great flood of 1935 in Skopje damaged the newly built station, especially its coal storage area. Similar damage occurred in the Kumanovo train station. The earthquake that struck on 7 March 1931, with a tremor that lasted for 30 seconds, caused severe damage to Gevgelija’s newly built train station (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). In sum, the post-war period brought major improvement to the railway system, which continued steadily. When the main line Thessaloniki– Skopje–Mitrovica was opened in 1873, there were only eight train stations. During the interwar period this number increased to 30. Along with the rebuilding of the damaged lines, new railway lines began to be constructed, as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia recognized the importance of a well-developed railway system. Several new railway lines were built on the territory of Macedonia: the line between Veles and Štip was built in 1926, and the Veles–Kočani line was built in collaboration with a German company. This new line was built in the place of a narrow-gauge line built during the war years (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, 178). The interwar period is also important for the emergence of unions that affected the porous spread of labor politics across borders and ideological lines. The unions in the railway company were the first to bring socialist ideas to the Balkans. A series of massive strikes in Thessaloniki that took place in August 1919 objected to the working conditions of the railway workers: although they worked harder than before, their salaries had increased by only 10 percent while the overall inflation and living expenses had risen by 300 percent. Railway workers were forced to work 16–18 hours a day, which was brutal exploitation (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973, Катарџиев 1998, Катарџиев 2000). In Carbon Democracy (2011) Mitchell examines a unique situation that occurred in Britain in August 1911, when massive workers’ strikes spread from the coal mines to the railways. Unexpectedly, prime minister Churchill deployed troops to maintain control of the railways “violating a rule that military force could be deployed only at the request of local civil authorities – a rule confirmed by parliament following the Featherstone massacre of 1893, when soldiers had shot and killed striking coal miners” (Mitchell 2011, 62). In a heated discussion, labor leaders in parliament objected to this decision, insisting that the government could have effectively ended the railway strike by ordering the railway companies to concede the strikers’ main demand. They pointed out the importance of recognizing the right of national unions to represent the railway workers – “and attacked Churchill

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for his ‘diabolical part’ in provoking unrest by substituting ‘military rule’ for civil government” (Mitchell 2011, 62). Churchill’s justification for using the army referred to the nature of the railways, which had created “immense populations of working people … concentrated together in large cities, entirely dependent on trains to supply fuel and food, the strike threatened a degeneration … of all the structure, social and economic, on which the life of the people depends”. Railway lines allowed him to evoke the existence of a vulnerable economic and social “structure, something non-local whose protection required local civilian authority to be subordinated to a coordinated military power” (Mitchell 2011, 62). The railways changed the social and economic fabric of the world on a global scale. This was especially important in the face of the obvious threat of the upcoming war when Britain and the rest of the Western world began making preparations for a European conflict, including detailed planning of the use of railways for mobilizing troops (Mitchell 2011, 63). The railways (and the labor politics that they enabled) were obviously crucial to the spread of mass democracy in the Middle East and the Balkans. Influenced by Greece, in 1919 the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party in the Yugoslav Kingdom organized the first massive union meeting of the railway workers, when approximately 50,000–60,000 workers voiced the need to organize themselves in unions. The meetings concluded with a so-called protocol of agreement with the government that was reached on 7 October 1919, specifying that the work day should be no longer than 12 hours. As the agreement was not respected, the independent railway union reacted to the workers’ conditions and from 15 to 19 April 1920 the railway union organized a general strike. The strike caused a massive disruption of the system of transportation and the overall economy of the country (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). The working conditions of the railway workers were indeed terrible. Those who worked on the construction of the new railway lines between Skopje and Kočani, and Skopje and Štip in the course of 1925–26, and between Bitola and Prilep, had suffered the worst conditions. They therefore participated wholeheartedly in the union gatherings and the strikes that were organized across Macedonian territory. The railway workers also bore the greatest burden of the crisis when the Kingdom of Yugoslavia joined the fascist alliance (Tripartite or Berlin Pact) on 25 March 1941. They were on the front lines of the protests against the fascist pact, and many were among the first to join the partisan uprising that started on 7 March 1940 (Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 1973). The railways were again damaged during World War Two, as the railway system was used by the fascist occupiers, who were in alliance with Bulgaria. The end of the war and the constitution of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation

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marked a new era in the development and maintenance of the railway system. It also added a new dimension to the railway porosity, namely the rebuilding of the new Yugoslav Socialist Federation, in which young people would be involved in the so-called Youth Work Actions (Младински Работни Акции – MRA) to restore the destroyed country. In the period 1946–52 the main focus of the MRA was to reconstruct the old railway lines and build new ones. Brčko–Banovići was the first railway line. In the period between 1 May and 7 November 1946, 62,268 young people from all over Yugoslavia built 90 kilometers of railway line in Bosnia and Herzegovina. To build it, they had to dig 1,360,000 cubic meters of soil and to hollow out three tunnels 600 meters long through the stony Majevica mountains (Vejzagic 2013). Between 1 April and 15 November 1947, young volunteers committed to the new Yugoslav socialist society built the railway line between Sarajevo and Šamac. The 242-kilometer-long line was built by 217,234 workers who had to erect 17 bridges, build nine tunnels, and dig over 5 million cubic meters of soil (Supek 1963). On the territory of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, in addition to rebuilding the main railway line between Thessaloniki, Skopje and Belgrade, the main Youth Work Actions (ORA) were focused on building the main Yugoslav Freeway “Brotherhood and Unity” (Bratstvo–Edinstvo) that connected the Yugoslav capitals Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade and Skopje and ended at the southernmost point of the Yugoslav Federation, the town of Gevgelija and the border with Greece. The freeway and the main railway line were the main arteries that enabled connection and communication between the Yugoslav Republics, and also provided connections with Greece, Hungary, Austria, and Italy. Through Serbia there was also a connection to Romania and Bulgaria. During the existence of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia 1945–91 there was rarely any disruption of railway communication and the transportation of passengers and goods, except for the disruptions that began around Knin in 1990 and were harbingers of the coming war. Even when a massive earthquake struck Skopje on 26 July 1963, when the railway station was almost entirely destroyed, a temporary building was erected on the same site as the old station shortly afterwards, which enabled uninterrupted railway communication (Selinić 2009, Vejzagic 2013).18 The Yugoslav state considered the railway system crucial for both Yugoslavia’s internal and its external connection, given the state’s special status as a non-aligned country. Travel between socialist countries in the East, as well to the capitalist countries to the North and West, functioned without any problems, while the Yugoslav red passport allowed free travel in both the capitalist and socialist blocs. Only Greece required visas due to the unresolved issue of the child refugees from Northern Greece who

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left the country during the Greek Civil War, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3. After the dissolution of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia in 1991, and the declaration of the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, official relations between Greece and its new northern neighbor became tense. Greece imposed an embargo on Macedonia and thus violated international law. Despite this official – albeit illegal – blockade, which continued until 1995, the railway transport of freight and passengers was impeded but not completely interrupted. Due to the fact that the oil supply of the newly established Republic of Macedonia came through the port of Thessaloniki, Greece never officially disrupted the railway route, although there were significant delays. This was more due to business interests than to international pressure. The main predicament of the railways in this period was the altered financial situation: in the time of the Yugoslav federation the state-owned railway company was part of the larger Yugoslav network, which provided expedient maintenance and support. With the 1991 independence, maintaining the railway network and trains became the sole responsibility of the Republic of Macedonia. The severe economic crisis that preceded and followed the Yugoslav dissolution had a major impact on all aspects of life, including the railway infrastructure and trains. Broken windows and lack of heating during winter deterred many people from using the trains. However, the railway between Athens, Thessaloniki, Gevgelija, Skopje, and Belgrade continued to operate, albeit on an unpredictable schedule and with huge delays. Later on, passengers had to board a shuttle bus in Thessaloniki, cross the Macedonian-Greek border by bus and board a train in Gevgelija to continue their trip to Belgrade.

Railway interrupted Long-term disruption of the railway came as a result of the Greek financial crisis in 2011. The migration and refugee wave19 of 2015 caused major disruption, preventing regular travelers from using the trains. The two trains that ran in the morning and the evening were used only by the migrants and refugees, and did not stop anywhere on their way to Tabanovce and the border with Serbia. In November 2015 some European countries reached an agreement that only refugees from Syria and Iraq would be allowed to proceed through the Balkan Corridor and on to Western Europe. By then, Hungary had already closed its borders with Serbia and Croatia with steel barbed wire that prevented crossing into Hungarian territory. Slovenia, Croatia, and RN

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Figure 1.2  Migrants stuck in the no-man’s-land between Greece and RN Macedonia block the railway line

Macedonia followed Hungary’s example. This move caused more than 10,000 economic migrants from Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and different countries of Africa to block the railway and settle in the temporary camp of Idoumeni, situated on the Greek side of the border between Greece and RN Macedonia (Figure 1.2). The transit camp at Idoumeni was built in 2015 by Médecins Sans Frontières and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to provide basic support for no more than 6,000 refugees passing through that area each day. The camp had rapidly to become a longer-term residential camp and to accommodate a much larger number of migrants. The peak number of refugees staying at Idoumeni was more than 15,000. The main Thessaloniki– Skopje railway thus became completely blocked for passengers as well as for freight. The Greek and Macedonia railway companies reported massive losses due to the interruption of freight transport. The Greek newspaper Eleftrotipos reported that the financial loss incurred by the railway company following the disruption of transport in November 2015 was €30 million. Similarly, the Macedonian railway company reported massive losses that affected the entire Macedonian economy. On 24 May 2016, the Greek authorities began relocating people from the Idoumeni camp to facilities mostly in and around Thessaloniki, placing many in the Diavata camp at the Thessaloniki port. This finally ended the interruption of railway transport, although the passenger trains run only in the summer months.

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The 2015–16 migration wave revealed different stakeholders involved in the crisis: the migrants; the rail company employees, who complained of the harsh working conditions, given the massive influx of people; the managers of the state-owned company in Macedonia, which at one time even saw the crisis as a source of profit; the politicians and state regulators addressing public transport; and also NGO activists who tried to assist the displaced people on their passage to Western Europe. While the displaced people rightly complained about the appalling conditions in the Gevgelija train station and the Macedonian trains as they waited or were transported to Serbia, as well as the high price of Macedonia rail transport, the local citizens of Macedonia had completely stopped using trains. They also complained about the state’s failure to meet its citizens’ needs. It was obvious that the Macedonian state and the officials of the town of Gevgelija were not able to respond to a crisis of such large proportions and to meet the demands of the displaced people. Research conducted in September 2015 revealed that the railway company employees held extremely antagonistic views towards the refugees/migrants, blaming them for the destruction of social cohesion in Gevgelija and affecting the “peace of the town.” The migrant and refugee wave of 2015 and 2016, along with military and police cooperation between Greece and RN Macedonia, arguably supplanted the name issue, although the governing regime used the migrant crisis to develop different xenophobic scenarios about Western intentions to settle migrants on Macedonian territory. This was also the case for the medical and humanitarian teams of both countries (and the rest of the world) who were working together to assist migrants and refugees caught in a precarious situation. Once the “migrant crisis was over,” as an employee at the railway station in Gevgelija confirmed, the name issue returned to center stage and turned into the main topic not only of domestic but also of international politics with the signing of the Prespa Agreement in July 2018.

Conclusion To return to my geological discussion in the Introduction, I suggest that the vuggy and moldic analogy of pores to analyze the openings created by the railway network established in the Balkans since 1870s is helpful to grasp the transformations and transgressions that have happened around the border and along the railway. The first vug, created with the railway connecting Thessaloniki with Skopje and Mitrovica, soon became interconnected with additional lines cross-cutting the initial one that opened in 1873. The porosity of the border triggered by the railway lines and established at different points in the formations of the independent states occurred in different aspects of

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life such as the economy, politics, and the military. This porosity continues, as revealed in efforts by different nation-states to control the recent migration wave in 2015–16 and tame the border porosity by using extreme measures such as barbed wire and thorough militarization of the border. In her work on borders Sarah Green argues that we should not conceptualize of a border as a line drawn by the state (Green 2018). Lines are onedimensional abstractions that exist on maps. Hence, borders marked as lines on maps do not have three-dimensional form. In actual life, borders are never one-dimensional and one-sided (if this is the case, there is always an “unfinished business” (Green 2018, 69)). When thinking about borders we need to consider different forms that go beyond the line metaphor. Green offers the concept of traces and tidemarks – these imply material forms that lines do not have (Green 2018, 70). And yet, as Jansen points out, borders are often confronted as lines drawn by the state, when a particular border is a linear demarcation of a territory on the basis of which a certain group of people makes sovereignty claims (Jansen 2018, 99). Furthermore, Jansen (2015) introduces the notion of states as a grid-matrix (or simply grid), whereby grids “are ad-hoc cumulative results of ongoing gridding. They may grow, integrate and intensify, or shrink, disintegrate and lower intensity” (Jansen 2015, 5). Originating at different levels (bottom-up or top-down, depending on the proximity to and concentration of power), gridding heralds different regularities along temporal or behavioral lines by utilizing various bureaucratic procedures and structures. Especially important for the process of social gridding are the infrastructural grids such as roads, wires, pipes, public transport, and buildings. These opposite and yet overlapping conceptions of borders intersect with the porosity concept precisely through the discussion of railways presented above. The gridding process used by Jansen is manifested in the railway infrastructure and the railways which cut across space and time. The railway vugs and cracks have created conditions for tidemarks and tangible traces that have penetrated and, in turn, have transformed landscapes, economies, social, military, and other aspects of life. Specifically, the vugs, cracks, and faults formed by the railways have enabled horizontal and vertical porosities to spread across the wider territory of Macedonia and the Balkans. The first stretch of the railway, built in 1871–73, has generated a web of cavities and cracks, as the porosity permeating through these cracks has been emancipatory and oppressive for the region since the initial construction of the railway. It has enabled economic prosperity, but it has also been used in turbulent times of conquest. In contrast to bringing progress and emancipation, at times the railways have inflicted violence or kept people stuck in a certain area.

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Hence I propose that, thinking about the border between Greece and North Macedonia through the lens of rock porosities, one should recall the representation of the vuggy and moldic cracks. More precisely, in geology some irregular pore spaces which cross-cut the original fabric of the rock are known as vugs and the porosity is referred to as vuggy. Depending on the tectonic activity, the vugs may become very large or cavernous (Alkhatha’ami 2005, 9). As elongated cavities formed by cracks and fissures opened by tectonic activity, vugs can be filled by different materials such as minerals or they can remain empty cavities that allow water or liquid to permeate through the rock. In contrast, moldic porosity is defined as a secondary porosity shaped after the rock has been formed and consolidated. This kind of porosity is created through the dissolution of pre-existing elements inside the rock such as shells, rock fragments, or grains that leave empty spaces. The pore spaces preserve the shape or the mold of the dissolved material and have a relatively stable shape. Unlike the far-reaching and protracted porosity created by vugs, the porosity created by these molds inside the rock has a spherical and concentrated layout. The vuggy and moldic porosity of infrastructure has been empowering and transformative for the areas under discussion. As Mitchell (2011) points out, the widespread use of coal gave workers a new power a century ago as the movement of coal and oil “required fixed, narrow channels that led from the coal mine, along railway tracks and canals, to factories and power stations. These grids created vulnerable points of passage where a labor strike could paralyze an entire energy system” (Mitchell 2011, 235). The development of the railway similarly gave power to the railway workers, whose strikes and unions were crucial for the spread of socialist ideas in the Balkans. The railways connected the Yugoslav republics among themselves, and also to the neighboring countries. The reconstruction of new railway lines through the Youth Worker Actions was one of the most significant features of the brotherhood and unity ideology of socialist Yugoslavia. The dissolution of the Yugoslav federation in 1991 left a major impact on the railways in the Balkans, as the individual railway companies could not provide the expensive maintenance. In the post-socialist period, the dilapidated train stations, lines, and trains restricted the mass use of trains. This changed between 2015 and 2016 when migrants and refugees used both the trains and the railway tracks in their journey towards the West. These developments, triggered by the railways, beg for conceptualization of porosity in a similar manner as it is used in geology and petroleum engineering: the elongated or spherical cracks in solid rocks created by tectonic, environmental, or chemical processes bear a similarity with the porosities triggered by the railways built since the early 1870s in the Macedonia region. Constructed with an initial intention to speed up transportation,

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these vugs and molds have been developing over time and transforming the region around and beyond the border area. This allows us to view the border as both a tidal and a linear phenomenon that is inevitably material, as it materializes a variety of new formations and processes.

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Notes 1 Throughout the book I use the current nation-state forms, and on first occurrence of each toponym I provide the Greek, Turkish and Macedonian forms, except where the similarity is so close as to be unnecessary. Solun in Macedonian, Selânik in Turkish, Salonica is the alternate name in Greek. 2 According to the Ministry of the Interior, only 68 asylum requests were filed for people to stay in Macedonia since May 2015; the primary destination for most refugees and migrants remains Germany, UK, Sweden, Belgium or other West European countries. 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uExNaOmznk (accessed 7 January 2018). 4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7LMvVfCHIo (accessed 12 January 2018). 5 According to Boué, this project would not have been too costly, nor would it have posed major engineering challenges, as the railway routes would follow natural valleys and rivers. The local workforce was cheap and reliable, while the building materials such as stone and timber could be obtained in the vicinity of the lines. The temperate climate would allow a regular service throughout the year (Gounaris 1993, 37). 6 Üsküb in Turkish, Shkup in Albanian. 7 Monastir in Turkish. 8 Mladen Stilinovic (2013) argues that the local urban imagery of Bitola has been constructed in a selective manner: during Ottoman rule, the city as “the city of consuls” distinguished itself from its surroundings in order to showcase a “European” and “cosmopolitan” identity. Later, its identity was reframed within the discourse of the nation-states, causing Bitola to become peripheral in an enclosed and hierarchic system. In the socialist period the city stood as a counterpoint vis-à-vis Skopje, reacting to the centralized socialist culture. Finally, in the contemporary search for continuity Bitola has re-established a selective link with its past. This mid-size city “uses selective profiling” in relation to its history and socioeconomic composition. Thus Bitola exhibits a capacity to absorb multiple identities that coexist and enable the city to profile itself as “historic” for the purpose of filmmaking or tourism, but also to display the global influences of marginalized groups such as Roma graffiti and hip-hop artists living in ghetto-like conditions (Stilinovic 2013, 7). 9 The Ilinden uprising began on 2 August 1903 (St Ilya’s day) in the town of Kruševo and elsewhere in Macedonia, when the local revolutionaries fought for Macedonian independence from Ottoman rule. The Kruševo Republic existed for only ten days, when it was put down by the Ottoman army and most of its revolutionaries were executed.

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10 1908 was the year of the Young Turk revolution, which established a new constitution and was initially a source of great hope in Macedonia and elsewhere. 11 “Turkish” here does not necessarily mean Turkish speakers but, rather, Muslims regardless of language. 12 The First Balkan War, fought from October 1912 to April 1913 between the Ottoman army and the Balkan alliance consisting of Serbian, the Greek and Bulgarian states/kingdoms, placed the border and the region of Macedonia at the center stage of the battles. This territory was the main reason for the Second Balkan War, in 1913, when the former allies turned against each other: Serbia and Greece on one side, and Bulgaria on the other, mainly due to territorial claims and disputes over the region of Macedonia (for more see Hall 2000) 13 Under the terms of the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest, the Struma Valley was part of the territory given to Bulgaria (as was the port of Dedeaǧaç). It lost the territories to Serbia and Greece, respectively, after World War One. 14 In the first years of World War One the position of Greece was ambiguous: it was partially neutral but also partly a member of the Allied Forces. This changed in the summer of 1917 when the Allied Forces forced Greece to join the alliance when Venizelos was installed as a prime minster in a coup d’état (Mazower 2000). 15 A line could therefore be drawn along the many military cemeteries that exist along the Macedonian–Greek state border. During my visits to Dojran and Bitola I noticed large groups of British and French tourists who came to trace the footsteps of their deceased ancestors who died during the fierce battles of 1916–17. Local guides and amateur historians organize hiking trips following the route of the World War One battles, and also impress the visitors by selling them objects dating from that period that have been excavated from the area: old bullets, helmets, knives or decorations. It seems that they earn good money, despite the fact that they have no proof of the objects’ origin. These are all different material forms that make the border between Greece and Macedonia tangible in historical but also in contemporary terms. Through the shared legacy of events that took place during World War One, more than a century ago, the cemeteries and the objects testify to the shared and yet different histories of this region. 16 The Macedonian-speaking villages of Prespa, Golobrdo, and Gora were assigned to Albania, with the exception a few Goran villages that were given to Serbia. These divisions predated the Paris 1919 Agreement. 17 https://visitskopje.mk (accessed 2 July 2018). 18 The façade of the railway station was torn in half and the gigantic clock stopped at the moment of the earthquake. The portion of the façade that was left standing, which included the clock, was left as a monument to the earthquake and endures to this day as a Museum of the city of Skopje. The new building was completed in 1981 and is not as centrally located as the old one. 19 I deliberately avoid using the word “crisis”, due to the loaded meaning that most often implies a crisis caused or perpetrated by the displaced people who are forced to move due to either military conflict or economic hardship.

2

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Desirous borders and consumer porosities: beauty, entertainment, and gambling in the EU periphery

Every weekend the hotel-casinos near the border and in the town of Gevgelija are packed with visitors from Greece. Some arrive for a one-day visit and some stay over the weekend. The presence of the Greek visitors is also visible at the farmers’ market, in the main shopping street, the cafes and restaurants, and also at the dental and medical practices. There are long lines at the gas stations where cars with Greek registration plates wait to get 40 percent cheaper gas than in Greece. Since the early 2000s the overall economy of this town has improved significantly, due to the consumerism brought in by the visitors from Greece. The significantly cheaper prices in Gevgelija have encouraged many to cross the border in their search for bargains. In this chapter I examine the consumer porosity driven by a desire for shopping, beauty services, and gambling. For many, crossing the border constitutes a symbolic act of stepping into a fantasy world that transgresses the limits of one’s reality as well as national borders. Theorizing desire is not an easy task, given its dense theoretical lineage. I remain swayed by the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach, according to which desire is inextricably linked to language as it enters an infant in a divisive fashion. Language consists of a series of identifications and creates a foundational loss that constitutes the subject. The compensation for this loss Lacan calls desire (Ragland-Sullivan 1982, 18). It is not my intention to engage with the theories on desire in explaining the complicated relationship between wanting and being. Rather, I build on Pulkkinen and Helms’s “agentic approach,” which pays strong attention to subjectivation processes in the formation of the subject. Specifically, those who cross the border following their desires engage in something which has been made possible by the border and by their imaginations, within which the border is an active agent.



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Borders as imageries that engender desires Pulkkinen and Helms (2021) consider the possibility that a desire can emerge out of, and often because of, complex sets of social, political, and economic possibilities and vulnerabilities created by and around the existence of borders. Particularly in terms of people’s desires to live different sorts of lives (gendered, sexed, and class too), we see the productive side of borders. Here I propose that desire is also relevant in explaining the EU and non-EU aspect of the border between Greece and RN Macedonia. Analyzing the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) launched in 2002–3, Kølvraa (2017), argues that this policy was the EU’s way of responding to the Eastern neighbors’ desires for closer ties to the Union. However, the policy ignored that such desires aimed at full EU membership rather than at mere neighborliness. “Indeed, the EU’s insistence that the ENP entailed neither a promise of, nor a definite ruling out of, membership, meant that the policy caught the eastern neighbors in a continuous state of ambivalent liminality” (Kølvraa 2017, 72). Kølvraa therefore argues that this ambiguity at the heart of the policy is linked to the rather self-congratulatory idea of Europe as “the club everybody wants to join,” and thus to a distinction between those who were European (the EU) and those who were inscribed with a desire to become European (the neighbors). The neighbors were defined not by their own position but by their desire for the privileged position of the articulating (European) subject. The ENP’s function of arresting the neighbors in a liminal position might, as such, be understood as a way of continually reproducing and displaying their desire for Europe, a desire which could then also be imitated in the disenchanted populations of the EU itself. And yet, Ballinger (2017) insists that concepts such as “Eastern Europe” and “periphery” remain relevant precisely because these terms continue to highlight the profound asymmetries that exist between the EU and its non-EU members. “For those individuals suffering the effects of life in a European ‘super periphery’ or for migrants trapped in the no-man’s land of the ‘Balkan corridor,’ the language of eastern peripheries continues to resonate as a way to denote deep asymmetries” (Ballinger 2017, 36). Despite the EU’s rhetoric that following the accession of Eastern European countries the EU policy has changed from that of transition into integration, the concept “Eastern periphery” remains relevant for the countries of the so-called Western Balkans (RN Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania), whose position vis-à-vis the EU is periphery of the periphery (Betchev quoted in Ballinger 2017, 44).

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Border porosities

The main aim of this chapter is to explore the intensity and modes of social interaction between RN Macedonia and Greece by applying the concept of porosity to account for mobility in the borderland areas of the two countries motivated by financial, bargain, and symbolic incentives. These borderland practices are relatively frequent and occur on a regular basis. The border thus enables local citizens on both sides of the border to interact with each other and to either suspend or reinforce the dominant views that have been created through conflict. I explore how people on both sides of the border relate to each other against this background. More precisely, I look at how, through cross-border interaction, people trespass on and appropriate political, legal, and economic contexts to develop and maintain social relations adapted to their specific temporal and spatial locations. By using a detailed ethnographic framework, the analysis attempts to go beyond the conceptual deadlock of binaries, where positive or negative reactions to conflict, or the “neighbor” on the other side of the border, determine social relations. I base this chapter on fieldwork examining the porosity of the border in the Gevgelija–Thessaloniki and Bitola–Florina regions. The chapter outlines consumption aspects of the pursuit of beauty services by several Greek citizens across the border. Seemingly driven by economic hardship and the necessity to maintain “feminine appearances,” the beauty-initiated practice of crossing the border to seek cheaper beauty and medical services reveals manifold aspects of the political economy, and the symbolic – desirous and discursive perspectives of those involved in border crossing.

Chasing beauty across the border During my research conducted between 2010 and 2017, I crossed this border at the three official checkpoints on a regular basis. The six-lane Bogorodica– Evzoni (Mačukovo in Macedonian) checkpoint is the largest and busiest, while Medžitlija–Niki (Negočani in Macedonian) and Dojran–Dojrani are significantly smaller, with less frequent traffic. The checkpoint at Bogorodica–Evzoni is framed by a blue metal construction with signs and traffic lights that direct the vehicles into lanes assigned to “MK (Macedonian Citizens),” “EU citizens,” and “Other,” and a special bus lane available to all. Many cars line up in the lanes leading to the glass booths where the border agents check travelers’ passports. The lines are especially long in the summer, when rivers of tourists stream into the six-lane gateway (Figure 2.1a–b). The passport check usually goes quickly. During my research I encountered the mainly expressionless faces of the border controllers who scanned the

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Figure 2.1a–b  The border crossing at Bogorodica–Evzoni

passports and checked the faces on photos with what appeared to me to be an air of resignation and boredom. Only on a handful of occasions, did I notice an expression of loathing on the face of the border agent, especially during the period 2014–15. This was the height of the anti-Greek propaganda in the Macedonian media, which had the obvious intention of discouraging people from traveling to Greece. Other than this, interaction with border officials was decidedly unmemorable, despite my repeated and concentrated intention to capture something out of the ordinary.

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Border porosities

It is hard not to sympathize with the border control agents who, stationed in their glass and metal booths, breathe polluted air from the fumes of the thousands of vehicles that cross the border. Air-conditioners are needed to cool the booths in the unbearably high temperatures of summer. According to one border employee who explained the damaging effects of car pollution on his and his colleagues’ health, the semi-poisonous freon gas can be detrimental to health if the space being cooled by the air conditioner is too small and one remains in the booth for too long. It is inevitable that the border agents will inhale damaging fumes; even in the smallest quantities, freon damages the lungs and can lead to serious health issues. Exposed to pollution, heat, or cold, these agents have expressed serious concern over their health and the severe working conditions they encounter day in and day out during boiling summers and freezing winters. The technological equipment on both sides of the borders – RN Macedonia and Greece – is basic. According to the six border agents I interviewed during my research, the Macedonian state has not invested in suitable cooling, heating, or air purifying systems for the Ministry of the Interior employees who work at the border checkpoints. Similar remarks were also made by their Greek colleagues, whose own working conditions appear to be similar. The air-conditioners are Japanese: Toshiba on the Macedonian side and Fujitsu on the Greek side. Also, the sizes of the glass booths are similar. I was assured by the head of Macedonian Border Control in Gevgelija that the ministry rigorously follows the Law for Labor Protection and that the border employees have controlled time slots of not more than two hours per person during their work day. And yet, the employees themselves complained that many of them have had health problems related to lung and respiratory diseases such as asthma, fluid build-up in the lungs, or allergies. The administrative quarters of the border are beneath a metal overpass. Almost unnoticeable to travelers by car, their appearance is intentionally invisible and unassuming. An interview with the head of the Border Division in Gevgelija stressed the pragmatic aspect of the material appearance of the administrative quarters: space is limited, there is constant movement of people, cars, pollution, hence the administrative building must not take up too much space, and must not appear dirty or uncared-for. The EU has required strict compliance with EU border standards for pending members in the Balkans. As a matter of fact, this is one of the main conditions for the start of RN Macedonia’s negotiations for EU membership. In this respect, the EU has already begun a major funding project to modernize and renovate the country’s border checkpoints. Signs for the campaign “Europe for You” (Evropa za tebe), and boards indicating the allocated funds, are visible at those checkpoints that have already been rebuilt. The Tabanovce crossing between Serbia and Macedonia so far has received €2

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million and a completely new customs terminal. The Medžitlija—Niki border crossing between RN Macedonia and Greece is the second checkpoint that received a full makeover; instead of the simple metal overhang, it now has a more stylish design, with cement pillars carrying a wavy roofing structure covered with metal bricks. The design, materials, and implementation of the border checkpoint remodeling have been commissioned, funded, and fully supervised by the EU, just as they required EU approval.1 Medžitlija—Niki between Bitola and Florina, and Dojran—Doirani are considerably smaller checkpoints with only one or two lanes. These two crossings are mainly used by the citizens of the border regions for their “regular” border-crossing activities such as shopping, entertainment, seeking beauty treatments, or medical services. While weekends can be crowded, one never sees the long lines that occur at the main Bogorodica—Evzoni crossing near Gevgelija. My effort to provide a detailed description of the border stems from my own reaction to the border, which, despite its restrictive appearance and the tensions created by bureaucratic checks, is at the same a familiar place that usually means holiday, shopping, or a social event.

Porous desires: crossing the border for bargains, beauty, and entertainment Regardless of political relations between Greece and RN Macedonia, money, goods, and services have successfully crossed the official state border, enabling different types of border porosities during socialism and after 1991, the year when the Socialist Republic of Macedonia became the Republic of Macedonia. Since the early 2000s, however, with the construction of a few hotels and casinos in and around Gevgelija there has been an emerging demand for beauty services offered by the well-trained high-end cosmetic and hair-dressing professionals employed in the hotels’ beauty parlors. The main consumers of these services have been Greek citizens from the border areas, many of them from the city of Thessaloniki. These people combine their visits to Gevgelija with a myriad of other consumption practices that often acquire a ritualized pattern. The financial crisis in Greece since 2009 has affected people’s lives in many different ways. It has certainly triggered a new relationship with the border, allowing many Greek citizens to maintain a sense of a “decent life-style” that became unaffordable in Greece. This became clear during my research in Gevgelija in 2012. I first visited the beauty parlor of a hotel on the border between Macedonia and Greece in mid-September 2012, with the intention of talking to the employees and some of the clients. As a way in, I chose to have a pedicure in the salon

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Border porosities

– a procedure that was promoted as safe and looked the least invasive. This salon insisted on high hygienic standards and tried to lure customers in with extra-discounted prices. Upon my exit from the elevator and into the reception area of the salon, I was greeted by a smiling hostess dressed in an immaculately white medical gown, which made a sharp contrast with her conspicuous make-up, red lipstick, and blond curls. I had made an appointment the day before, and she looked up my name in the computer and led me to a large room divided into several smaller sections with Asian-style screens. The interior of the salon was a mixture of medically sterile cleanliness and new-age feng shui elements, with large flower pictures decorating the walls, soothing music filling up the large room, and the pleasant smell of herbal incense and scented candles. The hotel, situated on the Macedonian side of the border, was announced in 2009 as a Turkish investment project worth €100 million (Figure 2.2). Construction began in 2010, followed by a large media campaign focusing on the investor’s intention to open 1,000 new jobs by attracting 4 million travelers per year. Indeed, in 2011 the new hotel/casino opened its doors as the largest casino in the Gevgelija or “Balkan Las Vegas” area, as it has been recently called. As part of a casino chain operating in Trinidad and

Figure 2.2  Princess hotel-casino in Gevgelija

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Tobago, Bulgaria, Georgia, Slovenia, and Ukraine, the Princess Management Group, the investor and owner of Princess, anticipated large profits. Flamingo, the other large hotel-casino in Gevgelija that began to operate in 2001, had been prospering and earning high profits, also mainly from the Greek citizens who had been pouring into the casinos and thus transforming the local economy of Gevgelija (Figure 2.3).2 The presence of these new hotel-casinos on the Macedonian–Greek border, Flamingo and Princess, built in 2001 and 2010 respectively, saw the start of increased visits to the town by Greek citizens. Even prior to the opening of these two hotel-casinos, many had been crossing the border to make various purchases. Since the early 2000s the transformation of the town of Gevgelija has been obvious: from a small transit and agricultural town known as the last point on the freeway (as described in Chapter 1) linking the four former Yugoslav capitals of Skopje, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana with Thessaloniki, Gevgelija turned into a vibrant small town with modern cafes, shops, and a large farmers’ market. With the rise of the casinos, the town has witnessed the opening of upscale boutiques and jewelry shops, restaurants, cafes, dental practices, and hair and beauty salons (Schüll 2014). Greek consumers had a variety of demands, and the town entrepreneurs rushed to meet them (see Dimova 2011).

Figure 2.3  Flamingo hotel-casino in Gevgelija

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Initially, it was the casino Apolonia in the center of town, known formerly as the hotel-casino Yugo during socialist times, and the hotel-casino Flamingo situated on the border crossing that ushered in the town’s transformation. The construction of the Princess in 2010 marked the presence of the largest player in the gambling market in the Southern Balkans. The hotel became part of Ramada Worldwide Group, introducing their standards of hotel business into the local market. Several months after the opening of the hotel, the lower-level floor was turned into an impressive fitness and wellness center putting the other hotels in the center of Gevgelija in the shade. The beauty center was opened as a branch of a large cosmetic and beauty salon that had been the leading beauty center in Skopje for 20 years. With branches operating in Tetovo and Bitola (the two largest cities in Macedonia after Skopje), Gevgelija and the salon in the Princess hotel did not come as a surprise, given the high demand for these services by Greek citizens (see also Dimova 2015a). When I arrived in the pedicure section, a footbath had already been prepared for me, so I sank deeply into the comfortable armchair. I immersed my feet in the soothing footbath, and tremors of sensation and relaxation rose up my body. I was sitting with closed eyes when I felt a warm touch on my hand. A smiling-faced employee brought me a pot of herbal tea. She placed the tray on a small side table and explained that I needed to sit in the bath for 30 minutes. I noticed that in the section next to mine, divided with an Asian-style screen, there was a woman lying on a massage table while a cosmetician was spreading some glue-like matter from a pot all over her body. The lady was undergoing a full-body wax hair removal treatment. I watched as wax was applied to her legs, hands, bikini area (later she explained that she regularly gets “Brazilian waxing”), with the cloth strips applied and pulled off. I was told that the waxing procedure was one of the most popular in the salon and most often involved the removal of every single hair on the body. Once the hard-to-reach hair removal was over, and while the woman was lying and waiting for a massage, I struck up an informal conversation in English, explaining about my interest in Greek citizens crossing the border to obtain beauty services, and asking her about the frequency of her visits. We continued chatting even when my pedicure was over, while she was undergoing a massage with a large electronic device that was circulated all over her body. Eleni, as I will call her, explained in perfect English that this was part of her monthly treatment, which consisted of full-body wax hair removal, an electronic massage, an algae-wrap, “plaster Bermudas” against cellulite, a facial treatment followed by a donkey milk exfoliation, and a pedicure/manicure package.3 These treatments take a total of four hours and cost €100. Eleni is in her early 40s, comes from Thessaloniki,

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and owns a private marketing company. Prior to the crisis, Eleni did “really well.” She used to be in charge of several massive media campaigns devoted to tourism, commissioned by the state and by several of the large hotel resorts in Halkidiki. Her life-style had been comfortable and she was used to spending a lot of money. The budget for her beauty treatments would be as much as €300 per month. And she has been attending the beauty salon regularly ever since she was 14 years old – when her mother took her for the first time for hair removal. Ever since, it has been an almost evangelical commitment for Eleni and her sister, who is three years older, to visit the beauty salon where their mother was also a regular for decades. She explained that since 2010, and especially in the past two years, she had been forced to reduce the frequency of her visits, and also the number of services that she requested. Her business had been suffering greatly as many of her clients had been unable to make timely payments, because if “no one pays – there’s no money!” She was having difficulty in making her regular payments for her major purchases: an Audi X SUV that she purchased in 2009 and a four-bedroom apartment in Calla Maria, one of the upper-class neighborhoods. The problems with the business had forced her to let go of three of her employees and keep on only the absolute minimum: the secretary and the web/media designer, a talented young IT specialist who is able “to do many things.” Eleni was in charge of the media promotion of one of the border casino-hotels in Greece, so she had been collaborating with the hotel business partners from 2010 onwards. That was why she had been able to enjoy the regular and extended visits to the beauty parlor in Gevgelija for a significantly reduced price. The drive from Thessaloniki was only an hour, so this had been working well, because, according to her, every woman should pay attention to how she looks. To my comment that many women cannot afford to indulge in these beauty treatments, she observed that poverty could never be an excuse for physical neglect. My grandmother used to make her own potions and tinctures by mixing olive oil with different herbs, yogurt, honey and mashed fruits. She would apply these self-made masks to her face regularly, and her face was beautifully moisturized. She never used to go to a hairdresser but always slept with soft curlers and her hair always looked styled. My mother inherited that sense to take care of herself, although at the beginning of the 80s she began to go to the beauty salon instead of doing all this by herself. For both me and my sister, it is unthinkable to use the economic measures and lack of finances as an excuse not to maintain ourselves. Whatever happens, this is the most important. You know that song from Nina Simone [starts to sing her own version of Ain’t Got no Life]:

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    “I ain’t got no home, ain’t got no shoes, no money, no class, no skirts, no bed…     And what have I got? Why am I alive anyway? What have I got?     Got my hair. Got my head. Got my brains.     Got my ears, my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my smile, my tongue, my chin, my legs, my heart, my feet, my toes, my liver, my blood, got my life, got my freedom!” (Eleni, September 2012)

There was silence after she finished singing. The cosmetician, who was unwrapping her algae wraps and plastic cling film, was also silent, although smiling. I sensed the intimacy between them and remained quiet until Eleni broke the silence. Then she explained that taking care of her body feels like the ultimate form of power that she has in her life. This extends not only to her sense of independence but also to the recent changes in Greece and the austerity measures that have affected people’s lives significantly. Although the usual budget of €300 spent in one of the best beauty centers in Thessaloniki is now reduced to around €100 per month in the hotel-casino on the Macedonian side of the Macedonian-Greek border, Eleni considers that the underlying reason – to take care of oneself and maintain a good quality life – remains intact, and grounds her sense as a woman and human being.

Border between survival and enjoyment Another Greek citizen whom I met in Gevgelija also revealed the importance of the border for her beauty practices. Sofia is a brisk, 45-year-old state employee, working in an electricity company in Thessaloniki.4 The long blond hair and the carefully trimmed eyebrows, along with her conspicuous make-up finished with precise eyeliner, lipstick, and blusher, revealed her desire to look good and take care of herself. She is in charge of planning the household budget. With a son and a daughter who are still minors and living with her and her husband, Sofia has been the only one with a reliable salary. The private company of her self-employed husband has not been doing well and brings only a minimal income to the household. She proudly recounted her micro-entrepreneurial skills in stretching the €200 budget which she sets aside for her monthly border crossings to cover the farmers’ market, the hair stylist, the visit to the beauty parlor, and, finally, the casino. The journey that begins early Saturday morning from a neighborhood in Thessaloniki is driven, in her words, by necessity – the rise in prices in Greece and the significantly cheaper goods in Macedonia. By stacking the car with groceries, and indulging in cosmetic and beauty cures that would not be affordable in Greece, Sofia’s main incentive for these day trips to Gevgelija seems to be pragmatic. And yet, during our conversation I came

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to understand that the economic element was eclipsed by the ritualistic importance of the excursion in which notions of agency (or, as she put it, “making decisions,” “taking initiative”), gendered norms of femininity (“desire to take care of oneself,” “being a real woman”), the social element of pampering herself with her neighbors as they also have fun, and also risk and trust, play an equally important role as the pragmatic financial calculation of the family budget. Although Sofia has been visiting Gevgelija since the mid-2000s, the shopping, medical, and beauty-inspired visits became regular from 2010. In 2012 she was forced to make more frequent trips across the border than the usual monthly excursion. If some products were urgently needed, or if there was a special event (such as a wedding, christening, or graduation) that required beauty treatment and hairstyling, Sofia arranged an additional trip across the border. Sofia hasn’t been to a hair stylist in Greece for the last three years, nor to a dentist. And for more than a year, laundry detergent, toilet paper, even apples, peppers, tomatoes, flour, sugar, or other grocery products are often purchased in Gevgelija. She explains that this is both because of the significant difference in price and also because of the “nature” of the trip: these trips across the border have their own trajectory that starts at the farmers’ market, continues to the local supermarket, the beauty or hair salons, the dentist’s, and ends in the evening with the casino trip to the Flamingo or Princess hotels. The trip to Gevgelija begins around 7:45 a.m. on Saturday morning, when Sofia and three friends meet in front of the local post office. Sofia explains that usually Saturday is the day for house cleaning and shopping, and only on Sunday she can get some time off to sleep longer and rest properly. The Saturday when she goes across the border is actually the day that Sofia looks forward to, because this day is more social and fun than the other Saturdays in the month. The fact that this is a “collective adventure” shared among four women, some of whom have known each other for years and live nearby, makes the trip relaxed and fun. Sofia started this with one of the four women who lives closest to her, whom she had met several times in Gevgelija at the farmers’ market. Her neighbor then invited her cousin, who had been severely affected by her husband’s loss of work and was looking for ways to “survive”. The fourth member of the “crew” is a colleague of Sofia’s neighbor who also lives nearby. The women are between 40 and 50 years old, with highschool degrees, and either work in state-owned companies and therefore have experienced severe cuts in their salaries, or work for private companies for low incomes. All of them face serious financial difficulties, and the possibility of traveling across the border for bargain deals was the initial incentive.

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Sofia’s neighbor is the designated driver. The four women board the Fiat Punto and leave for the short, one-hour drive to the border and the town of Gevgelija. The trip is accompanied by Greek music from the local radio station and talk about family affairs: “from mother-in-law clashes, to thyroid, arthritis, or other health problems, work-related tensions with colleagues and bosses, to sexual issues with husbands or lovers.” “There is no topic that is too personal or forbidden – we say it all because we trust each other,” explained Sofia, laughing loudly, as we sat in a café in Gevgelija. To my question about how the crossing of the border feels, Sofia answered: “The border crossing is always uneventful, easy, and predictable … It has been done so many times and it has lost its excitement. Nothing happens.” The first destination in Gevgelija is the farmers’ market (9:00 a.m.), where bargaining with the locals and checking the quality of local produce takes place. Sofia feels connected to the locals through the language that she doesn’t know well but that was once spoken by some of her family. Her children don’t speak a word of it. Nevertheless, the purchases at the farmers’ market are typically done in Macedonian, a language that one of the women, who is also of Macedonian origin, speaks well. Both she and Sofia are not very keen on talking about history and family heritage and they avoided my questions regarding their views on official Greek policy towards the Macedonian minority and the prohibition on using the Macedonian language not only in public places but also in people’s homes. “The past is too complicated in this part of the world. And I have too many troubles surviving the present,” Sofia says. I mentioned in the Introduction that prohibition of Macedonian language started in 1927, when the Greek state adopted an especially harsh attitude towards the Macedonian minority with the 1927 Greek Government Legislative Edict. The Edict published in the official Gazette declared that there were no non-Greek people in Greece. Hence 804 names of Macedonian villages, towns, and regions were changed into Greek versions, together with the surnames of ethnic Macedonians. This was part of the Hellenization ideology. The main objective of this policy was to assimilate or hide geographical or topographical names that were considered foreign and divisive towards Greek unity or indicative of a “bad Greek.” Names regarded foreign were usually of Turkish, Albanian, and Slavic origin. Most of the name changes occurred in the ethnically heterogeneous Northern Greece and the Arvanite settlements of central Greece (Bintliff 2003, Karakasidou 1993, Karakasidou 1997). I respect Sofia’s wish to remain silent about her origin as she skillfully dodges my questions about her family history. Fortunately she is a supertalkative interlocutor, sharing many interesting details about other aspects of her life and the trips to Gevgelija. Sofia is fond of locally grown and

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produced food, so buying produce from the local farmers feels like an especially good bargain. All is packed into a large traveling bag, taken to the car and placed in the trunk. There are four large traveling bags, one for each woman, to avoid mixing the goods. The hairdresser’s appointment is at 2 p.m. Sofia usually sends a text message to the hairdresser the day before the trip. It is the same hairdresser she’s been going to for the last four years. New and fancier hairdressers have appeared in Gevgelija, but Sofia and one of her neighbors remain faithful to this one. There is no need to explain anything. The hairdresser knows exactly what to do: dying with the same L’Oréal dye, washing, cutting and trimming, blow-drying and styling. The job is divided between two of the apprentices. “I have a great feeling after the hair treatment, feeling all young and beautiful!” Communication can be a problem sometimes, but one of the apprentices speaks fluent Greek, and also the main hairdresser has learned Greek words that are sufficient for good communication. Since Sofia started visiting this hair salon four years ago, there have been some significant changes in the quality of the materials, namely better shampoos and hair colors, as well as better equipment for hair drying, coloring, or styling. Evidently, the presence of customers from Greece has brought in more profit and a need to renovate the salon. The price for the entire treatment is 900 denars (€15), whereas in Greece these services wouldn’t be possible for less than €40, Sofia explained. She also adds that she likes the treatment and the attention from the salon employees because that kind of attention is not possible in Thessaloniki, where everyone is in a hurry and trying to spend the least possible time on customers. “We really get pampered here.” After the hairdresser, the four women meet at 4 o’clock in the center of town, where the car is parked, and the “crew” goes to the Flamingo or Princess hotel near the border. They all first head to the café for coffee and cookies, and then to the beauty salon for facials, depilation, and eyebrow treatment. They usually spend 2–3 hours in the beauty parlor, depending on what they require. Manicure, pedicure, full leg hair removal, eyebrow trimming, and massage are the most required services. The atmosphere is easygoing and pleasant, where all four of them feel relaxed and pampered. As in the hair salon, Sofia mentions that in the beauty parlor, too, it is the significantly lower prices, but also the quality of the treatment, that makes it attractive. The “girls” – the cosmeticians – who work in the parlor are trained to be exceptionally polite and to give good service to the customers. As all of them are fluent in Greek there is casual chatting permeated with trust and confidence. The usual amount Sofia pays for the beauty treatments each month is approximately €80 euros. Once again, she stresses that neither

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the price nor the quality of the service could compare with the beauty salons in Thessaloniki. Sofia proudly recounts that the regular hair styling and beauty cures are imperative for her. She would rather starve to death than neglect her physical appearance. She explained that Greek middle-class women have developed this specific attitude towards female beauty and maintaining one’s own appearance, so that it would be “the end of the world” if these women weren’t able to afford these beauty treatments anymore. Having my hair dyed and cut by a professional regularly is equally important to me as my regular Thyroxin check up. It is a matter of existence in this world. I just cannot imagine not putting on my make-up or curling my hair several times a week. Earlier I used to go to the hairdresser every week, but now I do the curling myself at home. The monthly dying and treatment in Gevgelija, however, is non-negotiable. This is what makes me a woman. (…). I cannot envision that lack of money could ever, ever make me give up this care for myself. This is all that is left. I owe that to myself, and I am doing it for myself, not for my husband or the environment. If I neglect my appearance, there is nothing left. This is what makes me be myself …. (Sofia, September 2012)

After the invigorating two to three hours spent in the beauty parlor, the four women change their clothes in the toilet lounge, spray perfumes, accentuate lipstick and blusher, and then enter the flashy interior of the casino where the entertainment usually begins with a concert and dancing to a band playing Greek music. There could be some sporadic gambling on the slot machines, but never spending more than €50. For spending over €10 guests receive a free dinner voucher for the casino’s buffet-style restaurant. They all stack their trays with various food, deserts, and beer. More dancing, some innocent flirting, which Sofia explains “all of us enjoy from time to time, but we always keep the proper distance.” At midnight they are ready to head back home and cross the border. They are “dead-tired,” but with a lot of adrenaline and feelings of accomplishment. The designated driver always drinks only coke (it has caffeine and keeps her alert), while the three others have already had several glasses of wine or beer or some cocktail. They are in a joyful mood, recounting the day, the prices, the local gossip. In an hour, they are all dropped at their homes and carry the heavy bags full of products purchased in Gevgelija. When asked about the casinos and the act of gambling, Sofia confesses that she is not really a gambler, as the feeling of losing hard-earned money makes her feel uneasy. But she has seen some real hardcore gamblers, regular visitors from the nearby region in Northern Greece who spend all their money earned mainly from agriculture. She believes that for many of these people the casinos are like a fantasy land completely detached from the rest of the world or the town of Gevgelija. The interiors are windowless, flashy,

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and loud, so the visitor is immediately transported into another dimension. “It is like an escape from the harsh reality that many of us are experiencing.” However, there is danger in this escape, as the machines or the games hypnotically suck you in and it is impossible to stop playing. You continue on auto-pilot until you have spent all your money. By the time you realize, there is nothing left. In a powerful account Schüll (2014) illustrates precisely the logic of this hypnotic addiction generated by the slot machines and their design. She calls this “the machine zone,” where the compulsive need to play is driven not by the desire to win but, rather, by the urge to stay in that machine zone. One of her interlocutors describes the zone: “it is like being in the eye of a storm … Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there – you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with” (Schüll 2014, 32). Her powerful ethnographic research conducted in Las Vegas reveals that the rise of the machine gambling experience has evolved in step with technological innovation.5 While anthropologists such as Goffman, Geertz, and Caillois in their research on gaming and gambling dismissed slot machines as a “degraded, asocial form of play not worthy of cultural analysis and lacking social connection” (Schüll 2014, 52), the rise of slot machine gambling in the US has risen 70 percent since the 1980s. The solitary, absorptive activity at the slot machine can suspend time, space, monetary value, social roles, and sometimes even one’s very sense of existence. As one of Schüll’s interlocutors put it, “you can erase it all at the machines – you can even erase yourself, [c]ontradicting the popular understanding of gambling as an expression of the desire to get ‘something for nothing.’” According to him, gambling with the slot machine is to be after nothingness itself (Schüll 2014, 55). Anthropologists who have studied gambling and games, such as Goffman and Malaby, have identified the close relationship between games and real life, especially in connection to risk, chance, control, and contingency and how these are experienced, interpreted, and strategized against/upon by social actors in real life (Schüll 2014, 57). This is, after all, the vocabulary that Sofia used when talking to me – that real life is so full of uncertainty and risk, especially with the financial crisis and financial troubles. The regular visits to Gevgelija and its casinos therefore are some of the brightest spots in her life. Malaby’s ethnography in the city of Chania in Crete, Greece analyzes how people confront risk in their lives (Malaby 2003). He shows the dynamics of gambling – risk, fate, uncertainty, and luck – and how they are reflected in other aspects of gamblers’ lives “from courtship and mortality to state bureaucracy

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and national identity” (Malaby 2003, 284). Making strong connection between Chania’s backgammon cafés, card clubs and hidden gambling rooms, and real life, Malaby suggests that we need to look at “contingency” beyond normative assumptions and see how the politics of contingency “provides a groundwork for assessing the struggles over accountability that characterize a surprisingly large part of everyday life” (Malaby 2003, 285). The accountability that Malaby mentions involves the state with its state-sponsored games and state-approved casinos as a way to recover part of tax revenue lost both to tax evasion and to the illegal gambling business throughout Greece. With state-sponsored gambling, the state also aims to have more control over the arenas of gambling and thus to exert greater influence over how risk and chance are talked about. One can see these influences as much in the marketing of the games as anywhere else – as one poster for Lotto, the largest Greek lottery, proclaimed, “It puts your fate (mira) in your hands!” The poster for Lotto neatly invokes a powerful and inevitable destiny while simultaneously making it paradoxically dependent upon one’s action to take part in the lottery. The state is thus colonizing an approach toward the future, saying, chillingly, that to have a chance at your destiny you must play the state’s game. (Malaby 2003, 285)

The slot-machine gambling described in Schüll’s work, in contrast, argues that the gambling machine is not a conduit of risk that allows for socially meaningful dealing with risks and uncertainties. Rather, the slot machine becomes a “reliable mechanism for securing a zone of insulation from a human world that is otherwise experienced as capricious, discontinuous, and insecure … The continuity of machine gambling holds worldly contingencies in a kind of abeyance, granting … an otherwise elusive zone of certainty” (Schüll 2014, 58). Although Sofia and her companions use gambling just for entertainment and a free meal, during weekends the casinos are packed with regulars who come week after week to gamble. Stefka, a former croupier working in the Princess casino, explained that one of the main drivers that many of the regulars have to visit the casino is the “feel-good” (добро чувство) factor. The regulars are pampered by the casino’s employees and, as many of them are “peasants” (сељаци) from the rural areas around Thessaloniki, Kilkis, or Voden who work hard on their land the entire week, the weekend visits to the casinos give them a sense of importance, class, and luxury. The casino also becomes a fantasy space where they project and enact a social role and class identity that does not exist in real life. The more they spend, the more special benefits they receive from the casino in terms of special massages, special culinary surprises brought to their rooms, spa

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treatments, presents, escort services, etc. According to Stefka, the casinos have developed an elaborate policy that deliberately “plays on this card to make losers in real life feel like kings in the casino. You have no idea what kind of jerks (дибеци) come in the casino. They have no sense of culture whatsoever but still, you have to make them feel superior in every sense. I often felt that being in Macedonia gives them even more pleasure to act superior. We as Macedonian are not allowed to mention that name in the casino, and this gives many of them a great sense of pleasure.” And yet, the main chagrin that Stefka had related to her employment in the casino was regarding the night shifts and the total sense of detachment from reality while working at night. “You work during the night and sleep during the day, and this is day after day. I earned a lot but after eight years in the casino, I felt like a zombie. It was obvious to me that I had to leave or I would go mad. Now I have my own fruit-producing small business and I like the feeling of control over my time.” As mentioned earlier, due to the visitors from Greece, Gevgelija has become one of the most prosperous towns in RN Macedonia, with the lowest unemployment rate. The financial prosperity brought by the casinos in this town appeared to be tempered by a compromise with the Greek visitors regarding the name Macedonia: nowhere in the restaurant or café menus would you find the traditional Macedonian salad or any Macedonian specialties. These are named as local specialties, but without mentioning the name Macedonia. Similarly, the absence of any nationalistic outbursts or incidents in the casinos reveals the “lenience that we Macedonians have to show towards the Greeks. Not that I am not bothered – I feel like a second-class citizen in my own country, not even allowed to say the name of my country. But we depend on them and we have to put up with this. Life is not fair and you cannot have it all.” The economic prosperity of Gevgelija municipality due to the border’s proximity and the visitors from Greece bears a similarity to the economic prosperity brought to Native American communities, especially to the Seminole tribe in Florida (Cattelino 2008). Tribal sovereignty has become a catchphrase of Native American rights movements since the 1960s and 1970s – sovereignty is the legal framework for most Native American rights claims. Constitutional references to Native American tribes have been interpreted to mean, among other things, that unless otherwise specified by the US Congress, the 50 states do not hold sovereignty over Native American tribes within reservation borders. As governments, Native American tribes are free from state taxation and business regulation. As a result, they enjoy a competitive advantage in sectors including high-stakes gaming and the sale of highly taxed and regulated commodities, such as tobacco, alcohol, gasoline, and fireworks. The National

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Indian Gaming Commission, which is the federal agency responsible for regulating tribal gaming, reported that tribal gaming revenues grew rapidly at the turn of the century, more than quadrupling from 1995 levels to $22.6 billion a decade later (Cattelino 2004, Cattelino 2008). Not since the massive dispossession and transfer of Native American lands to settlers had any economic activity in Native American country made such a dramatic impact on the lives of indigenous peoples and on regional economies, politics, and public perceptions. Tribal gaming is therefore distinct from commercial gaming, in that the former is owned by a government, similar to state lotteries, and not by private individuals or corporations. In South Florida, the home of the Seminole tribe, gaming has consistently blurred distinctions between commercial and governmental activity, and also between capitalism and crime.6 Tribal gaming has to be understood in the context of the relationship between indigenous economy and culture, on the one hand, and settler colonial domination and indigenous governance, on the other hand (Cattelino 2004, 10). Evidently, tribal gaming has reorganized economies of race and difference. The financial prosperity of the Seminole tribe poses the question whether money erases differences (both among objects and among those who exchange them), for better or worse, and therefore erodes those values and practices that people call “culture” and “tradition.” Yet, contrary to expectations that money would erode cultural distinctiveness, gaming has also subsidized and catalyzed Seminole cultural production, although many Seminole grandparents worry about how to convince their grandchildren to sew patchwork clothing (the striking and complicated style for which they are known) or to speak a Seminole language now that youth can afford Nintendos and cars (Cattelino 2004, 13). Although in a different context, the presence of casinos in Gevgelija has reorganized the economy of the border region. The possibilities for employment in Gevgelija have not only inhibited youth migration but have actually brought in people from all over RN Macedonia, including Skopje, the capital city, to work in the casinos. And according to an official in the local Gevgelija municipality, “there is nothing more patriotic than this – keeping young people in the country and providing wealth and opportunity to work and live in their own country. In an age when most of the young people dream to move out, this municipality provides employment and good pay. I don’t think that there is anything bad in not displaying nationalism or muting down the name Macedonia. The benefits are huge.” And yet, interviewees and acquaintances mentioned that there is asymmetry and injustice in terms of power. The conditionality imposed by the EU to resolve the name issue, the sense of coercion and despair, “should not be underestimated.”



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Trust, inequality, and beauty services Both Sofia and Eleni mentioned the level of trust that existed between them and the “girls”: the cosmeticians and the hairdressers. The patience, politeness, and expertise of employees on the Macedonian side of the border were highly praised by many Greek customers who crossed the border to obtain beauty services. An interview with Mira, a hairdresser in Bitola, many of whose clients come from the town of Florina and its surroundings in Greece, also pointed out the significance of the social bonds that exist between the hairdresser and her female clients. Mira has had her salon for 18 years and has a steady clientele even from the period prior to opening the salon. For seven years she had adapted a corner of the entrance to her one-bedroom apartment as her hair “studio.” Mira equipped the corner with professional hood drier fixed on a stand next to a trolley equipped with rollers, hairbrushes, sprays, etc. With two small children this was not a perfect arrangement, and therefore the possibility to open a salon near the main farmers’ market in Bitola marked a new beginning in her life. Mira and her husband managed to open the hair studio with the help of an inheritance from her husband’s family. This was a big professional step forward, and also a relief for their living conditions. Although she lost some of her faithful customers, who came regularly to her apartment and could afford the cheap prices Mira had charged while working at home, the salon was an overall success. It allowed her to gain steady customers. The prices were higher than those she had charged when she had worked at home, but her expenses were also much higher. At the beginning of her work in the new hair studio, Mira had an assistant/ intern whom she didn’t pay but who was there to learn the profession. Now she is among the oldest hairdressers in town and two young hairstylists work alongside her in the salon. According to Mira, the past five to seven years have been “great,” with the influx of people from Greece who find the prices much cheaper on her side of the border. She makes sure to explain to me that the price list is much higher for the Greek customers than for the Macedonian ones. Similarly to Eleni, Mira also recounted the importance of hairstyling for Greek women, adding that “hairstyling is something much more important for them than for our Macedonian women.” My interviews with Greek citizens indeed revealed the importance of hairstyling for women. The detailed study conducted by Alexandra Bakalaki on the history of the hair-dressing profession in Greece focuses on the connection between hairstyling and social class (Bakalaki 1984).7 From factory workers, to educated middle-class intellectuals, to-upper class housewives married to the richest Greek entrepreneurs, displaying care and

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attention to one’s hair has been essential for the performance of class in the post-World War Two period. While the first beauty shop in Greece opened its doors in the 1890s, it was not until the 1920s and 1930s that we see a proliferation of this institution; these shops catered to the “privileged and cultured” segments of the bourgeoisie exclusively, offering luxurious services previously unavailable in Greece. Hairdressers helped clients in their pursuit of fashion and in their efforts to realize Western bourgeois ideals of femininity. For bourgeois women, striving for these ideals became mandatory: “they constituted an indispensable prerequisite for their participation in the social arenas appropriate for their class and gender, as well as for their exclusion from others” (Bakalaki 1984, 141). The first beauty shop proprietors were male and were considered to be artists or maîtres; the high-class position of their clients gave prestige to their work. In contrast to the clients of the first beauty shops, the young women who entered the hairdressing business as apprentices were poor and uneducated, and would work only until they got married, with only a few exceptions (Bakalaki 1984, 141). The proliferation of hairdressers in Greece came after the Greek Civil War in 1949, under the conditions of rapid rural migration into the cities. This, along with the limited availability of industrial wage labor, the transfer of rural capital to the cities, the transfer of “guest workers’” savings from abroad, and increasing demand for consumer goods and services created a boom in the sector (Bakalaki 1984, 169). The 1950s and 1960s therefore can be considered as the golden age of beauty shops in Greece, which were mushrooming especially in the urban neighborhoods of Athens and Thessaloniki. However, this proliferation was accompanied by an evident feminization of the profession, when small neighborhood shops were now almost exclusively operated by self-employed women while male hairdressers became a minority, mostly concentrated in large and up-scale salons downtown, attracting wealthy clients who could pay salon prices. The neighborhood shops attracted working-class and lower middle-class clients, due to their cheap prices and the informal, familiar atmosphere (Bakalaki 1984, 169). The class distinction of the beauty-shop clients is thus replicated within the wider class divisions of Greece. However, women’s consumption of beauty-shop services in general was structured by domestic duties that determined a specific appearance and style, which was in turn determined by a specific social class and also shaped by the women’s status as wives and daughters. The connection between hairdressing and social class is the focal point of Bakalaki’s comprehensive analysis of hairdressing in Thessaloniki and Athens (Bakalaki 1984). The author underscores the establishment of the hairdressing profession in Greece through both gender and labor prisms,

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and argues that the Greek socio-economic matrix until the early 1980s was characterized by certain structural features which distinguished it from the developed capitalist countries. “Among the most important were the relatively recent domination of capitalist relations, the concentration of the labor force in agriculture and in the tertiary sector, the prevalence of small enterprises and the nature of their relationship to the capitalist unit” (Bakalaki 1984, 115). It was the processes of modernization and westernization in the 1950s and after the 1967–74 dictatorship, respectively, that initiated serious efforts to reform state institutions with the aim of abolishing “obsolete” and archaic bureaucratic practices and achieving “efficiency” on a par with the Western European countries (Bakalaki 1984, 116). During the 1950s and 1960s, entry into the hairdressing profession was easy due to low level of investment required for this business. Accordingly, the demand for hairdressing services was high. This facilitated women’s participation in beauty-shop businesses, which enabled them to accommodate employment to their marriage plans and family-related duties (Bakalaki 1984, 170). The increased costs of establishing and maintaining a shop as well as changes in the patterns of women’s consumption of beauty-shop services made it more difficult for newcomers to enter the sector.8 As described by Bakalaki (1984), the increased costs of establishing and maintaining a shop, as well as changes in women’s consumption patterns of beauty-shop services triggered a decline of these businesses in the 1970s and 1980s (for more on this see Bakalaki 1984 and note 19). Small-scale beauty shops nonetheless persisted, with women trying to minimize their financial risk and maximize their profit. This, in turn, facilitated home-based enterprises that, although operated illegally, allowed women to become more flexible in terms of working hours. While situated at the lowest level of the salon hierarchy, and attending to the poorest social strata, these home-based enterprises served an important social function by establishing a close relationship between the hairdresser and her client.9 These relationships would last for decades, and the hairdresser in a way became “a member of the family.” Today, the home-based illegal enterprises are exclusively operated by women, as are the neighborhood shops that typically employ one or two women. The research conducted in the border towns of Gevgelija and Bitola suggests ongoing divisions among hairdressers along class axes very similar to that described by Bakalaki in 1960s and 1970s Greece: the home-based, typically female hairdressers continue to attend to the poorest strata while the male-led shops are usually branded as the most fashionable, with most skillful and up-to-date stylists. In between these two types, neighborhood shops serve lower middle-class women and are characterized by close social

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bonds and familiarity between the hairdresser and her clients. The high-end salons, in contrast, maintain an impersonal (“professional”) relationship where “each client is treated the same” (Bakalaki 1984, 24). On several occasions my research confirmed the presence of close social relations between hairdressers and customers, often based on trust and intimacy. But, as the study of the development of the hairdressing profession in Greece suggests, this relationship is feminized and undervalued. Just like domestic work, it rests on patriarchal arrangements that, although they seemingly allow women to enter the labor force and be independent, are also structurally confining in a competitive market where the “big players,” who set the new trends of the profession, are typically male. The fact that many Greek middle-class women travel across the border to get pampered by Macedonian “girls” who offer an “immaculate” service, might even be interpreted as a neocolonial form of interaction based on inequality rooted in currency imparity and a political-economic and welfare gap between Greece and RN Macedonia. There is an obvious politicaleconomic difference between the two countries that needs to be fleshed out. Greece, as an EU, member and RN Macedonia, as a pending member and until 2018–19 deadlocked in a name dispute, have significant differences in gross domestic product (GDP). According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) figures for 2018, Greece’s GDP per capita was $20,317, while RN Macedonia’s GDP was $6,101 (World Bank 2018). This disparity undeniably affects living standards and creates a different quality of life in the economic and social security systems of the two countries, despite the ongoing financial crisis.10 The economic prosperity in Greece prior to the 2008 financial crisis has been subjected to numerous scrutinies that have tried to explain the economic crisis. According to several analyses, the Greek economy has experienced many oscillations: by late 1960s Greece had achieved high rates of economic growth due to large foreign investments. By the mid-1970s, the country had experienced a sharp decrease in the growth rate of its GDP and the ratio of investment to GDP, due to rising labor costs and oil prices (Krystaloyanni 2000, Mihail 1995). When Greece joined the European Community in 1981, protective economic barriers were removed. This removal caused even greater economic turbulence due to the economic policies based on borrowing that were implemented by the Greek government, resulting in even higher inflation. To finance rising public sector deficits, the government started to borrow heavily – a policy that, as some have argued, is at the root of the recent (and current) financial crisis (Krystaloyanni 2000, Mihail 1995).11 Another line of argument holds that the role of the Left after the victory of PASOK (the Pan-Hellenic Movement) and Papandreou in October 1981

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carries especially strong blame for the financial crisis and the politics of borrowing of 2009–10 (Stuckler and Basu 2013). Moreover, PASOK has been blamed for bringing large segments of the Greek population into the political mainstream. Greece succeeded in establishing a framework where disputes were resolved by spending money. In other words, spending became the primary neutralizer (even suppressor) of national antagonisms. It was the PASOK victory that allowed the socialists to come into power for the first time since 1924, and Andreas Papandreou to form the first post-World War Two socialist government in Greece. Their rule introduced major changes, departing from the previous repressive and anti-communist laws introduced after the war. For instance, leftist resistance fighters were given state pensions, while political refugees of the Greek Civil War who were “Greek by race” were finally given permission to return to Greece (thus ethnic Macedonians from Greece were excluded and were unable to claim their land and property unless they gave up or hid their Macedonian origin and claimed to be “pure” Greeks). The National Health System was created, wages were boosted, an independent and multidimensional foreign policy was pursued, and many reforms in family law aimed to strengthen the rights of women (Clogg 2002). This situation also affected the rise of the lower middle class in Greece. The 1980s also helped to anchor Greek democracy and settle big political questions. And yet, the 1980s derailed the Greek economy from a growth-driven one converging with the Western European economies to one of stagnation (Alogoskoufis 1995).12 It is not my intention to provide a detailed and linear chronicle on Greek socio-economic history but, rather, to identify certain knots in the post-war processes that have triggered the most recent financial crisis and have affected border porosity between Greece and RN Macedonia. As already suggested, the financial crisis in 2010 revealed that Greek citizens adopted a variety of responses. Most obvious were the massive strikes all over the country that attempted to challenge the decisions of the Greek political leadership. The protests voiced strong resentment over the way Greek politicians were forced to accept austerity measures and conditions imposed by the international community. It was evident that the austerity measures would affect every layer of society, especially the middle class, diminishing the generous welfare provisions that had existed in the country since the PASOK victory of 1981.The austerity measures set to meet targets determined by the EU, the IMF, and World Bank representatives have posed a threat to the social welfare system established since 1981. Public health has been especially impacted by the measures, causing cuts of 40 percent, according to a recent study (Stuckler and Basu 2013).

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Predicaments of agency One of the responses to the crisis, as I have tried to argue, was intensive cross-border activity, which, for the women I interviewed, was seen as a form of agency and empowerment. Sofia’s trips across the border are strategies of survival and adaptation to the crisis that left her husband almost without an income and prevented her children from enjoying a good life. However, the monthly border crossings for Sofia and her friends embrace prevailing gender norms and dominant modes of femininity. Such understandings of empowerment and agency, even resistance, carried out through the acts of consumption of beauty services and shopping, become at the same time an enactment of Sofia’s understanding of the possibility of visiting the beauty and hair salons or indulging in shopping and spending – practices that have been the staples of the middle-class in Greece since the 1980s. This middle-class female understanding of access to “normal beauty treatments” begs for a feminist approach that explicates the notion of female beauty and locates cosmetic services within disciplinary and normalizing feminine beauty practices, but also cannot be separated from the cultural and social practices that glorify female beauty, on the one hand, and define the female body as deficient and in constant need of improvement, on the other (Davis 1991, 25). Within feminism, women’s preoccupation with their appearance is viewed as part of a complex of structured social practices, variously referred to as the politics of appearance (Chapkis 1996), the technologies of body management and the beauty system (Bordo 1989), the aesthetic scaling of bodies (Young 1990), or the fashion–beauty complex (Bartky 1982). It includes the myriad procedures, technologies, and rituals drawn upon by individual women in their everyday lives, the cosmetic industry, the advertising business, and the cultural discourses on femininity and beauty. Appearance is one of the central ways through which femininity has been constructed for millennia, whereby women perceived as attractive are idealized as the incarnations of physical beauty, while most ordinary women are rendered “drab, ugly, loathsome or fearful bodies” (Davis quoted in Young 1990, 123). Evidently, the earlier feminist assumption that beauty and cosmetic interventions could never be liberating for women has shifted from one of oppression towards one of a discourse in which multiple femininities are at stake, and where power is not only repressive but also productive and constitutive. According to this approach the female body is seen as a cultural text through which femininity is constructed in scientific discourses, medical technologies, the popular media, and everyday common sense (Davis 1991, 26). Several authors have successfully argued for the subversive power

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of beauty and hair salons where different class, ethnic, and professional identities clash and are renegotiated in the discursive exchange that is formed between beauty professionals and their consumers (Gimlin 1996, Ossman 2002). Mahmood’s seminal work (2004) has also problematized liberal feminism’s conviction that emancipation results from breaking a norm, and instead argues for a case where subscribing to a norm constitutes an agentive, radical act. In this vein, we can argue that cosmetic and beauty interventions can also be closely linked to notions of justice and rights not only for the middle classes but also for working-class women who have a different relationship to modernity, medicine, and consumer culture. Alexander Edmonds’ research on cosmetic surgeries in Brazil reveals that behind the democratization of plastic surgery among the popular classes is the shifting notion of rights, in which the “right to beauty” is interpreted as an access to specific goods and services (Edmonds 2007, 371). According to Edmonds, this is a fundamental premise on which neoliberalism in Brazil functions nowadays, where the antidote to social exclusion is imagined as market participation, and where appearance has a very concrete market value. In Sofia’s and Eleni’s cases, but also for many women in Greece, the insistence on having access to beauty services was something fundamental to their sense of being and femininity. In subscribing to this view, they embraced two competing outlooks: they are part of women’s agency, but in so doing they also reinforce prevailing gender norms and notions of femininity. Such a position is preconditioned by market participation, with a specific market value of feminine appearance, but it also opens up avenues for renegotiating one’s positionality vis-à-vis larger national and supranational structures of power creating, through consumer practices, micro-narratives of initiative, entitlement, resistance, and persistence, as both Sofia and Eleni revealed during our conversations. Sofia’s and Eleni’s desire to be beautiful and to have a “high maintenance” look arguably contains an agentic power, to use Pulkkinen and Helms’s phrase. At the same time, it also reflects and is entrenched in a classist and patriarchal social system. Fully aware that the empowerment argument recapitulates capitalist dogma on consumption as liberation, I would like to bring in the concept of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) as “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility” (Berlant 2011, 24). Cruel optimism is a way of understanding the attachments that we have established in relation to fantasies of the good life that no longer exists in the present. Berlant thus defines an object of desire as “a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us” (Berlant 2011, 23), whether it be an individual or place, an abstract idea, sound, or smell.

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Moreover, “cruel optimism” is about living within crisis, and about the destruction of our collective conceptions of what a “life” is all about. Berlant’s analysis carries a profound political message in her insistence that we all need to reconsider our objects of desire and the deeply injurious and destructive nature of our attachments in favor of optimism. It is only by recognizing and understanding the various impasses we face, that we can strive to create alternative conditions for living. Sofia and Eleni obviously succumb to “cruel optimism” as they continue their consumption practices across the border. However, they have also created alternative conditions for doing so by crossing the border and traveling to a “hostile territory” (a phrase used by one of my interviewees in Polycastro). Although we never discussed it explicitly, both Eleni and Sofia appeared to be aware of the significantly lower income, poverty, and dire living standards in RN Macedonia when compared to Greece, by casually remarking on the dilapidated houses or the low salaries people earn. The aforementioned asymmetry between an EU country and the Western Balkan periphery leaves traces in people’s relations and how they feel about each other. As one dental assistant put it: “we are grateful for their (Greeks) presence because we have work and earning. But I often get annoyed by their arrogance and demands.”

Conclusion In conclusion, I would like to revisit the relevance of the porosity concept as viewed by geology and petroleum engineering given the resonance of the moldic and vuggy porosities and the consumer-driven border crossings that I have discussed. Historical and pre-existing economic conditions have opened up pores and channels for intensive cross-border movement. The “journeys for beauty” in the Greek–Macedonian borderland in the face of the financial crisis bring us back to the Marxist feminist relational nexus between labor, political economy, and human agency mediated through the role of the state. As became clear during my research, the changes taking place in Greece since 2010 have interfered with how citizens view and define their relationship to the state. “Being a real woman,” serves as a touchstone for the women whom I met during my fieldwork to rely on in their “active” engagement and participation in dealing with the crisis. The women’s effort was invested in actively being “in charge of one’s own life.” This extends beyond the rubric of beauty and maintaining femininity in the hair salon or the beauty parlor. The reproduction of normative definitions of femininity and beauty is used as a way to reaffirm agency against the austerity measures and continues to illustrate the doubt many have in the Greek state’s ability to take care of its citizens.

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Sofia’s and Eleni’s sense of control and power while making their monthly travels to Gevgelija gives them the impression of maintaining their sense of reality. Moreover, they feel capable of keeping up with practices that make them “real women.” Arguably, these practices are effectively grounded in consumerism and a capitalist logic that defines female beauty in a specific way grounded in the middle-class sense of self. Nevertheless, it is these acts of shopping and consumption that also allow them to exercise agency. Through these acts, they renegotiate their place in the family, their country, and even in Europe vis-à-vis the larger players. The access to beauty services that have become unaffordable in Greece gives a sense of comfort and reassurance that relies both on the border being within easy reach and on a sense of trust that has been developed through the intertwined histories of mixing and border-crossing between RN Macedonia and Greece, although other elements are also present such as gender, an unacknowledged shared Balkan way of life, and multilayered linguistic competencies. This presence of Greek citizens in the border towns of Gevgelija and Bitola has been transformative for the economy of these places and also for the country’s wider economy. But the transformation has also been followed by major scandals related to money laundering and tax evasion, especially in relation to the Princess Group casino. In the 1990s the owner of this largest casino in Gevgelija, Sudi Özkan, was charged by the Turkish authorities with a €200 million tax evasion. As a result of this scandal he moved out of Turkey, and since then has been residing on the island of St Martin. The investigative journalists’ network scoop.mk reported that in 2008 Özkan settled his tax debt in Turkey by paying €40 million to the Turkish revenue office. His casinos continued to operate in Turkey until 1998, when the Turkish government prohibited the gaming industry and casinos on religious grounds. Since then, Özkan’s gambling and luxury hotel business has spread in 15 countries where he currently owns 34 casinos and 18 first-class hotels. According to scoop.mk, in 2013 and 2014 the Princess Group in North Macedonia reported losses of €3 million. This information motivated investigative journalists to analyze the role of the casinos and the gaming industry in relation to moneylaundering activities connected to large corporations. Given the fact that RN Macedonia tops the list for the number of casinos per capita in Europe, many have rightly posed the question of corruption and bribery between government officials and the casinos.13 And yet, the casinos have inevitably changed the social landscape of Gevgelija. The presence of visitors from Greece in Gevgelija and Bitola is telling. The Princess, Flamingo and Apollonia casinos are packed with visitors during the weekends, to the point that it is impossible to find a free parking place. Minivans continuously transport visitors from Greece in the surrounding areas, but they also go all the way to Thessaloniki, Kilkis, and

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Edessa (Voden). The fact is that the casinos require their employees to be fluent in Greek, and the number of Greek language schools in Gevgelija and Bitola (also in Skopje) has increased dramatically. One of my interviewees responded that these developments are reproducing, in linguistic terms, the Hellenization campaigns of the twentieth century, albeit in ways that are at present differently layered and complex. In conclusion, from small businesses such as Mira’s hairdressing shop, to farmers who sell their produce at the farmers’ markets, to family-owned restaurants where many Greek citizens from the border areas organize celebrations and Greek language schools, this intensive porosity in Gevgelija and Bitola has had a major impact on the region. This porosity has had a spherical and repetitive character. The people are seemingly located in specific places as they face obstacles caused by the financial crisis. And yet, although many feel molded by harsh realities and powerless vis-à-vis the state and international impositions, many of them carve specific routes in the neighboring state that enable them to find practical but also effective solutions to their mundane problems.

Notes 1 An interview with an employee of the border police force, conducted in October 2015. 2 For comparative insights into how gaming industry transforms local communities see Cattelino 2004, Cattelino 2008, Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, Malaby 2003, Malaby 2007, Schüll 2014, Scott 2004, Scott and Selwyn 2010. 3 Conducted in September 2012, the one-hour interview with Eleni continued in an informal conversation over coffee in the hotel foyer, where she shared pictures of her advertisement campaigns, and her future professional plans and her strategy to revive her company. 4 This ethnographic vignette is based on excerpts of several interviews I had with Sofia in the spring of 2013, conducted in the center of Gevgelija and in the hotel Flamingo on the border with Greece. 5 The power of the machine stems from the intersection of the technological configuration of gambling activities and the experience of gamblers. Today’s standard gambling machines are complex devices assembled on a digital platform from 1,200 or more individual parts – a process that involves up to 300 people, including script writers, graphic artists, marketers, mathematicians, and mechanical, video, and software engineers – not to mention designers of auxiliary components such as touchscreens, bill validators, and machine cabinets (Schüll 2014, 55). 6 Tribal economic success has translated into very real benefits for Seminole individuals and families. Every tribal member who seeks and can sustain employment is able

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to work for the tribal government, and entrepreneurs can obtain small business loans. All Seminole citizens enjoy free lifelong access to educational access and universal health insurance. Services for elders are comprehensive, including provision of hot meals, payment of grocery bills payment, recreation and educational travel, and other services provided by the Department of Elders’ Affairs. Direct bimonthly cash distributions to all tribal citizens augment their household incomes. Infrastructure is being (re)built on all of the reservations, from sewers and roads to housing, schools, and administrative buildings (Cattelino 2004, 3). 7 I was also reminded that a similar importance is attached to hair and beard (shaving) for men, and of the importance of the old-fashioned barber shops, as well as the modern fashionable unisex hairdressers where younger men go. I am grateful to Costas Canakis for this remark. 8 Bakalaki (1984) attributed the decline of hair shops to changing styles: in the 1950s and 1960s, fashionable hairstyles required setting the hair in rollers and drying it under an upright hair-drying hood. It was common for women to have their hair set every time they washed it, and to visit the beauty shop weekly. Since the late 1960s, however, women have turned increasingly to the “natural look”, replacing old styles with precision cuts and permanents. Instead of weekly visits, these styles allowed them to look fashionable for at least a month. However, the technology of the new hairstyles required a blow-dryer, and instead of sitting under an upright drying hood it now took twice as long to set the hair than simply having the customer sit under the dryer (Bakalaki 1984, 200). Competition between different proprietors intensified and put those who ran large enterprises at an advantage due to the possibility of acquiring new hairdressing technology that costs more but, in turn, generates more income, unlike small-scale entrepreneurs who work alone and can serve only one client at a time (ibid., 210). 9 The professional associations of hairdressers in Greece strongly opposed the home-based proprietors, insisting on a professionalization, certified with degrees from training schools. Motivated by fear stemming from Greece’s entry into the European Community, hairdressing associations anticipated the entry of foreign and cheaper services and therefore pushed for professionalization and competitiveness. However, the informal, home-based and small neighborhood hairdressers, although severely affected by the changes in the market as well as changes of style and hairdressing practices, struggled to survive the harsh economic situation in the 1980s. What remained unchanged, although inevitably affected by the changing conditions and reduced time available for clients, was the close social bond between the small shops or the home-based proprietors and their clientele, a feature completely absent from the large salons, typically owned by male hairdressers, that offered a large variety of services and employed numerous personnel (Bakalaki 1984, 212). 10 In illustration of the effects of the financial crisis on GDP per capita, in 2008, prior to the beginning of the financial crisis, Greece’s GDP per capita was $30,661. When compared to the 2018 figure it is obvious that the Greek economy has shrunk by one third in the last decade (World Bank Reports).

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11 In 1985, for instance, supported by a US$1.7 billion European Currency Unit (ECU) loan from the EU, the Greek government began a two-year “stabilization” program, with moderate success. Inefficiency in the public sector and excessive government spending caused the government to borrow even more money. Already by 1992 government debt exceeded 100 percent of Greece’s GDP. Greece became dependent on foreign borrowing to pay for its fiscal deficits, and by the end of 1998 public sector external debt was at US$32 billion, with overall government debt at US$119 billion (105.5 percent of GDP) (Alogoskoufis 1995). 12 Central to this is the question why the Greek economy was worse off in 1989 than it was in 1980, and especially worse when compared to the post-war boom that lasted through the 1960s and 1970s. Economists have argued that Greece had been transformed from a growing in to a stagnant, even declining economy, due to a politics based on income redistribution that created a sense of entitlement, disconnecting reward from effort (Alogoskoufis 1995, Clogg 2002). It can be successfully argued that the language and economic philosophy of the 1980s created much of the rigidity the country faces today and explains the strength of groups such as unions and popular understandings of fairness of wages. In other words, in the 1980s Greece managed to “normalize” its politics and fortify democracy only through massive state spending (for more see Knight and Stewart 2016, Vournelis 2016) 13 http://scoop.mk/проблематичните-играчи-во-казино-биз/ (accessed 21 June 2018).

3

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The sedimentary porosity of tourism, ownership, and child refugees

In this chapter I discuss border porosity as tourists in socialist Yugoslavia and the child refugees who had fled the Greek Civil War (1946–49) crossed the border between the two countries. Motivated by diametrically opposite reasons – some crossing the border for leisure and some fleeing war – the people who crossed the border have caused an enduring porosity that has persisted despite the rigid national policies of the two countries and the extraordinary conditions when these movements took place. I call this sedimentary porosity because sediments that consist of different mineral parts and particles solidify and form a compact layer that endures over time. A significant number of people crossed the border with Greece as tourists during socialism, despite the grueling (and often humiliating) ways of obtaining Greek visas. Many of those who were passionate vacationers on the Greek shores during socialism, and have become upwardly mobile in the post-socialist period, are nowadays owners of seaside properties, with a permanent presence in Greece not only during the summer period but throughout the year. Since 2012 and the law that allows non-EU citizens to purchase property in Greece, property owners from RN Macedonia have been forming enduring relationships with their Greek neighbors, due to their spatial proximity as next-door neighbors and their regular visits. The child refugees who left their villages in Greek Macedonia in 1948, fleeing the Greek Civil War, have also formed enduring connections and alliances with each other and activists or politicians in their homeland, becoming one of the most influential voices of Macedonian national unity. I continue to draw on geology and its concepts as I find the metaphor of sediments helpful in understanding tourists, property owners, and child refugees, and the relationships they form that are reminiscent of sediments. Specifically, this geological idiom is helpful in explaining the persisting influence of the former tourists who have now turned into property owners,

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and the child refugees who now play a role in national and transnational policies. Defined as types of rock that are formed by the accumulation or deposition of small particles and the subsequent cementation of mineral or organic particles on the floors of oceans or other bodies of water on the Earth’s surface, sediments are deposits that acquire different forms, substance and functions over time. Sedimentation is the collective term for the processes that cause these particles to settle (Boggs 2006). The sedimentary porosity across the borders has involved people whose choices (or inevitability) to cross the border have created the conditions for ever more intensive porosity of the border and the evident presence of either the tourists (now homeowners) or child refugees (now national activists) on both sides of the border. The sedimentary permeability of the rigid border policy began during socialism, when, for Macedonians, obtaining a visa to travel to Greece was a difficult and cumbersome affair with an unpredictable outcome. Due to the disputed history between Yugoslavia and Greece relating to the Macedonian question and the child refugees (something that I will discuss in more detail below), crossing the border was uncertain and complicated. Given the proximity of the seaside, however, many Yugoslav citizens from the Socialist Republic of Macedonia (and the other parts of Yugoslavia) traveled to Greece for their summer vacations. Nowadays, many Macedonian owners of seaside property are faced with bureaucratic hurdles related to paying property taxes or the maintenance and security of their properties that, according to my interviewees, are often motivated by hostility towards them just for being Macedonians. Many of the child refugees who fled Northern Greece and have now settled across the world and have citizenship of other countries similarly encountered problems in crossing the border, due to using the Macedonian name of their place of birth. In addition to sedimentary porosity, this chapter also engages with more anthropological literature on borders, especially with Donnan and Wilson’s work (1999). The borders between Greece and RN Macedonia (and previously socialist Yugoslavia) are sites of power, as they inscribe the territorial limits of states. The anthropological approach in studying these limits is crucial. The “border cultures” (Donnan and Wilson 1999, 13) reveal how nation and state are routinely lived and experienced by ordinary people. “By their very nature, international borders highlight ambiguities of identity as people move through interactions based on, for example, citizenship, nationhood and membership in a local community” (Donnan and Wilson 1999, 13). I discuss the uneasy socialist porosity circumscribed by rigid bureaucracy and realpolitik, and the chapter provides a sketch of how the abolition of visa requirements in 2009 and the change of the Greek law on real estate ownership in 2013 enabled the border to become ever more open and

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allowed many affluent citizens from RN Macedonia to become “sedimented” in Greece by purchasing real estate, enabling a closer interaction between the two sides. In fieldwork conducted in Skopje and Halkidiki’s coastal towns of Kallithea, Polichrono, Haniotis, and Pevkohori on Cassandra – the first finger of the peninsula – and in the city of Nea Moudania in central Halkidiki, I collected materials from interviews and participant observation with 24 citizens from RN Macedonia who vacationed in Greece during socialism, in the post-socialist period, and those who have also recently purchased real estate. In addition, I also interviewed three real estate agents and three lawyers who worked closely with buyers and owners from RN Macedonia. Explaining the interaction between different actors, as well as identifying the relevance of name conflict, I hope to highlight the discrepancy between the official political hindrances that have marked the formal political regulations, on the one hand, and the economic exchange between the two countries in different temporal and ideological sequences, on the other. This chapter also addresses the flight of the child refugees in 1948, when approximately 20,000 children fled Greece as their parents fought in the civil war. Many of the fighters were ethnic Macedonians who fought side by side with the Greek communists, and after their defeat in 1949 their return to Greece was prohibited (for more on the tensions between the Greek communists and the Macedonians from Greece see Rossos 1997).

Socialist escapades across the border During the socialist period economic exchange was officially conducted between the Yugoslav Federation and Greece. However, the everyday informal border crossings of goods and money were primarily done by tourists and consumers from Macedonia and Serbia (and the other former Yugoslav republics, although not nearly so intensively). The Northern Greek lower-class holiday resorts such as Paralia, Platamona, and Leptokaria were favorite destinations for the average working- and lower middle-class socialist consumers, whose yearly savings would be poured into these places for vacations and shopping. Since socialist Macedonia was a land-locked republic closest to the Greek coast, many citizens travelled to Greece for their summer holidays. Many were on tight budgets and would therefore travel in cars stacked with food, drink, and anything needed for a comfortable holiday with minimal expenditure. They usually headed to the camp sites near Platamona, Paralia, and Leptokaria. Often called paradajz-turisti (“tomato tourists”), these people from the former Yugoslavia had a higher symbolic status than tourists from other socialist countries (Grandits and Taylor 2010).1 Polish

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and Czech tourists, for instance, were viewed by Greek locals as not only avoiding buying local products and commodities but actually bringing things from their homelands such as clothing, bags, silver jewelry, slide projectors, and small kitchen appliances (usually coffee mills, meat-mincing machines or mixers) to sell. Often turning car parks into small “Polish” bazaars, where they sold goods brought in from Poland, these tourists were not only covering their holiday costs but were also earning money for the rest of the year (for more on this see Grandits and Taylor 2010). Tourists from Yugoslavia regularly combined their summer holidays with shopping sprees, especially for goods which were in short supply in Yugoslavia such as coffee, but also for more fashionable clothes, popular school supplies such as pens, crayons, notebooks, or school bags. Owning “училишен прибор купен во Грција” (“a school set bought in Greece”) carried significant symbolic capital and instituted class awareness among primary and secondary school students in socialist Macedonia. Elsewhere, I have elaborated in more detail how everyday consumption practices that allowed people access to a variety of everyday goods and commodities, such as home furnishing items, electronic items, clothes, or cars, were widely accepted during the period of the Yugoslav Federation, especially in the 1970s and 1980s (Dimova 2013). The new, officially encouraged consumerist class was subjected to fierce criticism by the socialist leaders and important intellectuals within the country. Interestingly, the consumer culture and the national question in Yugoslavia became closely connected and formed the basis for subsequent ethno-national tensions: To live “the good life” – to have a nicer home, or a weekend house, to buy various glamorized consumer goods, to own a decent car, and to shop freely abroad – represented one of the rare factors contributing to a specifically Yugoslavian sense of identity, and thus […] helped dampen the appeal of ethnic nationalist politics. (Patterson 2012, 43)

More specifically, during the period of the Yugoslav Federation (1943–91) the salaries of many Yugoslav citizens allowed them to live a “consumer” life-style, but for disadvantaged minorities in Yugoslavia, such as ethnic Albanians, migration was the only means of access to consumerism (Patterson 2012, 25). The salaries of many working-class Yugoslav people during the socialist period allowed them to go to neighboring Trieste (Italy), Graz (Austria), and Thessaloniki (Greece) to purchase food, clothes, smaller household items and other goods. The main incentive was the larger range of choice. Purchasing goods from a Western capitalist country was a significant class marker. Many well-off working-class socialist families would save throughout the year in order to be able to afford shopping trips. For those living in Croatia and Slovenia, for instance, the main destinations were

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Trieste and Graz, and those living in Serbia and Macedonia went mostly to Thessaloniki, although many people from Serbia also went to Italy, as it had a higher status than Greece. The presence of Macedonian citizens on via Egnatia or via Tsimiski in Thessaloniki was clearly visible. Tsimiski offered more expensive shopping, as it targeted the more affluent Macedonian citizens. For the majority of working-class people who went shopping to Greece, the merchandise on this street was unaffordable. Moreover, the expensive and stylish items purchased in the boutiques on Tsimiski Street played a prominent role in the class imaginary of ordinary people in Macedonia by creating symbolic capital and drawing social boundaries. Arguably, crossing the border and bringing back goods purchased in Greece enabled the people involved in these cross-border shopping practices to negotiate class through the goods they brought back into the country. More precisely, the symbolic capital earned through the display of goods that were unavailable in Yugoslavia and were evidently purchased abroad became desirable for those layers of the Yugoslav middle class that were eager to climb the social ladder. Class differences existed, although their reproduction was strictly centralized. Unlike in capitalist countries, in socialist Yugoslavia education was not a site of class differentiation, given that there were only state schools or universities available to everyone. The same went for housing: there was guaranteed housing allocated through socialist companies where employees from different social backgrounds shared apartment buildings or urban quarters. It was therefore the display of goods that denoted the special distinction of their consumers’ social position (Bourdieu 1984). Everyday consumption became a field of the most obvious class differentiation. Moreover, shopping became a tangible possibility for many tourists from socialist Yugoslavia who spent their holidays and went shopping in Greece and thus had access to a variety of new products unavailable at home. The proximity of Thessaloniki, Larissa, and Katerini to the vacation spots enabled many Yugoslav tourists to plan frequent but carefully budgeted shopping visits to these places, mainly to buy clothes but also for household and school items. For many, their visits to Greece targeted high-end items such as fur coats, gold jewelry, and leather items such as shoes, bags, and jackets. For most of the visitors, crossing of the Greek border inevitably involved purchasing the popular Levi’s “501” jeans, fashionable T-shirts or Converse “All Star” sneakers. For citizens in Bitola, the proximity of the town of Florina (30 kilometers away) allowed them to organize monthly shopping visits to buy not only clothes but also food, detergents, and cleaning supplies. Although these were not cheaper than similar products available in Yugoslavia, the opportunity to purchase world brands unavailable at home was compelling and also contributed to a higher social status back home.

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The currency involved in these shopping transactions was mainly German marks. Usually, the majority of a traveler’s savings consisting of Yugoslav dinars would be converted to German marks through informal connections. Only a minimal sum of 100–300 German marks would be converted at an official exchange office, which would then issue the required “bordero” – a certificate of legally exchanged currency that was required as a proof when crossing the border. Since the formal method of currency exchange involved restrictions on the amount that could be exchanged, and also commanded a higher exchange fee (10 percent of the total amount), most Yugoslav citizens conducted these transactions informally, with people who allegedly earned great fortunes by doing informal transactions between the Yugoslav dinar and convertible foreign currencies such as the German mark, American dollar or Swiss franc. During the 1980s, when I was growing up and made regular trips from Skopje to Greece, to either Thessaloniki or the coastal towns of Platamona, both Yugoslavia and Greece went through shaky fiscal periods with high inflation.2 The exchange rate would determine whether Macedonian citizens exchanged their money into Greek drachmas or German marks. In any case, reliable information was always available, provided by someone who was part of the informal currency exchange business and who could advise on the state of the exchange rate in Macedonia and in Greece. These economic circumstances and the necessity for informal knowledge required different forms of trust and connection between people on both sides of the border in different formal or informal roles. These interactions actually enabled a more relaxed stance towards economically “immoral” and semi-legal behavior. These informal transactions were thus indicative of how people perceived and related to the state. The locus of morality in these economic practices evidently was not the relation to the state or law but, rather, was vested in the “Other” – the citizen of a state contesting the legitimacy of “one’s own” state (first as a socialist one in an ideological sense, and then as a state with an illegitimate name and identity). Hence, as Fassin reminds us, intimacy and emotions become inseparable from moral economy, and intertwined with value, pragmatism, and circulation (Fassin 2013, 12) Located on the brink of illegality, the money exchange “business” actually enabled different sorts of interconnectedness between Greek and Yugoslav citizens, especially Macedonians. For instance, on the streets of Thessaloniki most of the shopkeepers allowed purchases to be made in German marks in order to simplify the shopping experience for customers from socialist Yugoslavia and to spare them the additional fees required by both the formal and informal exchanges. This practice was accompanied by a common understanding on both sides that something “illegal” was being done, and

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also with a significant measure of trust binding the seller and the customer against the official political and economic situation in both countries. As a result, this practice revealed distrust of their own states as a shared feature among the citizens on both sides. As I argued in Chapter 2, by the late 1960s Greece had achieved high rates of economic growth due to large foreign investments. By the mid-1970s, the country was experiencing declines in the growth rate of its GDP and the ratio of investment to GDP, which caused labor costs and oil prices to rise. When Greece joined the European Community in 1981, protective economic barriers were removed and this caused even more economic turbulence. The aggressive economic policy implemented by the Greek government resulted in high inflation. To stop the rising public sector deficits, the government started to borrow heavily – a policy that, as some have argued, was at the root of the 2008–9 financial crisis (Krystaloyanni 2000, Mihail 1995). Moreover, the wider political-economic dynamics affected the border’s porosity, especially in terms of the tourist and shopping waves coming from socialist Yugoslavia; nonetheless, the informal porosity of the border would soon be re-established, while in the 1980s people would continue with their summer holidays, as well as the shopping sprees that raised their social status. In the changing economic conditions, the presence of citizens from socialist Yugoslavia (especially from Socialist Republic of Macedonia) as consumers and tourists remained a factor in the Greek economy, and it was especially significant for smaller businesses and merchants in the Northern Greek coastal towns, as well as in parts of Thessaloniki where Macedonians did their shopping. This changed in 1991 when Macedonia became independent and the two countries became engulfed in the name conflict. But also with the end of socialism, many of the commodities and brands that were previously unavailable were displayed in the newly opened shops and boutiques in Macedonian towns.

Post-socialist sedimentation Despite the name conflict, the Programme for Stimulating Investment in the Republic of Macedonia (2003) revealed that Greece was the largest investor in the country between 1991 and 2002, followed by Lichtenstein, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, Austria, and Slovenia (Ministry of the Economy of the Republic of Macedonia 2003). More precisely, since 1994, which marked the end of the economic embargo imposed by Greece between 1992 and 1993, Greek enterprises invested more money in Macedonia than in the enterprises of any other country (Chamber of Commerce of the Republic of Macedonia 2005). Greek-owned corporations purchased national companies

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in the most strategic sectors of the Macedonian economy. In 2001, Hellenic Petroleum bought the Macedonian Oil Refinery OKTA; in 1993, Alpha Bank Skopje (owned by Alpha Bank Athens) entered the Macedonian financial market as one of the first private banks; and in 2000, Stopanska Banka, Macedonia’s oldest and largest state bank, established in 1944, was purchased by the National Bank of Greece, competing with the Macedonian Bank for dominance over Macedonian-owned banks. The second-largest mobile phone operator, Cosmofon, formerly owned by a Greek company that also introduced a fixed-line telephone service, was sold to the Slovenian operator ONE in 2010, due to its financial problems; ONE then became part of the Austrian VIP and now A1 corporations. There has also been Greek investment in the large chain of textile factories that stretch across the southern part of the Republic of Macedonia between Bitola and Prilep. These Greek-owned businesses have been crucial in reviving Macedonia’s textile industry, which suffered gravely after the collapse of state-owned factories. From the second half of the 1990s and up to the present, Greek companies have been acquiring and invigorating Macedonian enterprises, and many Macedonian companies have achieved economic success by relying on their Greek partners for export and import ventures (Statistical Office of the Republic of Macedonia 2008). The fact that such partnerships are a significant presence at economic fairs in both countries reveals that governments on both sides of the border have been encouraging mutual investments. Greek money has also been used to hire Macedonian labor. An article in the Greek newspaper Elefteros Tipos (8 March 2008) reveals that Greece invested US$263 million in the Republic of Macedonia during the period 2000–6, prior to the financial crisis in Greece. During that period Greek-owned companies were employing around 20,000 Macedonian citizens. Moreover, because of economic difficulties in the Republic of Macedonia, many of its citizens migrated abroad to seek jobs. Greece is a popular destination, particularly for seasonal labor. During the peak tourist season, cheap labor from Macedonia migrates to the Greek coastal areas, primarily in the North. Many of the cleaners, waiters, bar-tenders and kitchen workers in the largest hotels in Halkidiki, for example, are from RN Macedonia. Greece also attracts seasonal labor from Macedonia to work in agriculture during the harvest season, particularly on the orange plantations of Greek Macedonia. Greece continues to be a major labor destination for many Macedonian citizens despite the euro crisis and the country’s own financial problems, and it is also a main tourist destination for lower middle-class and workingclass people from Macedonia through the affordable tourist packages offered by Macedonian tourist agencies, which range between €60 and €130 euros per person per week, including travel and accommodation. The EU visa



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liberalization in December 2009 for citizens of the Western Balkans (Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania) has lifted an immense impediment to cross-border travel. This has had an especially significant impact not only for Macedonian citizens traveling to Greece to seek temporary jobs but also for tourists and, as I will explain in the following section, rich Macedonians purchasing real estate in Greece.

Real estate: predicaments of ownership on the Greek coast In 2012, under EU pressure and as part of the austerity measures introduced to reduce its foreign debt, Greece introduced a property tax in the range of 7–12 percent (which has been managed by its individual municipalities or prefectures). This new tax has affected many property-owning Greek citizens, forcing them to pay large amounts for their property. The poor rental market left the option of selling their property as the most viable. Given that buying real estate had previously been one of the most attractive ways of investing money, due to the absence of any tax, from 2012 there was a surge of available real estate on the Greek market. This situation has resulted in two major changes: a big dip in real estate prices and, most importantly, the abolition of the law that formerly forbade non-EU citizens to own property in Greece.3 My interview with a Greek owner of several holiday complexes in Halkidiki revealed that most of the people interested in purchasing property were Turkish, Russian, Serbian, and, especially, “people from FYROM”. In addition to buying apartments or houses, a popular option for the less affluent has been setting up a mobile home in one of the many camping sites, where the annual fee allows a fixed platform to be mounted, as well as different semi-permanent additions to the actual camper. Since 2012 many well-off Macedonian citizens have purchased apartments or houses in the northern coastal areas that are not more than a three- or four-hour drive from Skopje, or even less from the other bigger towns of RN Macedonia. This new phenomenon led to the creation of an additional area of trust among sellers and buyers, next-door neighbors, lawyers and clients, as people needed to finalize their ownership of real estate. An interview with a couple from Skopje who purchased a seaside property in the town of Polichrono on Halkidiki in Northern Greece revealed the many tensions that were involved in the process of purchasing property, and also in its ongoing maintenance, along with the close contact between the Macedonian couple and their Greek neighbors in the same complex, who are from Thessaloniki. The actual price of the apartment was significantly higher than the sum officially recorded. This was done in order to reduce the seller’s

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income tax payment. In return, the seller gave the couple a reduction of €5,000 in the asking price. Thus, for a condominium of 85 square meters directly on the sea front, the Macedonian couple paid a total of €145,000, while the officially recorded price that was wired through an official bank transfer was €75,000. The remaining €70,000 were paid in cash by the Macedonian couple, who, in their own words, experienced days and nights of fear and apprehension until the deal was finally completed. First, there was the complication of accessing a sufficient amount of cash in Skopje in time. Then there was the fear that they might be robbed or attacked while transporting the money. Finally, there was the fear that the Greek seller or someone on the Greek side wouldn’t report the deal to the authorities. When the deal was done “and the contract was signed, the cash delivered and the bank transfer completed, everyone could relax and be at peace” (38-year-old coastal real estate owner in Northern Greece from Skopje). My interviews with Macedonian citizens who purchased seaside real estate in Greece reveal that each one of them used to spend their summer holidays in Greece. “And not only summer holidays, but every holiday, including Christmas, Easter, or state holidays, we would go to Greece. My entire family has been enchanted by the sea and nature. The people are not that bad as well. The more we get to know each other, the better our relationship becomes,” explained Stojan, a 52-year-old entrepreneur from Kumanovo who purchased a house in Polichrono in 2014. This surge of Macedonian citizens buying property in Greece has created a need for translators as well as lawyers who specialize in property, and general “experts” who assist Macedonian citizens in handling Greek property and bureaucratic regulations. The three couples from RN Macedonia whom I interviewed for my research, who all owned property in Polichrono, have relied on the services of a Bulgarian man who is married to a Greek woman, speaks fluent Greek, and is able to communicate with his clients from Macedonia in Bulgarian and Macedonian – two languages that are mutually intelligible (like Norwegian and Swedish). He has also created a network of handymen, technicians, painters, and people who provide cleaning services and everything else that is needed when, as he pointed out in a conversation with me, “the fridge or the air-conditioner breaks down.” An ongoing struggle, according to the Macedonian owners of the condominium in Halkidiki, has been the obvious resentment of the Greek neighbors in the complex, who are uneasy with the display of wealth by Macedonian citizens and who “have to digest the presence of our Jeep, our fancy balcony furniture or the nice clothes drying on the rack in the common garden behind the villas. Our next-door neighbor wanted to purchase this condominium for one of her sons, but she wasn’t able to get a bank loan

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and now bears animosity towards us, often turning away and not wanting to even greet us,” explained a 52-year-property owner in Polichrono from Skopje. Property relations and their moral significance for locals have been interpreted in ways other than through the idea of moral economy. Again, if the notion of moral economy in its original intent is a way to understand the moral sensibilities of locals who accept, and at times resist, inequality, for example in property or wealth, then property relations can certainly have moral significance for locals in other ways. Property relations are also a way for people to cultivate and maintain interpersonal relations of various sorts or to mark identity in ways imbued with moral authority. These relationships and identities become particularly clear during times of change or societal breakdown, not only for anthropologists, but also for local people (Zigon 2010, 73). In her 2010 article Zigon argues for the inextricable link between real estate and morality: From moral economies, to moral identities, to virtues, property relations of all sorts have been analyzed by anthropologists as having moral significance for local persons. Because property relations are almost always encoded in legal structures or enforced through law-like processes, it has been a primary way for anthropologists to consider the relationship between law and morality. What is perhaps most interesting about looking at property relations from the perspective of the anthropology of moralities is that it often reveals the deep-seated moral pluralism to be found within any society or social context. For the disagreements that arise around property relations are often founded on the conflicting moral assumptions that various actors bring to the table. (Zigon 2010, 75)

These relationships become part of the process of sedimentation that began with the surge of tourists since socialist times, revealing the presence of many Macedonian citizens differently: as wealthy owners who proudly display their fortune. In sum, it appears that the new experience of selling or buying real estate in Greece has rested on notions of (mis)trust and newly emerging interconnectedness that did not exist earlier, due to the impossibility of Macedonians buying real estate in Greece before 2012 and the passing of the new law. The unfolding of mutual expectations, hopes, and emotions is becoming an inseparable part of this emerging economy, creating sediments that initially form a thin veneer over a crust consisting of magmatic or metamorphic rocks of solid composition. In time, however, the thin sediments can gradually harden and interfere with the configuration of the pre-existing solid rocks. Following this sedimentation metaphor, the changes emerging with the more permanent presence of Macedonian citizens in Greece are evident:

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new possibilities have opened up since 2012 for both physical and social space where people come together, and also for space that fuels feelings of envy, resentment, and failure for the Greeks, who feel at a disadvantage following the 2009 financial crisis and the austerity measures imposed by the EU financial institutions.

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Ferocious porosity: the child refugees in 1948 Tourists, consumers, and property owners have crossed this border from the Macedonian side to Greece accompanied by historical, legal, cultural, and political sediments that have affected interactions between neighbors on both sides of the border. In this section I want to turn my attention to the sedimented porosity of the border produced during the 1946–49 Greek Civil War, when 27,000 child refugees4 left Greece and arrived in socialist Yugoslavia. These children’s parents fought for the communists, and most were of Macedonian origin. For most of them, what began as a temporary departure which was supposed to last for only a limited period, turned into a life-long “exile,” often accompanied by legal difficulties in subsequently visiting their native villages in Greece (some of which the Greeks had razed) or reclaiming their properties. Although these child refugees hold passports from different countries, it was a common occurrence, until early 2000s for the Greek border control to deny them entry, despite their American, Canadian, Polish, or other international passports. This happened in those cases where the birthplace in the passport recorded the Macedonian name of the village instead of the Greek one. Given that the process renaming the villages of Northern Greece from Macedonian to Greek began in 1927, during the interwar period, if anyone decided to keep the Macedonian name of their birthplace after 1948 this was taken as a sign that the person was claiming their Macedonian identity. These child refugees became human “deposits,” spread out throughout the world, while many of them insisted that their suffering and exile remained unacknowledged as an act of ethnic cleansing and humanitarian catastrophe.

The civil war and the communist impasse A year after the end of World War Two, a bloody civil war started between the Greek government army (supported by the United Kingdom and the US) and the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) – the military branch of the Communist Party of Greece supported by the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. The main fighting and activities of the Greek Civil War of 1946–49

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were concentrated in the northern part of Greece, near the borders with Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria.5 The main logistics and material support for the Communist Party arrived from these socialist countries; most of the wounded fighters were sheltered in these countries. Many members of the ethnic Macedonian minority in the territory of Greek Macedonia in Northern Greece joined the Communist Party, which promised that, following victory, socialist Greece would recognize the existence of its Macedonian minority and thus allow them human dignity instead of forced assimilation (Cvetanovski 2008).6 The year 1948 marked a major turning point in the civil war that would eventually lead to the complete defeat of the DSE. Its inability to capture Konitsa in December 1947 and the defeat on Mount Grammos the following summer meant that the DSE had failed to fulfill the most important goal set by the communist leadership in September 1947, namely taking control of a large area in Northern Greece and establishing a “free Greece.” This area was supposed to become the site of an alternative power structure (Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, 43). In addition to these defeats, the DSE was also unable to enlist more fighters and thus increase its forces to the target number of 60,000 fighters. The DSE’s efforts for the massive recruitment of men, women, and teenage children failed to meet this goal (Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, 44). Moreover, these forceful recruitments created a negative response among the local population, whose everyday lives were completely disrupted due to the intensive fighting and bombardments, especially in the mountain villages of Northern Greece. Danforth and Van Boeschoten (2012) vividly describe the conditions in the areas under the strongest attack: Most adult men were absent; they were serving in one of the two opposing armies, they had been imprisoned, or they had escaped to cities under government control or across the border to the north. In areas controlled by the Democratic Army, women and children were being requisitioned to carry the wounded, prepare food, build fortifications, deliver messages, and transport supplies. In areas under the control of the Greek Army, women and the elderly were also used to clear mines. Schools had been closed since the outbreak of hostilities in 1946, and hunger and disease were rapidly spreading. Daily bombing and heavy shelling had caused many civilian casualties and killed whatever livestock remained. Many people whose villages had been burned down were living in temporary shelters in caves or in forests. (Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, 44)

The territories controlled by the communist forces were continuously bombed by the government air force, which did not spare the local civil population, including children and the elderly. These were the circumstances under which officials of the Greek Communist Party decided to

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evacuate children from the war zone to Eastern Europe. After the outbreak of a typhus epidemic in the Konitsa area in January 1948, the DSE negotiated a transfer of children in Northern Greece with the Yugoslav Communist Party. Their main intention was to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe. On 25 March 1948, in an organized manner and under the leadership and armed protection of the fighters of DSE, many groups consisting of 18–20 children aged from 2 to 14 years illegally crossed the border between Greece and Yugoslavia. Once they arrived on the Yugoslav side, they were transported further and accepted by Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland (Mojsov 1954). Evidently, the main purpose of this transfer was humanitarian, motivated by the desire to save the children whose parents were fighting on the side of the Greek Communist Party (Cvetanovski 2008, Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012). As already mentioned, the temporary government of the Communist Party established in Northern Greece was assisted by Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Poland. These countries therefore agreed to take as many children as possible and to shelter them while their parents fought in the war. In January 1948 at the Youth Balkan Forum in Belgrade the participants coined the slogan “Save Our Children.” This was the beginning of a campaign to encourage the parents to send their children voluntarily. A complicated operation was under way to organize the collection of the children and to transfer them across the borders (Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, Kitanoski and Doneski 2003). On 3 March 1948, the DSE announced that most of the parents had agreed to send children aged from 3 to 13 to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Hence 4,784 children from 59 villages in the border area had already been registered for evacuation. Each group of 25 children would be accompanied by a female schoolteacher chosen by the parents and other members of the Communist Party. The announcement invoked both humanitarian and military reasons for the operation: children would be saved from the hardships of war, and parents would be able to concentrate all their energy on the war effort. The following day, during the Conference of Balkan Youth in Belgrade, the Balkan countries agreed to accept 12,000 children from “free Greece” and to care for them until the end of the civil war (Brown 2003a, Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, 46, Cvetanovski 2008). On 25 March 1948, accompanied by women who were acting as designated nurses responsible for the children, and under the armed protection of the DSE, the children were taken across the borders to the socialist countries. As the Communist Party of Greece was in the process of negotiating the children’s transfer to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, the Greek

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rightist government in Athens was also preparing another dislocation of the children in Northern Greece, headed by Queen Frederica (Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, 46). In an initiative announced on 6 March 1948, the government in Athens moved 14,000 children from the “bandit-controlled areas” of Northern Greece to the southern areas of the country. In the course of 1948, official statements issued by both sides aimed to justify the two evacuation programs, and hence were inevitably accompanied by ideological propaganda. With the expansion of the Greek government’s evacuation program, the DSE also broadened the scope of its own program to include children from areas under the control of the National Army (Brown 2003a, Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, Kitanoski and Doneski 2003). The humanitarian aspect of saving children was indicated as the main reason for both evacuation campaigns. There was also the incentive to raise the fighting spirit of the parents, who knew that their children were safe. The children were seen by the DSE as future potential. Already in the second half of 1948 and the first half of 1949 around 2,000 children aged 14, 15 and 16 years returned to Greece to join the fighting (Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012). Drawing on the diaries of the children and the nurses, Nakovski (2008), himself a child refugee who left his village on 11 March 1948, described the effects of the campaign on the physical and mental health of the children. They had to cross more than 50 kilometers of mountainous border terrain on the stretch between Florina and Bitola in snow and cold weather. The precise routes by which they left depended on the location of their villages. For the Florina area, the central village where the children were gathered and sent to the border was the village of Andartiko (Zhelevo). Accompanied by their parents, they would walk from their villages to Andartiko, where they would spend the night and be seen off by their parents (Наковски 2008). The next day they would walk along the shores of the Prespa Lakes, cross the border into Yugoslavia, and spend the night in Dupeni or Ljubojno, the first villages they reached on Yugoslav territory. The crossing of the border took place at unmarked places and hills so as to avoid being seen by the government forces. Once they arrived in Yugoslav territory, they would join hundreds of other children with very little to eat. They would sleep in stables or schools, and would be covered with fleas and lice (Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, 52). Similar border-crossing ordeals awaited the children from other parts of Northern Greece: those from the Konitsa and Kastoria areas, which are in the western part of Greece, walked to the Albanian border. Once they had crossed the border, again at unmarked mountainous places, they would board buses and be taken to Korça or Elbasan.

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Children from the Greek-speaking villages of the Pindus range (around Grevena and Kozani) followed the same route, but had to walk for several days, while children from the region of Aridea, which lies more towards the east, crossed the Yugoslav border near Gevgelija. The Gevgelija, Bitola, and Albanian routes converged at the railway station in Bitola, from where the children were taken to Eastern Europe by train. Children from the district of Evros in Greek Thrace crossed the Rhodope mountains into Bulgaria, where they were settled in temporary shelters, holiday resorts, or children’s homes until their departure for other countries two years later (Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, 52). Ranging in age from 3 to 15 years, divided into groups of 20–25, and led by the nurses (“the mothers”) who had been chosen at meetings with the DSE, many of the child refugees vividly remembered that first moment of leaving their homes, villages, and parents. Many of their memories recount hunger, and difficulty walking over hills and mountains while hungry and barefoot (Brown 2003a, Danforth and Van Boeschoten 2012, Наковски 2008). One of the stories published as a feuilleton on the ordeals of the child refugees on the online portal makedonski.mk7 recounts that from his native village Setoma (Kefalari in Greek), in the Kastoria area, Nikola Gilevski was taken, along with the other children, to the village Želovo (Greek Antartiko). Nikola’s mother put two straw baskets on their donkey and put the seven-year-old Nikola and his nine-year-old brother, Paskal, into them. Although Setoma and Želovo are not that far apart, it took two nights to traverse the distance on foot. From Želovo, a large group of 1,000 children walked along the Prespa Lake shore, where they crossed the border and arrived in the village Ljubojno. This journey took one night, and once the children arrived in Yugoslav territory they finally received good food and proper shelter. A similar story is recounted by Paskal Kamburovski, who left his native village Kondorobi (Greek Metamorfosi) in the Kostur (Kastoria) area. His story details a journey that always took place at night. The children also gathered in Želovo/Antartiko and managed to travel more than 30 kilometers in the Prespa region in one night. Once they arrived in Yugoslav territory, the children were received in the village Dolno Dupeni, where they were warmly greeted by the villagers, who prepared bean soup for the children. It turned out, however, that the village didn’t have sufficient plates and spoons, so the solution was to have three children dip the soup with bread from one plate. After two days in the village Dolno Dupeni, where the children recovered and rested, they were taken to Bitola. There, they waited in the city park for the trains to arrive, and were served bread, jam, and tea. What Paskal remembers vividly was that there was no limit to how many pieces of bread each child could eat. Given the previous severe

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limitations on food, many of the children got sick from overeating. Once the trains arrived, the children left Bitola, traveling to Belgrade and then on to Budapest. This group of children was the first to board a passenger car rather than a freight car, and for many this was a joyful experience. Once they had crossed the Yugoslav border and arrived in Bitola, there was an organized transfer for the children to their final destinations. They boarded freight trains that took them further to Serbia (Bela Crkva in Vojvodina or Bekla near Belgrade) or to Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, or East Germany. In the many stories of their ordeals, one aspect remains common for every child: the belief that this was only a temporary journey and that they would soon be brought back to their homes and reunited with their parents. They had no idea that for more than half of them, the new country would become a permanent home.8 The aforementioned events were influenced by several international events: by the beginning of 1949, there was increased American aid for the Greek royalist army, aimed at preventing the communists from coming into power, which was a main factor affecting the outcome of the civil war. The second major event was the Tito–Stalin split in 1948, when the Yugoslav leader, Tito, clashed with Stalin about hierarchy in the socialist bloc. Following this schism, Yugoslavia refused to take child refugees, given that the Greek Communist Party was following Stalin’s socialist path. There was also a conflict over the place of socialist Albania, which Tito wanted to have as a member of the Yugoslav Federation, while Stalin forcefully objected to such a proposition (Banac 1989). These matters affected the power of the DSE. The collapse of the DSE and the evacuation of the Communist Party of Greece to Tashkent in 1949 led to thousands of people leaving the country (Rossos 1991, Rossos 2008). By 1949 over 100,000 people had left Greece for Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc, particularly the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. The civil war brought widespread devastation across Greece, and particularly to the regions of Macedonia and Epirus, causing many people to continue to leave the country even after the conflict had ended (Rossos 1991, Rossos 2008). For many of the child refugees scattered across the Eastern socialist bloc, the reunification with their parents was long and arduous. In fact, many children did not manage to reunite, due to illness, bureaucratic errors, or unfortunate circumstances (Brown 2003a). Moreover, the fact that many of the child refugees were allowed, with the assistance of the Red Cross, to move to the US, Australia, or Canada after their initial settlement in East European countries, further complicated reunification with their parents. In the documentary film made by Jill Daniels entitled Next Year in Lerin (2000), the author shows the second collective reunion of the child refugees in Skopje in 1998, 50 years after their 1948 exodus from Northern Greece.

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The film showcases moving moments of the first reunion of parents with their children, of brothers and sisters, and between relatives who were seeing each other for the first time in a half a century. After the reunion in Skopje, the participants traveled to their native villages in Northern Greece to see the places where they were born. The border crossing was organized with buses and took place at the official Gevgelija/Evzoni checkpoint. The film graphically illustrates the moment when the Greek border control officer refused entry into Greece to many of the participants in this event. Although many of the child refugees held Canadian, US, or Australian passports, they were denied entry to Greece due to the fact that their birthplace was identified on their passport by its Macedonian name. Most of those who left Greece either as child refugees or as members of the Communist Party fighting against the government were not allowed to return to Greece or apply for restitution of their confiscated properties. The Amnesty Law passed in Greece in 1982 when the leftist PASOK came into power allowed all members of the Communist Party to return to Greece, but they had to be “Greek by genos (race).” This requirement disqualified many of the Macedonian minority whose names revealed their non-Greek background. Similarly, a law enacted in 1985 allowed for compensation of illegally confiscated property, only if the person applying for compensation was “Greek by genos”. This stripped thousands of people who were born in Northern Greece of their right to reclaim their property.9 The United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD) has been vocal in highlighting the injustice of the 1982 and 1985 Greek laws on return and compensation, which, according to UMD, exemplify the Greek government’s continued denial of the most basic human rights to its ethnic minorities. In a statement issued regularly on World Refugee Day on 20 June, the UMD reiterates its call on Greece to repeal the Greek laws that discriminate against Macedonians and to allow the Macedonian child refugees of the Greek Civil War the right to repatriation and restitution of their confiscated property and resources – the very same rights currently limited to “Greeks by genos.” UMD has also requested that the Greek government reverse its long-standing denial of basic human rights to all ethnic and religious minorities in Greece. Another diaspora organization, the Australian Macedonian Human Rights Council, has been active in seeking restitution of property for Aegean Macedonians who live in Australia. Scattered all over the world, the child refugees today constitute one of the most important voices for the ethno-national unity of all Macedonians, bringing to mind consolidated sediments that are layered over time. While the UMD utilizes a nationalistic/patriotic vocabulary, the members of the Rainbow Party (Vinožito) in Greece, fighting for the realization of the basic human rights of the Macedonians in Greece, are trying to frame their struggle

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for recognition within the universal language of human rights. In an interview, a member of the collective leadership of the Rainbow Party revealed the official Greek claims that Greece is an ethnically homogeneous nation, despite evidence to the contrary from the US State Department, Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch, and the United Nations. Macedonians and other minorities in Greece have voiced their concerns that they are not allowed to exercise even basic liberties such as the rights to identify themselves as Macedonians, to have Macedonian names, to speak or study in their own language, to establish cultural associations. Their continuous efforts to petition the Greek government for the redress of their grievances and injuries have not been successful.10 Although it is not explicitly stated, the Prespa Agreement in effect stipulates that RN Macedonia would neither interfere in international politics nor claim a national minority within the borders of Greece. According to the Agreement, the parties and associations existing within Greece should rely on self-organization and activities that are not encouraged or sponsored by RN Macedonia. Prior to the Prespa Agreement, Greece regularly justified its objection to the Republic of Macedonia’s using its constitutional name by claiming that it implied irredentism, and to claims to Greek territory that came from the child refugees. Article 7 of the Prespa Agreement obliges both Greece and RN Macedonia not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs. According to opposition parties such as VMRO-DPMNE this effectively denies the existence of the Macedonian minority in Greece and disavows the suffering that the child refugees endured in their flight and subsequent struggle abroad. However, the RN Macedonia government representative responded that Greece, as an EU member, has to respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and allow minorities to realize their individual and collective rights. In an interview conducted in June 2019 a representative of the Rainbow Party confirmed that the Party would be making an official application for church sermons to be given in the Macedonian language for the Macedonian minority living in Northern Greece. Similar demands would be made for primary education to be available in the Macedonian language.

Conclusion The border between Greece and socialist Macedonia became sedimented across different lines. The strict visa regime that did not allow citizens to cross the border was a major obstacle under socialism, yet it did not prevent people from spending their summer holidays by the Greek seaside. Many Macedonians would queue in front of the Greek consulate for hours – even

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days – to obtain visas and be able to travel to the coast. The long lines at the border during the summer months revealed that visa regulations and the measures for the official exchange of Greek currency, were not insurmountable obstacles for the socialist middle class. Many Macedonians had to endure exceptionally rigorous visa checks, unlike citizens of the other Yugoslav republics. With the visa liberalization in 2009 and the Greek law allowing non-EU residents to purchase property in 2012, border crossing intensified and changed the socio-economic distance between people who previously had been separated by more profound obstacles. Arguably, the strict visa regime that had existed mainly for Macedonian citizens but not for the other nations of the Former Yugoslavia was due to the presence of child refugees and other members of Northern Greece’s Macedonian minority who had been expelled during the Greek Civil War. As described above, the war fought in Greece from 1946 to 1949 between what became the Greek government army and the DSE, had devastating consequences for the population of Northern Greece, especially the Macedonian minority, many of whom supported the Greek Communist Party. These people suffered grave consequences after the defeat of the communist insurgents. Legal regulations as to who was allowed to enter Greece continued for many decades after the end of the civil war, until the beginning of the 2000s. Yet, with the financial crisis of 2009 and the 2012 law allowing non-EU citizens to purchase real estate in Greece, the wave of coastal real estate purchases by Macedonian citizens has opened up a new dimension in the interaction between these next-door neighbors. This law has allowed many of the nouveaux riches people of RN Macedonia to buy apartments or houses either in Halkidiki or in the northern coastal areas around Platamona and Leptokaria, although this has not been an option for other regions where Macedonians have been living for a very long time. Regardless of the political-ideological context, and the severity of the circumstances, the border has been porous, allowing different bureaucratic, political, but primarily human “sediments” to be used in creating the other side.

Notes 1 For more on the role of tourism in dissolving or fortifying borders see Clifford 1998, Scott and Lu 2006, Scott and Selwyn 2010. 2 It is important to note here that while the Yugoslav dinar itself was convertible, not only were the limits on amounts, but the rate to Greek drachmas was unfavorable in the extreme. 3 Interview with a real estate agent from Nea Moudania conducted in August 2014.

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4 The number of child refugees is disputed, given the different sources. While in his 2003 study Keith Brown (2003a) argues that the number is significantly less than 27,000, Danforth and Van Boeschoten (2012) after comparing three different sources suggest that the number of 27,000 child -refugees is quite accurate if it takes into account the fact that there were both Greek and Macedonian children. 5 The border town of Florina (Lerin) has been important as a center of strong Slavic (Macedonian and Bulgarian) presence and influence, especially in the late nineteenth century, when it became an intellectual center of Slavic agitation for independence from the Ottoman Empire. The Slavic presence remained strong throughout the first half of the twentieth century. For part of the Greek Civil War (1946–49), Florina was under communist control. The Macedonian National Liberation Front (NOF) had a significant presence in the area: by 1946, seven Macedonian partisan units were operating in the Florina area, and NOF had a regional committee based in Florina. When the Communists withdrew from Florina in 1949, thousands of people were evacuated or fled to Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc (Rossos 1981). 6 www.globusmagazin.com.mk/?ItemID=8DF212E7C628BF4691E1F962AECEE 3CD (accessed 11 June 2018). 7 https://denesen.mk/svedoshtva-na-decata-begalci-od-grcija-7-nikola-gilevski-kakotrite-meseci-stanaa-pedeset-godini/ (accessed 1 June 2018). 8 https://denesen.mk/svedoshtva-na-decata-begalci-od-grcija-3-paskal-kamburovskiza-crnicata-shto-ne-dava-da-bide-isechena-i-za-zaklanata-tetka-evgenija/ (accessed 11 November 2018). 9 For more on the topic of Egejci and the issue of property restitution to those Macedonians who fled Northern Greece, see the work of Miladina Monova (2002a, 2002b, 2010). 10 This information was collected in a series of interviews with Pavle Voskoupolos, the president of the Rainbow Party.

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Porosity of environmental activism and transnational mining companies: struggles against open-pit mines on the border

Throughout 2016 and 2017 the public in RN Macedonia witnessed massive protests in the southern towns of Gevgelija, Valandovo, Bogdanci, and Dojran. These protests were organized by citizens’ initiatives against the open-pit copper, gold, and silver mines. One of these mines – Kazandol– was already well under construction. While the concessions for other mines were given for exploration, the concession for the Kazandol mine near the town of Valandovo was given by the VMRO-DPMNE-led government in 2012–13 for operation and exploitation. These concessions were given mainly to foreign mining companies for exploration and mining in the southeastern part of the country. The 2017 Kazandol mine protests were organized by the association SOS for Valandovo. Gevgelija similarly organized a series of protests against the gold mine that was planned to be built between Gevgelija, Dojran, and Bogdanci by a Canadian investor. These protests were organized in a similar manner to the 2013 protests against the Skouries and Olympiada gold mines in the Halkidiki prefecture in Northern Greece. The protestors objected to the Canadian investor company, Eldorado Gold, which was in process of building an open-pit gold mine, and highlighted the negative effects that the mine would have on the environment and local way of life. The gold- and copper-rich area stretching along the border belt between Greece, RN Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Serbia is known as the Serbo-Macedonian Massif. Material artifacts testify that gold was extracted in these areas during antiquity and in Ottoman times (Antic 2015, Шериф 2001). Only recently have the mines and ore exploitation in this region been dominated by large international mining companies. This chapter argues that these companies leverage their economic might and manipulate the law to create porous borders, thereby depriving citizens of their rights and compromising state sovereignty. The EU and international legal treaties

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regulating foreign direct investments condition the financial assistance that countries receive and depend on. These circumstances, in turn, have generated massive protests that create alliances between activists on both sides of the border, making the border porous to environmental activism by those who are fighting for the protection of the environment and their ways of life. In this chapter I will discuss the recent environmental, political, and financial polemics surrounding the mines in both Greece and RN Macedonia as I explain the “age of extraction,” in which international companies race to exploit minerals in the cheapest possible way, thus disregarding the impacts on the environment and local ways of life in the places where these mines operate. Protests and activists’ models organized by SOS civil associations that started in Greece trickled into RN Macedonia once the construction of the open-pit mines had begun.

Eldorado in Halkidiki: gold rush against pristine nature The major international mining company investing in the gold mine in Halkidiki, Greece is the Canadian Eldorado Gold. This company took over the mine that was previously owned by another Canadian company called TVX Inc. An article written by the Mackenzie Institute and published in 1992 investigates the extraction of gold from the Halkidiki mines and mentions that extraction of gold in this area has been known for centuries. As a matter of fact, it was already mentioned in antiquity. Allegedly, the mines of this area paid for Aristotle’s education in Athens. They also provided the armor and pikes of the soldiers of Philip II and his son Alexander the Great. Coins made with metal from these mines may also have paid the masons who built Hagia Sofia. While these accounts belong more to romantic historical story-telling, tangible data on gold extraction from the mines exist for the period of the 1920s, when they were operated by a French company. After World War Two the mines were reopened by the state-owned Hellenic Chemicals, which was in charge of extraction in the 1950s. However, the old gold mines, all situated in the Olympiada area of Halkidiki, were not profitable: they produced modest quantities of lead and zinc, but very little gold. This forced Hellenic Chemicals to liquidate their holdings in 1991 – a decision that caused the loss of 1,000 jobs in an already underdeveloped area with 30 percent unemployment. This situation forced the Greek government to step in: with a financial subsidy from the National Bank of Greece of approximately $25,000,000 a year, the mines continued to operate from 1992 onwards. However, due to the high costs this was not a workable option for the Greek government. Finding a private investor was therefore of highest priority.

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Under these circumstances, in 1995 the state-owned mining company sold the mines to the Canadian company TVX Gold Inc. Given the high debt, high inflation, and a large trade deficit, the government was forced to encourage foreign investment and align its economy with that of other European countries (Mackenzie Institute Report, 1998). Finding a foreign investor had been an imperative since 1981, when Greece became a member of the European Community, which became the European Union in 1993. The deal with TVX was therefore more than welcome: an agreement between the Greek government and TVX was signed in December 1995. Parliament ratified it in July 1996, and thus TVX became the largest single foreign investor in modern Greece. As early as November 1997, however, TVX Inc. faced strong opposition from the people of the village of Olympiada, due to environmental concerns. Given the importance that the TVX Inc. mining investment had for the Greek government, the official government and media ignored the protests, which soon afterwards were rapidly crushed by Greek riot police. TVX, a Toronto-based company also operated in Northern Chile; Goias and Minas Gerais States in Brazil; Ontario and Manitoba in Canada; the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia; and in the Czech Republic; and was already a well-established player in the field of mining and extraction. According to the protestors and the critics, TVX’s main driving force was to produce precious metals cheaply, without regard to environmental consequences. The Greek government’s requirements for environmental and community responsibility demanded that the project be profitable and employ at least 550 workers. In addition, the government required an environmental protection and rehabilitation plan, as well as support for local community and cultural development.1 Initially, TVX appeared to honor these conditions. It relied on two mines in Halkidiki: the underground Kassandra mine near Olympiada, and the Skouries open-pit mine that had high-grade copper and gold ores. It also started a process of environmental rehabilitation in the Stratos area, which had suffered environmental damage from years of extraction by the stateowned mining company. In 2002, TVX’s operations stopped as a dam burst and the Stratoni bay was colored red with mine waste. As a direct result, the fishing village of Stratoni had to ban fishing and swimming. Due to this incident, in 2003 TVX filed for bankruptcy, but an extrajudicial agreement absolved the company of any environmental liability. Thereafter the mines were operated by the state-owned Hellas Gold, until Eldorado Gold, a Vancouver-based Canadian company, purchased them in 2012. The acquisition of the mines by Eldorado Gold occurred while Greece was trapped in its worst financial crisis since World War Two. The international

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financial institutions put pressure on the Greek government: the European Commission wanted to improve the business climate in the country, while the IMF wanted Greece to attract foreign investment. For these reasons, an “Invest in Greece” agency was established to ensure, among other things that the Canadian Eldorado Gold company could obtain an export loan and tax breaks for its mining investments in Greece.2 While in opposition, the leftist Syriza party was bitterly opposed to the Skouries investment, “The Greek state has nothing to gain but environmental cost from the investment,” claimed Alexis Tsipras. His position on the gold mine in Halkidiki seemed clear. No open-pit mine should operate on Halkidiki. Syriza always rallied against the gold mining projects and it was with this stance that Tsipras’s party won the elections in Halkidiki. Giorgos Velegrakis specialized in the Halkidiki conflict for his doctorate in Geography and Political Ecology at the Department of Geography of Harkopia University. Until June 2015 he also worked for Syriza on preparing an alternative development strategy other than mining (Nabih et al. 2016). His proposal to the government contained four main points: the cancellation of the mining project in Halkidiki, environmental restoration of the area, the phasing out of the “old” gold mining projects in the region, and the reconstruction of the local economy. When Syriza came to power in 2015, Eldorado’s operating license was revoked on the basis that the company did not conduct tests on deposits from the Olympiada and Skouries sites on its premises, but at a facility in Finland. However, the Council of State ruled that this was not sufficient justification for revoking the license. Eldorado Gold confirmed on 2 September 2019 that it had received installation permits for its Skouries project and its Olympiadas mine from the Greek Ministry of Energy and Environment and would therefore continue with construction and operation of the mines.3 After its victory in 2015, Syriza’s official position did not change. However, the party showed concern that Eldorado Gold could withdraw all its investments from Greece and that funding for environmental restoration would never come. Moreover, the minister of ecology and environment referred to a “necessary compromise by all sides” in dealing with the Skouries mine. Because Eldorado was the biggest foreign mining investor in Greece, exceeding a projected €1 billion, Syriza felt obliged to support foreign direct investment, especially projects and privatizations cited in the terms of the third bailout agreement. According to Velegrakis and the other activists, the reconstruction of this area must be based on agriculture, eco-tourism, forestry, and fisheries. And although supporters of the mining project have continuously stressed the 2,000 jobs that would be created, they failed to recognize that at the same time the mine would also destroy jobs. “Tens of thousands of people in the

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area work as olive oil producers, beekeepers, foresters, fishermen, sheep and goat herders and of course everything that has to do with tourism. The tree-lined beaches are downright heavenly. Halkidiki alone has 1,059 beekeepers, accounting for ten percent of the annual production of honey in Greece. But their bee habitat has diminished and soon the bees would have no pastures at all,” said an activist from the SOS Halkidiki association whom I met in Thessaloniki in July 2018. As soon as the public and environmental organizations found out about Eldorado Gold’s intention to activate the old mine and expand production by building additional sections, massive protests were organized in Halkidiki, and also in Thessaloniki and Athens (Figure 4.1). The slogan of the protests was SOS Halkidiki; this gradually became a brand not only in Greece but across the border as well. The SOS slogan would later be used by the protestors against the open-pit mines in RN Macedonia (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The Greek protests in 2013 intensified and even ended up with several arrests. Giannis Stathoris was one of the four residents of Ierissos who were arrested during the protests in Halkidiki. He remembers the police brutality as government forces struck the protestors. After four months in prison his release on 6 November 2013 was a relief, but also brought major concern for the local farmers: when the mine begins

Figure 4.1  Protest by 1,500 people against the Eldorado Gold company Skouries mine in Halkidiki, November 2014

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its operation, no one will any longer buy products from the polluted region. “Of course it would also be a disaster for my business. Most farmers will give up, and the milk from the farmers who remain will be polluted by chemicals and dust clouds that come from the open mine.”4 The bay where the gold mines are situated is of great ecological and touristic value. Moreover, this area is also highly seismic. The bay and the dams cannot withstand earthquakes greater than six points on the Richter scale. Since 1953, Greece has been struck by thirteen severe earthquakes, such one measuring 6.5 points in nearby Thessaloniki in 1978.5 The activists also stressed that the license given to Eldorado Gold revealed the hypocrisy of the international funding agencies, as Greece has to comply with the IMF’s demands in a memorandum signed by both parties in 2013, with the intention of facilitating investments. The parliament was forced to approve laws by the end of 2013 which would issue licenses and permits for investment in the areas of operations, environment, land use, and public infrastructure.6 Moreover, the Greek Professor Giorgos Kallis, specializing in ecological economics and political ecology, said that what Greece was experiencing today was “a regression from a developed country to a developing country, similar to the process which many Latin American countries went through in the 1980s. The only function of a developing country is to provide the global economy with cheap raw materials, often at the expense of its own population and development.”7 According to Kallis, it is no coincidence that the gold was being excavated at this time of severe crisis, although its existence had been known for centuries. “The crisis reduces the price tag for the company. The labor cost is a quarter cheaper, health and environmental protection are not a priority and controls such as a study on the environmental impact can be skipped.”8

The open-pit copper mine: Kazandol vs. organic food production Only 8 kilometers from the border with Greece, in RN Macedonia, and 100 kilometers from the Halkidiki Skouries mines, a similar situation to that in Greece, related to open-pit copper and gold mines, has been unfolding since 2016. The Kazandol mine in the Valandovo municipality is an open-pit mine where the extraction of the minerals would be carried out using arsenic, sulfuric acid, and cyanide. The company that received the concession to explore and exploit the mine was Sardic MC, an international company with mixed Ukrainian and British capital. It began preparation of the terrain after the mining concession was received in June 2014. The local population found about the mine once

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the foundation was built in August 2016, when activists started organizing a campaign against the mine’s construction.9 Sardic MC announced that during the geological exploration it was confirmed that there were reserves of 33 million tons of minerals, and that the extraction and exploitation of mineral resources would be secure for the next 20 years. The capacity of the mine is production of 4,000 tons of cathode copper per year. In its publicity, the Sardic MC repeatedly confirmed that it would comply with the strictest environmental regulations. For this purpose, it had provided the most sophisticated air purifying technology produced by Aavi Technologies of Finland, which would prevent any negative consequences on the human environment. Sardic MC planned initially to employ 100 people and the production of the first cathode copper would begin at the end of 2017. The entire investment was estimated at €35 million.10 The study for the environmental assessment prepared by the consultancy firm Experia, and commissioned by Sardic MC, reveals that there would be three sulfuric acid tanks, each of 270 cubic meters, on the site, along with an organic diluents reservoir. Although the study highlights the sophisticated technology against pollution, it also acknowledges that there would be harmful effects, such as air pollution from acid fumes, dust emissions from mining activities, and emissions from trucks and cars associated with the complex. According to a local activist, these harmful effects were already visible on 13 December 2017 when Sardic MC ran test blasts at the Kazandol mining complex that, in addition to the violent noise and tremors, also left thick traces of smoke in the area. In reaction to the protests, in 2016 the mayor of Valandovo, a member of VMRO-DPMNE, claimed that the decision to open the mine had been preceded by consultation with the local population and open discussion of the environmental impact assessment of the open-pit mine. He claimed that the investor had assured the authorities and the public at the time that there would be full warranty, with the most sophisticated technology to prevent environmental pollution. Moreover, the mayor stated that if there were any pollution he would be the first to stop the mine’s operation, given that Valandovo is one of the cleanest municipalities in the country. The investor promised that the mine would have the most sophisticate equipment coming from Finland, with a filtration system and station to measure the pollution. Also, someone from the municipality would be employed to control the levels of pollution. When the protests began the mayor assured the public that levels of pollution would be continuously monitored and appropriate actions would be taken. However, this did not reassure the activists that the mayor of Valandovo, who was evidently standing behind the Ukrainian investor, had full confidence in the filtration system. The area intended for the Kazandol

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mining complex, spanning 287 hectares of land covered with forest and shrubs, was cleared of vegetation and prepared for mining. In an interview with an activist from SOS for Gevgelija I learned that, as is always the case with open-pit mines, the extraction of copper and gold ores would be done by blasting, while the metals would be separated from the ore in on-site pools of sulfuric acid. The danger of open-pit mining and of this extraction method is the significant amount of waste that is created, with almost a million tons of ore and waste rock being removed from the mines per day. Just as in Greece, each municipality affected by open-pit mining has organized a grassroots environmental initiative exposing the long-term consequences of open-pit mining for the environment: for the soil, for agricultural production and through pollution of both water and air. Activists from Gevgelija, Valandovo, Bogdanci, and Dojran protested against the construction of the Kazandol complex and also against the decisions to open many more similar mines in the border belt with Greece and Bulgaria in southeastern RN Macedonia (Figures 4.2a–b). Grassroots initiatives in Valandovo, Gevgelija, Strumica, and Dojran have organized community gatherings, panel discussions, and, finally, referendums in their municipalities in order to raise awareness of the mine and to make their voices heard. Following the example of their Greek colleagues, the activists organized their initiatives under the SOS slogan. The intensive collaboration between the activists took place mainly through social media, where the Greek activists shared their experiences and often gave advice to their Macedonian counterparts.11 The activists initiated referendums in the municipalities of Valandovo, Gevgelija, Bogdanci, and Dojran, where citizens were invited to vote in support of or against the Kazandol and other mines that were planned in the area. The decision to have referendums raised the activists’ efforts to another level. The referendum in Gevgelija took place on 23 April 2017, with over 90 percent of votes cast against the construction of the Konsko gold mine, for which a Canadian company had received a concession to conduct geological explorations. The referendum in Bogdanci took place on 11 June 2017, in Dojran on 23 July 2017, and in Valandovo on 20 August 2017. Of these four referendums only the Valandovo one was unsuccessful. Overall, over 40,000 people cast their votes, with 98 percent voting against the mining projects. SOS for Valandovo organized a well-planned campaign to inform citizens of the consequences of the mine, which is just one kilometer as the crow flies from Valandovo, three kilometers from Gevgelija, and seven kilometers from Bogdanci. This proximity to the towns and the agricultural character of the region inspired more than 97 percent of the local population to vote against the mine(s).

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Figure 4.2a–b  Protests against Kazandol, the copper mine on the Kožuf mountain

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The referendum ballot asked the Valandovo citizens whether they “approve” the continuation of the Kazandol mining complex or wished to stop its activity altogether. The ballot also asked whether they approved or disapproved of opening new metal and mineral mines. In order for the Valandovo referendum to be successful, a turnout of at least 5,200 citizens was needed. It failed because only 40 percent of the eligible voters showed up. The media reported many irregularities during the referendum and the involvement of the Ukrainian embassy, which influenced the vote through pressure and threats. National and state media sites did not even cover the referendum, which motivated the independent internet portal novatv.mk to begin its own coverage. In the light of the success of the referendums in Gevgelija, Bogdanci, and Dojran, where the vote against the mines was more than 90 percent, it is legitimate to ask what happened with the referendum in Valandovo and to explain why there was an insufficient turnout. A total of 10,141 citizens were eligible to vote. Only 4,683, or 46 percent, turned out, and thus the referendum was invalid. The civil associations SOS for Valandovo and Kalinka (Pomegranate) identified pressure, threats, and blackmail as common means used to discourage participation. They also reported breaking of the ban on campaigning on the day before the referendum. On the referendum day, officials of the investor, Sardic MC, and representatives of the local municipality and the political party in power in Valandovo, along with the personnel from the Ukrainian embassy, “occupied” the city of Valandovo. “Valandovo was under siege, bursting with cars with foreign plates and official embassy vehicles. Cars from other municipalities who were pressuring the local citizens stood in front of the election sites. These accusations have been documented and we have proofs that we are now trying to file and give to the officials,” explained Robert Markov, who is a member of SOS Valandovo, in an interview for local TV station VIS. He described the atmosphere during the referendum as “war-like.” The Ministry of the Interior was not up to the task, and the local municipality’s election committee held only one press conference, where it failed to give a breakdown of numbers of voters. The campaigning ban was not respected by the ruling party in the town and by MC Sardic, nor by the local authorities, who ran radio advertisements and went door-to-door agitating for the mine. They also threatened people, blackmailing them about their employment or pensions (novatv.mk). During the first phase of construction of the mine in 2015 and early 2016, the governing institutions were almost invisible and avoided any publicity. In the rare moments when they spoke, the official representatives of the government or the local municipality took the side of the investors or tried to avoid public discussion of this topic. The overall impression of

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the activists that I interviewed was that the institutions were working to protect the investors instead of protecting the citizens. Many of the activists and citizens felt that with the opening of the mine and with the danger posed to agricultural production, the people of the Valandovo region would be denied any choice as to what kind of economic activity they would like for providing their livelihood. In addition, the activists also raised questions regarding the lack of transparency both in granting the concession and in the preparation of the environmental impact assessment, which did not give people the answers the needed regarding the safety of the mine. The SOS initiatives played a crucial role in exposing the threat and danger of the open-pit mines. The activists had a presence on social media and provided detailed information on the consequences for people’s health and the impact that the mines would have on food production. As this region is the most important food-producing region in the entire country, and Valandovo in particular is the center of organic fruit and vegetable production, this became a major issue. Experience from Greece and other similar mines showed that the use of sulfuric acid to dissolve the minerals would require the creation of lakes on the Kožuf mountain where the acid would accumulate. It became evident that this would be a major catastrophe for the mountain villages such as Pirava, Brajkovci, Balovo, and Kazandol, which are major producers of vegetables and dairy products. The most devastating effect of the mine would be on organic production, because the producers would lose their certificates and permission to label their products as organic (information from Katarina Karakoteva, an activist in SOS Valandovo). Although the investors were vocal about the positive aspects of the mine – the development of the region due to massive employment and the financial prosperity of the entire region – just as in Halkidiki, the activists stressed the negative aspects and the loss not only of jobs but also of conditions for producing food. The late Dimče Balevski, who was one of the most committed activists from 2015 until his death in October 2019, was also a member of the association of organic producers. He stated that the mine would spell the end not only of organic but also of all agricultural production. The activists were determined that if the work in Kazandol were to begin, the consequences would be comparable to those in the Bor mine area in Serbia, where there is similar mine and where the pH value of the soil is only 2, making it unusable for any kind of food production.12 Balevski confirmed that organic food production is not a small business. “We already feel the consequences. Since the news that there will be an open-pit mine in our neighborhood, no one wants to buy parcels [of land]. Previously the price per decare (1,000 square meters) was going up to €2000.

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Who would want to buy a plot of land or vegetables and fruits from Valandovo after the operation of such mine? For 15 years now my family and I have been investing in organic agriculture, working the land together with my children to build a better life for them in our homeland,” he insisted during a public debate on proposed amendments to the Law on Minerals held in the Macedonian parliament on 1 February 2018. “And now, without any consultation with us, the affected community, you set up a ticking bomb in our yards – open-pit copper, silver, and gold mines that threaten our sources of income, our health, and our livelihoods. You come in, unwanted, and want to kick us out from our home – you have even ‘planned’ our ‘relocation’ in your own Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) study!” This was Balovski’s address, when he cited excerpts from the investor’s EIA study as he addressed the government, parliamentary deputies, and the Macedonian public through broadcast media at a special parliamentary session organized in March 2018 at the activists’ request. Simona Getova, a community organizer who holds an MSc in Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management, has been one of the most vocal activists. She argues that Macedonia is a country where about a fourth of the population’s livelihood comes from agriculture – an industry contributing 17 percent of its gross national product (GNP). This is in contrast to the mining sector, which currently employs only 2,500 workers (in heavy metals) and contributes only 1.5 percent to the GNP. In addition, agriculture is estimated to account for €237 million in gross value added (GVA), with about 30 percent of all agricultural produce consumed in Macedonia originating from the southeast. These municipal anti-mining initiatives are united by a shared vision for the region: with about 300 sunny days per year, the Macedonian southeast is a perfect setting for a model of sustainable development that is based on agriculture, eco-tourism, and renewable energy production. This vision will be impossible to realize if the 86 toxic and destructive mining concessions imposed by the former right-wing VMRO-DPMNE government are allowed to proceed.13 The local population of the village Kazandol, who live just one kilometer from the mine, were perplexed by the government’s decision in 2016 to allow the construction of the mine without an open public discussion, unlike in the case of Gevgelija, where the local population put a halt to the construction of a Canadian gold mine. We were neither informed nor did we know about any public discussion. A mine cannot be built here because this is an agricultural region. What kind of employment are they talking about when we don’t have that kind of experts who would be able to work in the mines? We would have to import these kinds of employees. We are an agricultural region with ecological crops of

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pomegranates, grapes, and persimmons. (interview with an activist from SOS Valandovo)

After the failed referendum in Valandovo, there was new hope with the change of government at the general election in December 2016. The victory of the Social Democrats, who during their election campaign relied heavily on the “illegality” of the mining industry and the environmental factor in the southeastern part of the country, gave new hope. And yet, months and months after the victory, there was silence while the construction of Kazandol mine continued at a rapid pace. As the new government had promised that it would stop the “mines of death,” the long silence raised red flags and reignited the activists’ response. Furthermore, the activists were outraged when they saw the new minister of the economy shyly shaking hands with representatives from the Sardic MC company. Only the deputy minister for environment met with representatives of the SOS for Valandovo initiative, at a meeting that was not covered by the national media. During the 2016 election campaign, the current prime minister, Zoran Zaev, who was then the opposition leader, promised that one of the first tasks on his agenda as prime minister would be to stop the construction of Kazandol mine. The 86 concessions issued to foreign companies for mines all over Macedonia were an important part of the Social-Democratic Alliance of Macedonia (SDSM) campaign, which was accompanied by promises to abolish the concessions and to stop the construction of the mines. Although the elections took place in December 2016, the new government was not formed until April 2017, due to the VMRO-DPMNE-led coalition’s resistance to constituting the new parliament and the prolongation of the selection process for the parliament’s speaker with marathon parliamentary sessions. The appointment of the parliament president, Talat Xhaferi, finally took place on 27 April, after violent events in which the new MPs were attacked by VMRO-DPMNE representatives and supporters who entered the parliament building. This was the date of the official transfer of power from VMRO-DPMNE to the winning coalition led by SDSM and Zoran Zaev. Despite the change of government, the pro-mines campaign proved to be very strong, with powerful players who organized meetings with miners and offered persuasive alternatives to pollution and environmental protection. Although there were many conspiracy theories, it became clear that, just as in Greece, there was a strong connection between local and central government and the international and local investors. At the beginning of January 2018, more than a year after the elections, and eight months after the change of government, the Kazandol mine continued with its construction. This was a major disappointment for the activists and the population of the Gevgelija, Dojran, and Valandovo regions. In addition, the public learned that the concession for the mining of Kazandol had been issued twice: first

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in 2004–5, by Radmila Šekerinska, who was at that time deputy prime minister of the Social Democrat government with Vladimir Bučkovski as prime minister.14 The second concession for the Kazandol mine was issued in 2014 to the Sardic MC company, and signed by Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski. This concession was published in the nineteenth issue of the official Gazette on 29 January 2014. According to Dimitar Apasiev, a professor at the Faculty of Law at the Goce Delčev University in Štip, the concession signed by Šekerinska in 2005 had actually paved the way for the public exploitation of natural resources. The first step had been to allow the state-owned company Macedonian Forests to begin massive exploitation of the Macedonian forests, especially in the southeastern part of the country. The devastation of the hills and mountains enabled the start of geological and mineral research conducted by Phelps-Dodge in the Kožuf mountain. Apasiev stressed that the Social Democrats, currently in power and supposedly against the mines, were also fully complicit with the mining operation in the south. After the public’s reaction against the new government’s avoidance of dealing with the Kazandol and other mines, Prime Minister Zoran Zaev explained that the reason for the government’s silence was due to its concern about overcoming the legal hurdle of paying penalties for the contract signed between Sardic MC and the previous government. The provisions of the contract meant that if it was broken the state would have to pay high financial penalties to Sardic MC. In a TV interview for 24vest.mk, Zaev revealed that it would be hard to avoid paying penalties to Sardic MC for breaking the concession contract. Eventually, the official contract became publicly available and some of the best legal experts in the country offered their advice on how to stop the construction and operation of the mine without having to pay high penalties to the investor. It is obvious that both governments, due to their need to attract foreign investment, were complicit in colluding with international mining companies and complying with their conditions for doing business in the country. Thus Zoran Zaev’s promise that the government that came into power in April 2017 had a historic opportunity to correct previous mistakes and to stop the “evil that would destroy the southeastern region” resonated strongly with the local population. On 30 January 2018, Aleksandar Janev, an investigative journalist with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) (Prizma.mk, 30 January 2018), wrote that the research of BIRN’s investigative journalists had discovered that the government had solid grounds for ending the concession contract for the Kazandol mine, due to unfulfilled conditions of the contract. One of the main conditions in the concession contract for the exploitation of copper was that within a period of two years the investor (concessionaire)

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would build a full facility for exploitation of cathode copper with a capacity to process at least 50 percent of the exploited minerals. By 30 January 2018, when the journalist revealed the details of the contract, this condition had not yet been fulfilled. Drone photos of the mine site taken by SOS for Valandovo in February 2018 revealed that since the signing of the agreement on 27 February 2015, the construction of the facility for copper cathodes had not yet been completed. Furthermore, the facility was not even close to completion and this was reasonable grounds for the government to terminate the concession agreement. In a TV interview, law professor Borče Davitkovski also stressed that paragraph 14 of the agreement gave two years to the concessionaire to build the facility for exploitation of the minerals. If this obligation was not fulfilled, this was a valid reason for termination of the agreement without any financial penalties. Sardic MC did not answer the questions posed by the BIRN journalist as to why they had failed to fulfill this condition. A few days after the publication of the story in February 2018, the company provided a detailed photographic review on the Sardic MC website of what had been built in the mine complex. As a matter of fact, with these photos, the investor formally corroborated that the facility for cathode copper production was still in process of construction.15 The civil society associations filed a legal case against the concession agreement with Sardic MC for the exploitation of Kazandol, and proposed a temporary measure to stop all activities at the mine, pending a decision by state prosecutor. The lawsuit addressed several issues: first, how the environmental impact assessment was prepared. This 295-page study prepared by Empiria EMS, and available online,16 was completed in only 14 days after the Ministry for Environment published a call for such a study. The final document was submitted in January 2015, and prior to the evaluation of the minister for transport, Mile Janakievski.17 The lawsuit also indicates that Sardic MC finished the geological exploration of the Kazandol site in the unrealistic time of only 10 months. According to the lawsuit, this is a reason for sustainable suspicion that Sardic MC had information about previous geological explorations of the site that might be available through the Macedonian Geological Institute. This data is strictly confidential and is the property of RN Macedonia, and it is against the law for it to be sold or given to third parties. The lawsuit also states that required documents such as state urban planning documentation, strategic planning, environmental impact assessment, and the agreement for concession for exploitation were contrary to the 2002–22 urban master plan of the Republic of Macedonia, which clearly

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states that the land use of the southeastern border region (Valandovo– Gevgelija–Bogdanci–Dojran) is primarily for tourist and agricultural activities. The urban master plan is the most important document, with almost constitutional importance for urban planning. Issuing a concession for the exploitation of a copper mine and an economic activity which was not included in the urban plan, especially for an open-pit mine and a process that would use sulfuric acid and cyanide, was clearly against the law. The lawsuit was received by the public prosecutor in Gevgelija in May 2019, and is now being forwarded to the public prosecutor for organized crime and corruption, who will decide on the outcome of the case. The SDSM-led government has been explicitly opposed to the operation on the Kazandol mine. Prime Minister Zaev, very much like Tsipras in Greece, was determined during the elections and after his victory that he would stop the construction and operation of the mine. However, it took a while for the new government to begin formally challenging the mine’s operation, due to the fear of losing millions of euros in legal fees and penalties for breaking the agreement. In his interview for the magazine Kapital, the prime minster confirmed that the health of citizens is ahead of any economic gain. For the first time in that interview, however, Zaev mentioned that the government would probably have to pay €70 million in fees, because that is part of the agreement. “Our legal team is already working on the formalities and I am confident that we will find the most suitable solution how to come out of this situation. Macedonia is not the only country that has a mine of this type; any mine activity has to follow strict ecological criteria.” (Interview with Zaev, Kapital, 5 March 2018)

This last comment was interpreted by many as stepping back from the initial promise to close down the mine. The activists reacted strongly against this change of heart and reminded the prime minister that their demand was to close down the mine completely and immediately, exactly as had been promised during the election campaign. The activists reaffirmed the importance of living in a healthy environment, and their determination to fight for this basic human right.18 The activists also initiated the changes in the law on minerals and raw materials, according to which the use of cyanide and sulfuric acid in the process of leaching and extraction of minerals should be prohibited. Although this new law was voted and passed by parliament, it cannot be applied retroactively, and cannot alter the process of previous concessions. Since November 2018 Sardic MC has been forced to stop all its activities in the Kazandol mine, and the government unilaterally annulled the concession agreement with Sardic MC for the exploration of copper, gold, and silver

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on March 2018, claiming that the concessionaire had breached the agreement. Sardic MC is now seeking €350m in damages following the cancelation reported in the online platform MKD.mk. The process was launched at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington, DC. “White & Case was selected to represent the government as the best applicant in the public call,” MKD reported, citing the government’s press office. Meanwhile, the government stated that the Administrative Court in Skopje had decided in favor of the government, saying that the termination of the concession contract with Sardic MC was legal. “The lawsuit launched by Sardic MC was baseless. The reasons for termination of the contract are justified as the concessioner failed to meet contract obligations within two years as of the singing of the contract,” the government said in the statement on 25 May 2019, citing the court’s decision. “The government remains committed to its position that it supports foreign investments in the country and creates a climate for economic prosperity, but exclusively in line with the established legal norms and regulations,” the statement concluded.19

Conclusion The village of Kazandol is located just 150 meters above the mine and only 100 meters away from the spring that supplies water for the village. The 150 Turkish-speaking villagers would suffer the most from pollution from the mine. A team from the internet portal Glasnik that visited the village of Kazandol saw that, and despite the promises given by Prime Minister Zaev to the villagers that there would be no mine, and despite the reactions of the civil and SOS movements in January 2018, after the team’s report was written, the construction of the mine continued at full pace. The Glasnik journalist interviewed Mustafa and his family, residents of the village of Kazandol, who are concerned about their future. Mustafa revealed that: Our voice doesn’t seem to reach anyone. Neither this current nor the previous governments care about the situation and our future. The villagers’ main activities are sheep and cow herding and agriculture (fruit, almond, and quince trees), as well as different vegetables. We live from the production of agricultural and milk products, and if the mine starts to work, no one will ever buy anything from us. The soil and the water will be polluted and we will be afflicted by different diseases.

In this respect, most of the villagers were against the construction of the mine. Mustafa maintained that the majority were against; some were in favor of the mine. These people have been bought by Sardic MC or by

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someone else, he suspects, with the promise of important jobs at the mine once it started to function. But Mustafa asks how a workplace could be more important than the future and health of the village’s children. To finish, in the 2016 book entitled Expulsions, Saskia Sassen criticizes the massive land grabs in the “Global South” by all kinds of foreign governments and corporations: they are rendering the people working their small plots of land completely irrelevant, invisible, even a sort of nuisance to the larger corporate project of using rural areas for mining, for water grabs, for developing plantation economies where before there were smallholders, etc. (Sassen 2014). Those expelled smallholders, with their long-standing knowledge of how to keep the land alive, become invisible, and reappear as slum dwellers in large cities or as migrants in the ships of smugglers. Their histories and their knowledge have been rendered invisible (Sassen, 2018). Very much along the lines of the villagers and protesters in Greece, those in RN Macedonia have been confronted with large international players ranging from international mining companies, to international financial institutions and local corrupt or coerced governments that have no freedom to go against the larger corporate players. Ironically, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Environment has explicitly warned that open-pit mines create a significant amount of waste in the course of their four main operations: drilling, blasting, loading, and hauling. Almost one million tons of ore and waste rock can be moved from the largest mines each day, and a couple thousand tons from small mines. For these reasons, the European Commission warns against operating open-pit mines.20 A study commissioned by the European Commission claims that open-pit mines disturb the ground, which in turn leads to the creation of air pollutants. While the main source of air pollutants is the transportation of minerals and CO2 emissions from the trucks, there are various other factors including drilling, blasting, loading and unloading. These types of pollutants cause significant damage to public health and safety, in addition to damaging the air quality. The inhalation of these pollutants can cause issues to the lungs and ultimately increase mortality. Furthermore, the pollutants affect the flora and fauna of the areas surrounding open-pit mines. The conclusion of the study is crystal clear: open-pit copper and gold mining is dangerous and is one of the greatest threats to the environment, as it affects the air and water chemistry. The dust can be toxic or radioactive, creating health concerns for the workers and the surrounding communities. Despite this conclusion, the explicit demands imposed by the EU on Greece as an EU member, and also on RN Macedonia as a pending member, have been to intensify foreign investments. The mining and extraction industries seem to be the leading foreign investors in the Balkans.

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The dilemma posed for the activists and the local progressive governments such as Tsipras’ Syriza and Zaev’s SDSM is whether they can go against the will of the big companies and international institutions. Greece seems to have lost the battle with Eldorado Gold, as the company has received all its licenses and has already started operations. In the case of Kazandol, the activists seem to have been able to turn the tables, given that in September 2019 the company filed for bankruptcy. However the legal case that Sardic MC has filed, suing the government of RN Macedonia for €350 million, may be way too big for any government to take on. Just as happened with TVX in Halkidiki, the bankruptcy was followed by the transfer of the mine to Eldorado Gold, which just continued what TVX had begun. Although, in the case of Kazandol, Sardic MC consisted of Ukrainian and Macedonian capital, the fight for licenses to conduct mineral exploration and obtain the subsequent license for operation in RN Macedonia is led by Canadian mining companies. The growing role of Canadian mining companies across the world is causing “serious environmental impacts,” destroying glaciers, contaminating rivers and other water sources, and cutting down forests, says a report on mining in Latin America. According to the report, Canadian mining corporations are forcibly displacing people, dividing and impoverishing communities, making false promises about economic benefits, endangering people’s health, and fraudulently acquiring property. According to The Impact of Canadian Mining in Latin America and Canada’s Responsibility, the executive summary of a 2017 report by the Working Group on Mining and Human Rights in Latin America, it is obvious that the financial and political support that Canadian mining companies receive from the Canadian authorities, along with the absence of solid institutions and adequate regulatory systems in the host states, are key elements of the current pattern of human rights violations resulting from this extractive industry in Latin America and elsewhere. A spokesperson for Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development said that “Canada’s mining sector leads the world in responsible mining practices. Canada seeks to establish a wellregarded and globally competitive extractive sector, and works proactively with host governments to enhance their capacity to manage their own natural resources for economic, social and environmental sustainability.”21 This is the same logic as that described by Hannah Appel’s work on the US oil and gas industry, which appears “separate, distanced, and outside of local life in Equatorial Guinea” (Appel 2019, 4). In the case of the Canadian and other international mining companies there is also a serious work of abstraction and distancing that ensures the mining operation (just like the production and export of oil in Appel’s analysis) seems detached from local lives, histories, and landscapes.

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Ethnography is crucial in revealing the “work of standardization, decontextualization, and distancing… The ethnographic approach allows us to attend to capitalism as a project; to show how it is at once uneven, heterogeneous, and contested and, at the same time, proliferative, powerful, and systemic” (Appel 2019, 5). Uncovering the role of some of the world’s most powerful mining corporations is not a simple account of “local inflections or instantiations of capitalism. Rather, it asks after the force and fulsomeness with which capitalism, in fact, seems to do all the things it is supposed to do: standardize, abstract, distance, and decontextualize” (Appel 2019, 4). With these acts of standardization and abstraction, the capitalist project also makes state borders porous, enabling these corporations’ consolidation of power and influence over the host governments, as both the cases of Greece and RN Macedonia show. Ironically, it is this porosity of borders created by the expansion of that extractive mining industry that also engenders innovative and vocal forms of activism that become a formidable force across borders, as in the collaboration between the activists in RN Macedonia and Greece. Recent academic study has examined the data relating to growth in mining exports and the growth of environmental conflicts in Latin America, especially across Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. The analysis reveals that the Andes now resembles a war zone. In Peru – the world’s number two producer of copper, zinc, and silver – many peasant groups are in revolt. Mining accounts for 12 percent of Peru’s GDP and 57 percent of its exports. As its mining exports grow, so do its number of mining conflicts, as clashes between demonstrators and the authorities between 2015 and 2016 left four dead following the opening of the Las Bambas mine. According to the study by Scheidel et al., entire populations of indigenous peoples and farmers were forcibly displaced. Polluting the only available water sources was just part of a strategy to make the remaining communities move away when investors wanted to expand the mine (Scheidel, Temper and Demaria 2018). Digging in Andean countries grew significantly in the 1970–2012 period: from 336 mega tonnes to 1,145 mega tonnes. The Environmental Justice Atlas data shows that for the Andean countries only 28 environmental conflicts started before 1990, while 45 started in the 1990s and a distressing 171 have started since the turn of the millennium (Scheidel, Temper and Demaria 2018, 591). Evidently, the new battle lines or commodity frontiers are in territories with indigenous populations. These populations find themselves on the front lines of a global resources war. Some academics now argue that these ecological distribution conflicts have an important role for sustainability, because they relentlessly bring to light conflicting values over the environment. Environmental justice movements born out of such conflicts become key actors in politicizing unsustainable resources

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use. As Scheidel et al. point out: “They can turn from ‘victims’ of environmental injustices into ‘warriors’ for sustainability” (Scheidel, Temper and Demaria 2018, 593). Pijpers and Eriksen remind us that the “mining encounters” unfold in, or generate, spaces of accelerated change, “spaces where power relations are destabilized, new livelihood activities develop, existing livelihoods are challenged, new inequalities are created and the lure of fast money in large quantities is omnipresent” (Pijpers and Eriksen 2018, 24). Mitchell (2011) also highlights the limits of the “carbon democracy” and the environmental constraints placed on international companies. Given the gold and copper resources in the Southern Balkans, environmental concerns have caused major protests and effective activism on both sides of the border. An outcome of this is that the alliances established between the SOS associations in Greece and RN Macedonia have opened up a new media presence and avenues of collaboration that have long been overshadowed by the name conflict.

Notes 1 https://mackenzieinstitute.com/1998/05/gold-in-a-hard-place-tvx-and-the-villageof-olympiada/ (accessed 12 May 2018). 2 www.mo.be/en/analysis/greek-state-has-nothing-gain-environmental-cost-investment (accessed 11 April 2018). 3 www.miningreece.com/tag/olympiada/ (accessed 2 June 2019). 4 www.mo.be/en/analysis/greek-state-has-nothing-gain-environmental-costinvestment, Nick Meynen and Stavroula Poulimeni, 21 April 2016 (accessed 11 September 2019). 5 www.mining.com/greece-grants-eldorado-gold-permits-for-olympia-mine-andskouries-project/ (accessed 3 July 2019). 6 Prior to and during the protests it became widely known that local politicians were closely involved with issuing concessions and licenses. Former Minister of Development Akis Tsoxatzopoulos, who also signed the concession contract with Eldorado, was arrested for money laundering, and on 7 October 2013 he was jailed for 20 years. Former Deputy Minister of Economy Christos Pachtas was fired after he transformed 17 hectares of protected primary forest around Halkidiki into luxury homes, even though the primeval forest in Halkidiki is protected as part of the EU’s Natura 2000 network. 7 In 2014 the EU and Canada signed a comprehensive trade agreement (CETA), which allows Eldorado Gold to sue the Greek state whenever the government does anything that prevents work on the mine. 8 www.mo.be/en/analysis/greek-state-has-nothing-gain-environmental-cost-investment (accessed 20 February 2019). 9 The novatv.mk journalist mentions that it is also equally important to consider what the public does not know about the investor in the mine. In an article

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addressing the investor, the author mentions that Sardic MC Company is an incorporated entity with shareholders who intended to invest €35 million in the Kazandol mine. The groundwork for this investment was already prepared by Prime Minister Gruevski, back in 2013. The investor was initially labeled as a British corporation and then became British-Ukrainian. By the time of the official start of construction in 2016, the investor was only Ukrainian. The investigative journalists disclosed that in reality the majority capital belongs to Macedonian oligarchs and politicians from Macedonia and Ukraine. The documents from the central register reveal that the director of the board of Sardic MC is Aco Spasenovski, a former Macedonian ambassador who served in Ukraine from 2010 to 2014. He was a minister of agriculture and forests in Gruevski’s government from 2006 until 2009. He is a member of the socialist party of Macedonia, which was led by the businessman Ljubisav Ivanov-Dzingo, whose company Sileks was the main mining company in Eastern Macedonia from socialist times onward. Spasenovski acquired shares in Sileks and also in Sardic MC Company. The main mining engineers that were involved as experts overseeing the construction of Kazandol actually come from the Macedonian Sileks company, which together with the TV media company Sitel is part of the large business empire of Ivanov, which has been close to VMRO-DPMNE and the former Gruevski government. The Socialist Party run by Ivanov was the main coalition partner in the Gruevski government (2006–17). Other shareholders of Sardic MC are Ukrainian politicians who were members in the parliament of Ukraine during Spasenovski’s period as Macedonian ambassador in Ukraine. Although Gruevski’s government claimed that the investors are famous for their worldwide work in the field of mining, the internet portal novatv.mk did not find any facts to confirm this expertise. 10 https://sdk.mk/index.php/dopisna-mrezha/referendumot-vo-valandovo-ne-uspea/ (accessed 11 April 2017). 11 www.facebook.com/SOSValandovo/; www.facebook.com/spaszagevgelija/; www. facebook.com/spaszabogdanci/?__tn__=%2Cd%2CP-R&eid=ARCCtg GTVoOipk6h0poXs-JhB_JT8dw4Ol2Wj5fcAFJ9IsvpSbor7jKlIVQaWKhPxr-ldz9tDn93e1E. 12 SOS Valandovo reveals research conducted by Dr Miroslav Marić in Serbia who compares Bor to a similar mine in Andalusia, Spain, where there is no possibility for food production within a radius of 40 kilometers of the mine. The soil around the Yokohama mine in Japan similarly shows contamination, and there is also an increase of lung diseases among the local population, which was the reason why the Japanese authorities closed down the open-cast copper mine. 13 www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/miners-macedonia/ (accessed 2 September 2018). 14 Journalists managed to find the announcement of the concession issued to the American mine company Phelps-Dodge of Arizona, which was published in the 48th edition of the Official Gazette of the Republic of Macedonia. The concession for mine exploration and detailed geological explorations was issued to the Phelps-Dodge company, one of the oldest copper companies in the world, founded in 1834. After a series of scandals associated with workers’ safety and

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labor issues, as well as the accusation that it was one of the largest polluters in the US, the company was acquired by Freeport-McMoRan on 19 March 2007 and now operates under the name Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. The concession issued to the company in 2005 therefore became invalid. 15 The BIRN journalist revealed two conflicting reports by two state institutions in determining whether Sardic MC had fulfilled the agreement. These two institutions made exceptional visits to the Kazandol mine complex to check how far the construction of the production facility had progressed. The first institution was the Inspectorate for Environment, which inspected the facility in November 2017 and decided that the facility for the production of copper cathodes was not finished and was in the process of being built. Activities of assembling the facility were still in progress, along with putting together the technological equipment for the production process. One month earlier (in October 2017), however, the State Inspectorate for Technical Supervision came to a different conclusion, framed in a report that states that the production facility had been completed. The facility was waiting only for the arrival of the equipment for electrolysis, necessary to begin the production of cathode copper. The two different reports that the BIRN journalists found also reveal that the main persons responsible for preparing report for the State Inspectorate for Technical Supervision were Petre Runčev and Vencislav Boškovski, both of them close to the VMRO-DPMNE party and the Sardic MC company. The other statement by the minister of economy was signed by Ekrem Bunjaku, an official in the ministry and a member of DUI (the Albanian party led by Ali Ahmeti). According to BIRN, these contradictory reports prepared by two government institutions appointed to check the facility in Kazandol were discussed during a government session in which some of the ministers asked for a review and control to check which of the two reports was actually valid and what was the reason behind the contradictory reports. The State Inspectorate for Technical Inspection did not answer the question posed by the BIRN journalist, while the director of the Inspectorate for Environment, Miroslav Bogdanovski said that they were prepared to make an exceptional visit to the mine together with the other institutions to clarify the different conclusions. These reports are now publicly available, and they were also forwarded to the office of the public persecutor, especially when, in December 2017, the civil activist association SOS for Us from Gevgelija filed an official legal suit suspecting criminal acts in licensing the mine. The legal file claims that there are grounds for suspicion of illegal acts that enabled the Sardic MC Company to obtain an agreement for a concession for exploitation of the mine. 16 The evaluation is available in the Macedonian language at www.moepp.gov. mk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Nacrt-SOZS-Rudnicki-kompleks-KazandolValandovo.pdf. 17 Mile Janakieski served as minister of transport and communications in the cabinet of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski until 12 May 2015. He has been involved in several cases deriving from the wiretap scandal that brought down

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the VMRO-DPMNE government in 2016 and is awaiting trial in connection with the violent storming of parliament in 2017. 18 The alliance of the environmental activists across Macedonia at their rally in 2018 was cynically supported by former president Gjorge Ivanov, who in 2014 actually announced the Kazandol as a new investment and congratulated the investor. Curiously, in 2018 he demonstrated a change of heart in showing solidarity with the citizens of this area. 19 Strong argumentation in court concerned the discovery of the investigative journalist who had found inconsistencies in the procedure for issuing mining license to Sardic MC Company. For instance, the decision to undertake a strategic evaluation on the mine’s impact on the environment and the lives and health of local people was made on 30 March 2015. This was two weeks after the signature of the agreement for concession, on 27 February 2015. The law requires that the environmental evaluation should be done before signing the agreement for concession of exploitation. The evaluation was given to the ministry and the public after the agreement was signed, which again was in a reversed order. Also, the open public debate about the health and environmental consequences took place after the agreement was signed on 27 February 2015. Further, the evaluation document, prepared by the consultancy group Empiria, claims that the draft report was approved on 31 December 2014, which was two and a half months prior to the official approval of the ministry of transport. It became clear therefore that the evaluation document was approved before it was actually completed and submitted. 20 https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/mining/index.htm (accessed 11 November 2018). 21 www.theguardian.com/environment/andes-to-the-amazon/2014/may/14/canadianmining-serious-environmental-harm-iachr (accessed 4 February 2018).

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Tidal porosity: displaced borders in Skopje and the Colorful Revolution

This chapter expands the argument of border porosity onto the project “Skopje 2014” and the aesthetic remodeling of the capital of RN Macedonia. Propelled by the conflict with Greece over the name Macedonia and the persistent conflict with the Albanian (predominantly Muslim) minority, the remodeling of Skopje deserves closer scrutiny because it reveals the radical aestheticization of contemporary politics in Macedonia, and the drawing of borders and boundaries through the act of aestheticization. I argue that this project constitutes the establishing of effective borders that gave the name conflict a tangible, material manifestation and also created depictions of its socialist past and the presence of Islam. In my earlier work I have pointed out that in its effort to create a visible demarcation, due to the conflict with Greece, and to build boundaries with the previous socialist regime, the VMRO-DPMNE regime used aesthetics as its main vehicle, especially with the “Skopje 2014” project (Dimova 2013, 2015b). I also emphasized that the “Skopje 2014” project should be seen at the same time as a symptom of the marginalization and exclusion of a country that for almost 30 years following its independence was not permitted to become “European” because of its name. “Skopje 2014” can also be viewed as an excessive manifestation of the “moral” right of Macedonia to be part of the European family. And yet, for many the real purpose of this project remains “the instrumentalization by a small ruling elite to cement its hold on absolute power by misleading and intimidating the public while stealing as much money as possible” (Donco, 68-year-old interviewee, summer 2016). Building on Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler’s argument (2002), I suggest that this aesthetic border should be viewed as imaginary, where the process of imagination of Skopje and RN Macedonia with neo-Baroque and neoclassical architecture creates a narrative of antiquity and continuation, as well as of Europeans and belonging despite the politics that have prevented

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RN Macedonia from even beginning EU accession negotiations. Just as Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities are real and tangible, similarly these materializations of aesthetic styles in central Skopje instigate powerful processes of imagining the past, present, and future that enable the observer to imagine different realities. Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler insist on the difference between boundaries and borders. Boundaries refer to limit-lines of collectivities in creating separation between “us” and “them” by using differential positionings in terms of ethnicity, class, gender, and other social divisions, while borders refer to legal/territorial entities (Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler 2002, 331). In both instances, imagination is the process that enables borders and boundaries to be both experienced and imagined in different ways by those who do the imagining. I concur with the border scholars who argue that borders and boundaries are analytically separate concepts (Donnan and Wilson 1999, Schumacher 2015, Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler 2002). In the case of the “Skopje 2014” project, however, I argue that the state borders that delineate the territorial limits of Greece and RN Macedonia are actually washed off on the “shores” of the capital Skopje, are materialized in the buildings and monuments, and thus become tidemarks that blur the distinction between borders and boundaries. This tidal porosity expedites, intentionally or not, different nationalist ideologies, and also protests that react against these ideologies and/or responses to the wider international community that has supervised the revolution of the name conflict and also the process of RN Macedonia’s accession to NATO and the EU. In addition to viewing the “Skopje 2014” project as a bordering apparatus, both popular and scientific arguments have pointed out that this project was a major financial operation, as well as an attempt to deflect popular attention from the dire state of the economy and the massive brain drain taking place in the country during the VMRO-DPMNE regime from 2006–17 (for more on this see Graan 2013, Mattioli 2014).

Nationalistic, economic, and other muddy pores of “Skopje 2014” Elsewhere I have argued that, prior to Tsipras’ willingness to put an end to the name dispute and broker the Prespa Agreement, the name conflict was premised on the official Greek position that there is only one “Macedonia” – Greek Macedonia. No region in the Balkans except the Greek province of Macedonia can be associated or identified with the ancient kingdom of Macedonia and no people, except the Greeks, are entitled to call themselves Macedonians, either as a cultural-ethnic or as a geographic-regional denomination. The majority of politicians and mainstream scholars in Greece have

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argued that the Hellenic connection of Ancient Macedonia should not be called into question. In this vein, they have also argued that, by usurping the name of Macedonia, FYROM was automatically making irredentist claims for the annexation of Greek Macedonia. The 1990s and 2000s were marked by a forceful surge of nationalism in the Republic of Macedonia too. In addition to the name dispute with Greece, this surge was focused on the demands of the Albanian minority that comprises between 20 and 25 percent of the country’s population. While there were efforts to introduce antiquity as a legitimate aesthetic record prior to 2006, the year when VMRO-DPMNE came to power, it was only from 2008 onwards, when Greece vetoed Macedonia’s membership of NATO at the Bucharest NATO summit, that an unprecedented material display of antiquity started to emerge in the center of Skopje.1 This was arguably motivated by the name conflict, as the embellished neoclassical and neo-Baroque buildings erected as part of the “Skopje 2014” project revealed the full intensity of that conflict. The main argument of this chapter revolves around the claim that new buildings and monuments from the “Skopje 2014” project should be read as a materialization of the conflict triggered by the name dispute. It is in central Skopje that one should seek the tangible materialization of borders through the “Skopje 2014” project. The name dispute acquired a visible material presence, while the buildings and monuments created a visible border in the center of the capital. Whereas the dispute refers to the name Macedonia and how it relates to a specific territory and history, the actual border between the two countries is muted and stripped of any embellishments or material visibility inferring the name dispute. The visible border of this dispute is therefore pushed in a tidal wave from the location of the two states’ rim in the southern part of RN Macedonia, to the capital, where it washes off monumental traces that reveal details of the 27-year-old name conflict. Although it is framed in historical terms and “fact-based truth,” in an earlier analysis I have suggested that it is advantageous to consider this conflict in terms of a contemporary late-capitalist branding paradigm (Dimova 2013).2 This aesthetic border in central Skopje has been created through the project of “antiquization” of the country implemented by the right-wing party VMRO-DPMNE. This party came to power in 2006 and managed to stay in power in three back-to-back early elections in 2008, 2011, and 2013, in which the wiretap scandal of 2015–16 has revealed them to have been involved widespread voter fraud. In my earlier work I have addressed the fact that VMRO-DPMNE’s reign relied on a much deeper ideological attempt to revive and recreate a new political subject, the so-called “real human” (Dimova 2013, 2018). Although present in other domains, this revival took place in the domain of aesthetics

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and materiality, which is best illustrated in the “Skopje 2014” project. Just as a reminder, this project introduced a plethora of new buildings, monuments, and embellishments in the central city area that were supposed to enhance the central cityscape, primarily around the main square, Macedonia Square, and the embankment of the River Vardar. What appeared to be an “honest” initiative to embellish the capital gradually turned into a well-crafted political and ideological platform that acquired full-blown power during the 2008 early elections, when the main electoral program of VMRO-DPMNE, entitled “Prerodba vo 100 čekori” (Revival in 100 Steps), was introduced. According to many of my interviewees, it was also part of a colossal money-laundering and theft scheme. The revival outlined a series of economic, political, and cultural promises claiming to improve the overall life of the nation.3 The first hint of the “Skopje 2014” project was introduced in a TV video in 2010, when the government prepared a computer simulation revealing its plan to give center of the city a full facelift.4

Aestheticized materiality of power The world recession, and especially the Greek financial crisis that started in 2008–9, forced government representatives to admit that the best way to fight against the threat of the Greek crisis spilling over in to the Republic of Macedonia was to “build, build and build” (Utrinski Vesnik, 23 June 2010). More precisely, the dramatic progress that the governing VMRODPMNE had claimed since coming to power in the Republic of Macedonia in 2006 became especially pronounced in 2011 when, according to government sources, the economy grew by 5.1 percent and 5.3 percent in the first and second quarters, respectively. This growth was due to the expansion in the construction industry, especially the “Skopje 2014” project (for more on this see Mattioli 2020).5 Government data claimed that an additional 25 industries profited from this project,6 while media critics, reported on bizarre subsidies offered to foreign companies that discriminated vastly against domestic businesses. The grand embellishment of the Macedonian capital was first announced in 2010. The massive “Skopje 2014” project envisaged the construction of some 40 monuments, sculptures, façades, and new buildings.7 A review of the project in April 2016 revealed that the number of buildings and monuments had tripled. The price tag of Skopje’s new look has meanwhile also come to light, far surpassing the initially announced figure of €80 million and totaling around €560 million, as shown by BIRN, the association of investigative journalists. Their eight-month-long investigation drew on data procured through the Access to Public Information Act, the official web page of the

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Public Procurement Bureau, the “Skopje 2014” audit and a joint report by the government, the Skopje municipality of Centar and the Ministry of Culture. Their final report was presented after the 2013 local elections. Locals in Skopje complained that this money, instead of being invested in infrastructure, schools, or hospitals, was spent on monuments and buildings that were not awarded by open international bid but were given to several architects and artists close to the governing party, who allegedly earned hefty fees for their commissions. The government, especially the Ministry of Culture, has insisted on the positive aspects of the project, particularly in rebranding the former (according to an employee in the ministry) very ugly socialist face of the Macedonian capital. Additional support for the project came from the flourishing construction industry, with the government as the biggest investor, as well as from supporters of the governing party, including wealthy individuals in the Macedonian diaspora. While the “Skopje 2014” project contributed to the growth of the overall economy in 2011, recent analysis of this period reveals that the real profiteers from the project were just a handful of construction companies close to the governing party. One of these companies saw its yearly profits increase by 1,700 percent, and another by 250 percent (Utrinski Vesnik, 12 July 2015). In recent reports and analyses of “Skopje 2014,” by the mayor of the Municipality Center, some striking data has been revealed related to the legally dubious contracts, the lack of transparency of the bids, and the commissioned artists and architects. The Social Democrats openly accused VMRO-DPMNE of using the project as a money-laundering machine to help politicians from the governing bloc to earn profits and establish a clientelistic network that has helped VMRO-DPMNE to remain in power. This data confirms that the main incentive for the “Skopje 2014” project was arguably economic, driven by the desire to improve the economy by bringing in foreign investors. This fits in with the discussion in the previous chapter on the mining concessions for the exploration and operation of dangerous open-pit mines issued by the VMRO-DPMNE led government. Seeking to improve the economy, the government aggressively sought out alternative markets for Macedonian exports and worked hard to attract foreign investors. They also tried to do this by encouraging the local economy, and supposedly the “Skopje 2014” project was initiated with this in mind. In addition to the economic aspect, the project had an important symbolic element. Although the video “Skopje 2014” was promoted in February 2010, several government and public buildings located on the River Vardar were already under construction. In 2010 it was announced that the National Archive building, situated on the bank of the River Vardar, near the site of the Macedonian Opera and Ballet, would also accommodate the Archaeological Museum and the Constitutional Court. This location also became a

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building site for the headquarters of the central district attorney and the financial police. Around the same time, the city council of Skopje announced a bid for a major reconstruction of the façades of the buildings built during the socialist period, especially after the 1963 earthquake – those surrounding the central Macedonia and Pela squares and stretching to the Portal Macedonia (Porta Makedonija). In April 2011 the mayor of Skopje victoriously stated in a press release that this was the beginning of giving Skopje a “new face, a classical face, a face of old Skopje.” Next to the theater a large venue has been erected, a museum commemorating the Macedonian struggle for independence and statehood (the popular name for this museum is the Museum of VMRO, whose narrative dominates the museum, which can be visited only by carefully scripted guided tour). Also related to the government’s plan to embellish Skopje was the construction of the Portal Macedonia, built on Pela Square and designed by the artist Valentina Stefanovska. Rising to a height of 21 meters, this construction cost around €4 million and celebrates 20 years of Macedonian independence. Its façade is embellished with 193 square meters of reliefs carved in marble and depicting scenes from the history of Macedonia. It also contains interior rooms, one of which is a state-owned souvenir shop, as well as elevators and stairs providing public access to the roof for panoramic viewing. However, most of the massive aesthetic interventions since 2008–9 have been on the central Macedonia Square. During 2010 and 2011 a number of monuments devoted to national figures from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were erected: statues of Goce Delčev and Dame Gruev, both riding horses (which in reality they never had done!) and placed on each side of the Stone Bridge where one enters the square. In June 2011, a five-meter high statue of Tsar Samuil (the medieval king claimed by both Bulgaria and Macedonia) was erected on the opposite side of the square from the Goce Delčev and Dame Gruev monuments. Another contribution, added in June 2011 to the central square’s colonnade of monuments, is the statue of Justinian I, a five-meter high tribute mounted on a 3.5-meter pedestal honoring the Byzantine emperor, who was born in Skopje in AD 527. By far the most monumental accolade to the “glory of the Macedonian past and present,” however, is the statue officially called “Warrior on the Horse.” Arriving just nine days after the 5 June early elections of 2011, which VMRO DPMNE won for a third consecutive time, the statue, which bears a striking semblance to Alexander the Great, was brought to Skopje in several pieces. Cast by the leading Ferdinando Marinelli Artistic Foundry in Florence, the “Warrior on the Horse” was also designed by the artist Valentina Stefanovska. The media speculated that the cost of the monument was as much as €5.3 million (€650,000 were allegedly paid to the artist),

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while an additional €4.1 million were paid for the base, consisting of a grandiose fountain lined with eight warriors of the ancient Macedonian army. Each of these statues is three meters high, and they stand next to eight lions: four seated facing the square, and four standing facing the fountain. From the lions’ mouths water jets spout into the basin of the fountain. The total height of the monument and the fountain is 27 meters. The bronze “Warrior on the Horse” alone is 14.5 meters high and weighs 30 tons. The official inaugural festivities took place on 8 September 2001, on the twentieth anniversary of Macedonia’s independence referendum. The incentive to build the “Warrior on the Horse” was evidently the name conflict with Greece, a conflict that placed antiquity at center stage in the revival agenda. This was done after the NATO meeting in Bucharest in November 2008 when, as already noted, Greece effectively prevented the Republic of Macedonia from receiving an official invitation to become a member. It was this political conflict over symbols that fueled the intention of VMRO-DPMNE to “restore the fallen dignity of our great nation and glorious past,” as an art historian employed in the Ministry of Culture told me. “Correcting the mistakes” committed under the previous reign of the Social Democrats, who received the blame for accepting the acronym FYROM in 1991, appeared to be part of the mission of the VMRO-DPMNE-led government, which “makes no compromise regarding the constitutional name of our country” (interview with art historian, Ministry of Culture). Although antiquity emerged as an important factor in nation building after independence in 1991, the wave of antiquization (antikvizacija) sweeping over Skopje’s central public space and the entire country since 2008 has been unprecedented indeed. The “epic” monument of the “Warrior on the Horse” occupies the most central place in the capital of the country. The same day (14 June 2011) that this monument was erected in the main square, two monuments of Philip II of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great, born in Heraclea near Bitola) were also erected: a five-meter high monument placed on a 3.5-meter base, designed by the same artist who created the “Warrior on the Horse,” was installed in the Skopje Avtokomanda municipality and another monument was erected in June 2012 on the other side of the Stone Bridge, in front of the church of St Dimitrija. This statue is an impressive 17 meters high. The project “Skopje 2014” aroused harsh criticism from many intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary people in Macedonia, regardless of their age, ethnicity, or social background. The most vocal reactions have been against the funding of these projects amid severe economic crisis and unemployment. Architects, especially those who valued the modernistic appearance of Skopje achieved after the 1963 earthquake, have criticized the neo-Baroque and



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neoclassical transformation of central Skopje. For many, the “eclecticism” and “unoriginality” of “Skopje 2014” just underlines the intentions of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE to create a version of history that deliberately erases the memory of socialism, but also obscures the visibility of the Islamic architecture built during the Ottoman period.

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The Colorful Revolution: the background and causes In the previous chapter I argued that the environmental protests on both sides of the border created porosity that ended with bankruptcy of Sardic MC – the main investor in the Kazandol mine near Valandovo. Terminating the mine and closing its activities was a major achievement for the activists who followed the SOS model of their fellow activists in Greece, organized as the NGO SOS Halkidiki. Although the protests in Greece could not stop the activities of the Skouries mine, these activities did draw the world’s attention to the corporate affairs of Eldorado Gold. In this section I focus on the so-called “Colorful Revolution” in Skopje, which took place between April and June 2016. I discuss the protests of the Colorful Revolution that took place in Skopje (and gradually spread to major cities in RN Macedonia). Using “Skopje 2014” as their backdrop, the protests corroborated Lefebvre’s (1991) famous idiom “right to the city.” He argued that although space is a social system and, as such, is produced through the primacy of economic relations, “users of space” often appropriate spaces to ends other than those for which they were initially intended. The Colorful Revolution began in central Skopje, where the buildings and monuments of “Skopje 2014” became the mise-en-scène for the movement. After the “Bulldozer Revolution” that unfolded in Serbia, resulting in the ouster of Milošević, the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine that installed Yushchenko, the “Velvet Revolution” (also called “Pink Revolution”) carried out by Georgian activists who were similarly successful in replacing Eduard Shevardnadze with Mikheil Saakashvili, or the “unsuccessful” “Tulip Revolution” of Kyrgyzstan, in 2016 the “Colorful Revolution” in the Republic of Macedonia paved the way for drastic social change and eventually brought down the VMRO-DPMNE regime (Figure 5.1). The revolution followed the wiretap scandal, when voices identified as those of Gruevski, senior officials, journalists, and judges were played at several press conferences organized by Zoran Zaev and the opposition. The exposure of the tapes, also known as the Truth for Macedonia (Вистината за Македонија), revealed ministers and security officials discussing how to employ loyal party members in state jobs, pick judges, and influence the

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Figure 5.1  The Colorful Revolution on the streets of Skopje

elections. Gruevski, who remained silent for 24 hours after the initial revelations on 24 January 2015, was far from apologetic when he spoke at an anniversary celebration for his party. He accused an unnamed organization, probably a foreign intelligence service, of having paid “a lot of money to some people who can make numerous wiretapped recordings” with the aim of “brutally destroying” his party and “introducing fear among the people.” Gruevski dismissed the wiretaps as the work of foreign spies and the authorities charged Zaev with trying to take down the government. The results of an investigation into the scandal revealed 670,000 illegally recorded conversations from more than 20,000 telephone numbers and exposed the weakness of Macedonia’s democratic structure. According to the report of the investigation carried out and prepared by independent experts, the government under Nikola Gruevski misused national security services “to control top officials in the public administration, prosecutors, judges and political opponents” (Focus, 22 April 2016, online edition). The report also pointed to the “apparent direct involvement of senior government and party officials in electoral fraud, corruption, abuse of power and authority, conflict of interest, blackmail, extortion, criminal damage,” as well as “unacceptable political interference in the nomination/appointment of judges” (Focus, 22 April 2016, online edition).

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After several failed attempts four political leaders, along with the ambassadors of the EU and US, reached an agreement on a transitional government that would prepare the country for snap elections in April 2016. In an attempt to defuse the country’s biggest crisis since independence in 1991, the EU brokered an agreement that saw the appointment of a Special Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the wiretaps and led to Prime Minister Gruevski stepping down in January 2016. However, Gruevski continued to claim that the wiretaps had been fabricated by foreign intelligence services. The ensuing investigation by the special prosecutor led to six people, including a former chief of the secret services. These people were charged with making the tapes, while the opposition leader, Zoran Zaev, who had been leaking the conversations – which the opposition called “bombs” – was charged with threatening violence against the prime minister. On 12 April 2016, President Gjorge Ivanov announced a mass pardon for the politicians involved in the wiretapping scandal. This reignited the crisis that had begun in February 2015, when the wiretapped conversations first emerged. With his mass pardon Ivanov effectively halted the work of the special prosecutor, saying that he was pardoning all those under investigation so as “to put an end to this agony.” “I am making an important step towards mutual reconciliation, [which] will help restore a normal political and democratic fight … based on a competition of ideas and results instead of mutual exhaustion and destruction,” he said in his TV address on 12 April 2016. Further, he claimed that the scandal was “someone else’s game” and “in someone else’s interests,” without giving any more details. “We have had enough of seeing Macedonians going against Macedonians,” he declared, while looking ahead to “fair and democratic elections.” On the very same day Zoran Zaev denounced the move as “a coup” by “the man put in place by Nikola Gruevski” and marched with hundreds of people through the Macedonian capital Skopje to Ivanov’s office, which some protesters pelted with eggs. Maja Kocijančič, the spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, stressed that there were “serious concerns” over the pardon and that this decision risked producing a climate of impunity and undermined the rule of law, as well as exacerbating the existing political crisis. As a matter of fact, Ivanov had been continuously accused of coordinating his decisions with the ruling VMRO-DPMNE so as to protect party officials from prosecution. His move therefore deepened Macedonia’s tense political climate, as his declaration was also considered a huge blow to Macedonia’s newly established Special Prosecutor’s Office and its mandate to investigate the wiretap scandal. On 13 April the protesters demolished the office of President Gjorge Ivanov when dozens of protestors were arrested. After that initial day of

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Figure 5.2  Protestors preparing to throw paint during the Colorful Revolution

violence, the following days ushered in a festive atmosphere. People started showing up with paintball guns, and the target of their “artwork” became the Porta Macedonia, the triumphal arch erected in 2011–12 as part of the controversial “Skopje 2014” project. Many of the protesters and citizens considered the Porta Macedonia an icon of “Gruevism”. Gradually, throughout Skopje, protestors began targeting other buildings with paint (Figure 5.2). The protesters, we are colorful ourselves – from different ethnic backgrounds, ages, gender. The colors are our answer against the grayness that this government has been pushing for years. Just like when they painted the bunkers in Albania after Enver Hoxha fell; we are giving color to the “bunkers” that Gruevski and his gang made: the bunkers that occupied freedom of thought, the bunkers that hid the billions that they stole in the last ten years. They dictated grayness; we give them back color. They forced uniformity; we give back variety. (Interview with a protesters, 23 April 2016)

The Colorful Revolution went viral on social media and in real life. The “Warrior on a Horse” fountain on Macedonia Square was red for a day, as the protestors dumped red paint in the water. The liquid became a symbol of the “blood” shed by the people in their collective fight for good governance. The water was soon drained and returned to normal, but some of the lions flanking the fountain had their eyeballs and testicles painted red for some

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time. Another night, the fountain bubbled over after activists filled it with detergent. The Justice Ministry, the city council, the streets of the city center – all were splattered with paint by activists. Skopje’s parliament building was also splattered with colors. Irena Stezijovska, a 28-year-old theater producer, was the main creator of the aesthetics of the Colorful Revolution. Along with her colleague Tatjana Krukulj, she took to the streets of Skopje almost every day, covering government buildings and monuments with paint. The Colorful Revolution mobilized thousands of people, ethnic Macedonians standing side by side with ethnic Albanians, Turks, Roms, Vlahs, and others to demonstrate against government corruption and impunity. The Colorful Revolution would soon turn into more than two months of consecutive demonstrations, with the pair playing a major role in shaping the message with their unique method of protest: “These are modern times, and we use color, not weapons,” Krukulj said in an interview for Focus Magazin. “If we take down the regime with color that is art.” While Krukulj provided the artistic direction, Stezijovska became the face of the movement. On the evening of the revolution, the pair – along with several other activists, young and old – repainted the road outside parliament. Stzeijovska had been riding in the back of a pickup truck headed toward that evening’s concrete canvas. Recognizing her mask of glitter paint, people came up to her, hugged her, and told her how much they appreciated what she was doing. “When people come up to me, I feel a responsibility,” she said. “Some of these people, they see you at every protest, and yes, you are a hero to them. They put their hope in you.” Stezijovska sees the Colorful Revolution less as a protest against the government, and more as a call to the people to remember the power they have to make the change they want to see in their leadership. “Our target is the citizens, not the government – regardless of how this revolution ends, people have to vote and choose a government,” she said one evening in her apartment as she checked social media for the reaction to that night’s protest. “People have been taught to obey. [The government] has been cracking down on any free thought and free ideas. There is no free society; we are all that is left of it.” (Interview on 24 Vesti TV channel, 18 April 2016)

The colors of the protesters The Colorful Revolution was rather diffuse, with no clear leader and no clear political platform. The protesters were mostly young and unemployed, frustrated with the political establishment, corruption, and their own uncertain

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employment opportunities. As in other European protest movements, the participants in Skopje’s Colorful Revolution used social media to connect with each other and to draw attention to what was going on in the capital. “Protest,” a Macedonian-language Facebook action page, helped to organize the anti-government demonstrations throughout the country. Its demands were clear: first among them was to revoke the mass pardon by President Gjorge Ivanov. Second was Ivanov’s irrevocable resignation. Third, parliamentary elections, which had been scheduled for 5 June, needed to be delayed. These demands – and many of the posts on Twitter and other social media outlets – were written in English, in addition to Macedonian, with the intent of internationalizing the message, making the movement accessible to people outside the country, and thereby increasing awareness of the protests. Under international pressure, the Macedonian parliament passed legislation that enabled Ivanov to revoke the pardons he had granted to 34 officials implicated in the wiretapping scandal. The protests also led to the cancellation of the election set for 5 June, which was then rescheduled for 14 December 2016. The Colorful Revolution gave new charm to the kitschy constructions of downtown Skopje as the twenty-fifth anniversary of Macedonia’s independence approached in September 2016. More importantly, the large numbers of people who had taken to the streets in those several months gradually and definitely paved the way to end the regime that had been in power since 2006. As already pointed out, placed in perspective, the events that took place in Skopje are comparable to the series of popular protests, which later became known as “color revolutions,” that took place in Serbia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine between 2000 and 2005. These revolutions established a repertoire of non-violent, sometimes successful, regime-change strategies (Finkel and Brudny 2012a). The response by the VMRO-DPMNE government was similar to that in the other places where color revolutions took place, regardless of whether they succeeded or not: those in power studied the democracy-promotion techniques used in various color revolutions and focused their prevention strategies on combating these techniques. In the period after the revolution, the VMRO-DPMNE government staged a massive campaign against the “colorfuls” (шарените), qualifying them as hooligans and anti-patriots. Finkel and Brudny (2012b) have argued that in the various “soft” revolutions in other East European countries governments adopted techniques similar to those used by the protestors. This, according to Finkel and Brudny (2012a), reveals the capacity of autocratic regimes to study democracy-promotion techniques and focus their democracy-prevention efforts precisely on the policies and topics on which the democracy promoters concentrate. By doing this, autocratic regimes sometimes replicate democracy-promotion

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techniques for use against the pro-democratic opposition (Finkel and Brudny 2012a, 2012b). Moreover, the repertoire of authoritarian reactions to color revolutions represents in essence the “mirror image” of the repertoire of the color revolution activists and consists of several key political and intellectual strategies. These are, namely, attacks on independent civil society and political opposition, limits on electoral competition, and efforts to ideologically delegitimize color revolution ideas and techniques as subversive and alien to their country’s culture and traditions (Finkel and Brudny 2012a). The period following the Colorful Revolution arguably changed the ambience in Republic of Macedonia and engendered hope for the pending elections in December 2016, especially because of the open support of the EU and US. However, the demonization of the civil society organizations critical of the regime was fierce. Using the terms Soros and Sorosoids (соросоиди) as umbrella terms for every NGO or anyone who was critical of the government was part of a strategic attempt to delegitimize the protestors and their vision. While there is a significant literature on different attempts to identify a theoretical framework which would provide an explanation for the causes of political mobilization during the “color revolutions” in countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, this approach has predominantly drawn on the “transition paradigm” (Zherebkin 2009). Instead of explaining the Colorful Revolution in Skopje through the rigid lens of structure versus agency, I want to look at the performative aspect, in which the participants in a democratic performance were acting as equals in their status as actors and “makers of history”. The message of equality, freedom, and non-violent resistance was effectively channeled via the “carnival culture” (music, songs, anecdotes, public performances, poetry, graffiti, etc.) in Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the carnivalesque reversion of the “top” and the “bottom” and the poles of domination and subordination. According to Bakhtin, “carnival” goes far beyond being a mere ritual or form of entertainment. Rather, it is an ontological condition, a political space of suspension of all hierarchical relations, overwhelmed by the excess of the wild energy of folklore festivals (Bakhtin 1993). Drawing on the famous Renaissance writer Rabelais, Bakhtin offered new reading of Rabelais’s analysis of carnival, now as a popular response to the extreme hierarchization of social order in the conditions of feudalism, “a special form of free and familiar contact [that] reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age” (Bakhtin, quoted in Zherebkin 2009, 200). I underline the relevance of Bakhtin’s theoretical work on gaps between “words and the world,” and the concept of porosity that informs the theoretical bedrock of this book. For Bakhtin, a “gap” also exists not only between our words and the world but between two speakers. Thus, for

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him, communication is never a matter of simply transferring an idea from the head of one person into that of another. It is, rather, a process in which people who occupy different “positions” in a discourse attempt to influence each other’s behavior in some way. And because a person can never wholly occupy another’s place (without losing their own), two speakers can never completely understand each other; they remain only partially satisfied with each other’s replies; each utterance occasions a further response. Thus the creative bridging of each “gap” occasions the need for a further response, and the speech chain remains unbroken. Bakhtin argued that instead of functioning in terms of pre-existing mental representations at the center of our being, awaiting codification in words, our mental activities are “given form” only at the time of their expression, in a process of “ethically sensitive negotiation” at the boundaries of our being (Shotter 1993, 351). Bakhtin calls this the “semantic landscape,” where contact through utterances and dialogue take place as everything of “importance goes on in the gaps or the zones of uncertainty … between utterances, at the boundaries between the different, unique positions in existence everyone and everything has and is answerable for (see Clark and Holquist 1984, ch. 3). Bakhtin’s world is fluid and slippery, as language and communication are permeated by the existence of gaps similar to the pores in rocks. And yet, just like in geology, the porous character of language and public discourse does not mean that everything is totally disconnected, either. The connection, according to Bakhtin, exists in the inter-linguistically created context, where a myriad of intentions, responses, utterances, or different speech positions are intertwined (Bakhtin 1993). Further, Bakhtin reminds us that this context is temporally and spatially specific, informed by a precise chain of events that unfold in the “zone of uncertainty.” It is in this zone of uncertainty where, through contact, the construction of a word’s significance takes place. This significance of the word (or the act) can reshape social reality as it attempts to bridge the gap between oneself and another where different influences are exerted. This zone is porous and bumpy ground that Holquist rightly calls “the combat zone of the word” (Holquist, quoted in Shotter 1993, 388). It is in the light of Bakhtin’s approach towards gaps and zones of uncertainty capable of changing social reality that I construe the Colorful Revolution that took place in Skopje in 2015. It was a result of the porosity and uncertainty that grew out of the “Skopje 2014” project, which itself was an outcome of a porous narrative of ownership (antiquity), belonging (to Europe), and erasure (of socialism and Islam). The “monumentalism” of Skopje urban space is one of the factors that propelled the Colorful Revolution in the first place. Intensified by the monuments and buildings of the “Skopje 2014” project, which arguably was seen by many as the most explicit testimony to corrupt governing practices, Skopje’s urban space became

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porous and tenuous. The baroque size and “grandeur” of the buildings and monuments was meant to impress, but they also provoke. In their proper historical context, the dramatic styles of the baroque and classicism also appeared as urban styles used as a means of impressing visitors and expressing triumphant power and control over the local people. The excessive details and décor of the (neo-)baroque are to manifest power (Beverley 1988, Egginton 2010, Lambert 2004). Through greater volumes, exaggerated decorations, colossal sculptures, huge furniture, etc., where sense of movement, energy, and tension are dominant impressions, the baroque and classicism gave special attention to animation and grandeur achieved through scale, and the dramatic use of light and shadow. Skopje’s version of grandeur used cheap building materials, foam and plaster instead of stone and marble, in much of its construction, and it is already crumbling.

Conclusion With the Colorful Revolution, citizens used “Skopje 2014” venues and monuments to express their yearning for justice and the rule of law. While pro-VMRO-DPMNE elements described their acts as hooliganism, the creators and main participants insisted that the Colorful Revolution was ultimately a quest for justice and a reaction against the principle of impunity that had prevailed in RN Macedonia regardless of which party governed the country. Bakhtin’s concern with the gaps and uncertainties was not concerned with the end product of an action and the end result, but with the “‘ethical deed in its making’ with how in the process of authoring, that is, in crafting the complex, time-space relations between self and others, the self is also crafted” (Shotter 1993, 388). This is where I see the relevance of the porosity metaphor and the Colorful Revolution in thinking about borders. The borders, even when marked as definite and final, are always incomplete, lending themselves to different imagination and experience that make them subject to subversion and transgression. The new aesthetics in Skopje were partly introduced to be appealing to the masses and to tourists and to glorify the rule of the governing party by adopting a new rhetorical, theatrical, and sculptural fashion, expressive of the “triumph” of the state. But they were also an attempt to insert a variety of aesthetic and historical styles that would link Macedonia to the West. An employee in the Ministry of Culture affirmed that Skopje has become a “real European city.” The erasure of the traces of the socialist and Ottoman past is an inseparable part of the national “revival” project, founded on the processes of antiquization (antikvizacija) and Christianization (hristijanizacija) of the country. By focusing on the architectural interventions in Skopje, this chapter has revealed the wider context of the activities of the state, particularly in the

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context of its transnational relations and in its attempts to use architecture and monuments to assert a certain kind of border and truth about the country. I have argued that the creation and definition of the idea of Macedonia has been conducted to a great extent in relation to the challenges by Greece against the name “Macedonia,” but also in relation to the way that transnational organizations such as the EU and NATO have responded and attempted to mediate the dispute.8 To close, the excessive, glittering, and oversized (but poorly constructed and already crumbling) ornamentation in Skopje pretends to be a great deal larger than life. Superficial aesthetics have been critical not only as tools for creating new borders through symbols, signs, and content required during rebranding, but also as the very terrain where the rebranding of the city has taken place. The nexus between legality and identity in Macedonia has become a terrain where history is rewritten, and also where the present is reclaimed. For, in addition to its historical claims over antiquity, VMRO-DPMNE also insisted on the right of Macedonia to be part of Europe, “even if Europe, due to Greece’s blockade, does not accept Macedonia” (interview with an employee, Ministry of Culture, Skopje 2012).

Notes 1 The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on 5 December 2012 that by blocking Macedonia’s NATO bid in April 2008, Greece had breached a bilateral agreement signed between the two countries in 1995. The ruling of the Hague-based court, adopted by 15 votes to 1, found that Greece, by objecting to the admission of Macedonia to NATO in April 2008, had breached its obligation not to block the country’s accession to international organizations while the country was referred to as ‘The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’ (FYROM). The Macedonian legal team argued that Greece had violated the Interim Accord signed in New York on 13 September 1995, 4 UNTS 1995, which was agreed by both countries. Under this Accord, Greece undertook an obligation not to block Macedonia’s entry into international organizations while the dispute over the use of the name Macedonia by the Former Yugoslav Republic was still unresolved. The ICJ proceedings initiated by the government of the Republic of Macedonia were an attempt to fight for justice in an international context and expose the injustice inflicted by Greece. The fact that R Macedonia won this case at the ICJ was a symbolic victory; the verdict carried no political clout and the ICJ provided for no sanctions against Greece and its judgment was therefore useless. 2 An interlocutor insisted that the display of power in the Skopje 2014 project has to be seen also as a fascist power belittling the citizen, especially with the Porta Makedonija, which is an imitation of the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile in Paris and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. In addition, the Skopje project is also about the building of churches and walls to obscure the Mustafa Pashina Mosque and

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the other left-bank Muslim monuments from the view on the right bank. The Albanian nationalist Skenderbeg Square should be considered a response to the VMRO-DPMNE construction frenzy exemplified in the Skopje 2014 project, which, according to my interlocutor, should be seen as part of the VMRO-DPMNE/DUI “divide and conquer” policy. 3 The doctrine stated the revival to be the end of the 15 years of transition that started in 1991 with the independence of the republic. The consecutive rule of the Social Democratic Alliance (SDSM) since the 1991 independence of Macedonia – with the exception of the period 1998–2002, when VMRO-DPMNE and the Democratic Alternative won the 1998 elections – was viewed by the right-wing demo-Christians in the VMRO-DPMNE as a continuation of the socialist legacy, not only detrimental to the economic well-being of the citizens, but especially disadvantageous for the preservation of Macedonian national identity. The revival introduced in 2006–7 thus aimed at correcting the lingering socialist “anomalies” by introducing (and producing) radically different views of society and its members. 4 The initial video of this project is available on www.youtube.com/watch?v=iybmtiLysU (accessed 7 August 2011). 5 The rise in the construction industry was undeniably due to the Skopje 2014 project. Gruevski and his government had been forced to be proactive in seeking out alternative markets for the country’s exports (other than the eurozone). One of the main agendas in the 2011 elections was to maintain Macedonia as a country with lowest taxes in Europe, which would encourage foreign investors. However, the numbers indicating success and a rise in foreign direct investments did not account for the massive tax, infrastructure, and labor benefits that were given by the government (World Bank 2014). Free Investment Zones were promoted all over the country as the plots were sold to foreign investors for €1 per square meter for a 99-year period. The total of foreign investments was estimated by official government sources to be €220 million, with 2,000 new jobs. Each foreign investor was entitled to €500,000 in subsidies for investments of over €15 million and for hiring over 100 new employees. The government could also consider allocating additional subsidies: 50 percent of the expenses for general education and 25 percent of the costs for special training of employees, such as travel and daily expenses, consulting services and reimbursement for equipment (BIRN 2015). The foreign investors were exempt from paying any income tax for a ten-year period, and for a five-year period they had to pay only 50 percent of what was due. In addition to the fact that plots of land were rented out for €1 per square meter for 99 years, the investors were released of paying fees for preparation for the plots and for construction, legal and urban permits. All these costs were paid by the government. The investors were also exempt from customs expenses for the importation of materials and from VAT. In addition to this, the state provided free connections for gas, sewer and water pipelines (BIRN 2015). Such concessions were indeed important for bringing in foreign investors such as the Belgian bus producer Van Hool and the mixed capital company Johnson Control (BIRN 2015). 6 www.utrinski.mk/default.asp?ItemID=CB4A2682F293244C9A6B9F70BEE76316 (accessed 5 February 2016).

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7 For more on the Skopje 2014 project see Gelevski 2010, Gelevski 2011, Gelevski 2012, Graan 2013, Janev 2011, Janev 2015, Koteska 2011, Takovski 2016, Vilik 2009. 8 While international attention has been preoccupied with the name conflict with Greece, the Bulgarian issue proves to be fundamentally as contentious and dangerous to RN Macedonia’s well-being, with its denial of the existence of the Macedonian language and nation. This became especially obvious in the course of October–November 2020 as RN Macedonia was preparing to begin the official accession negotiations, when Bulgaria threatened to veto the start of negotiations if RN Macedonia did not acknowledge that its language and nation were created by Tito in 1944/45.

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Conclusion: porous trails at the border

My main intention in this book has been to offer a contrasting approach from that of previous scholarly works on borders that view borders as sites of governmentality or generative hybridity. I have attempted not to weigh the book down with plodding theoretical exegesis but, rather, by using porosity as a main analytical lens, to suggest a novel theoretical point that is demonstrated and ethnographically elaborated in each chapter. Although my conceptualization of porosity draws primarily from geology, it is an eclectically assembled notion that also draws on anthropology, political science, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. I have taken this eclectic route to present new ways to think about borders, border crossing, and their social consequentiality in a specific context where the name dispute used to dominate the political and social landscape. While I acknowledge and build on scholarship on the Balkan region that has focused on the collapse of state socialism, subsequent social reforms and neoliberalization, the violent break-up of Yugoslavia and its consequences, and the impact of international organizations and projects in the region, the concept of border porosity has allowed me to carve out new questions and new problematics for research in Southeastern Europe. Zooming onto the railway infrastructure built and developed in the Balkans, porosity has allowed me to offer an alternative reading of the region’s modern history, as well as an innovative take on temporality and spatiality in all their past and contemporary relevance. The desire to consume and gamble reveals the porous and gendered practices that propel people to cross the border for a visit to the beauty parlor or the casino. Crossing the border during socialism created among many vacationers the desire, and since 2012 a possibility, to purchase seaside property. For the child refugees from the Greek Civil War, however, the border has created a life-long longing for the lost childhood home. These, which I call sediments, albeit different,

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leave visible traces that not only affect people’s lives but have also transformed the social fabric of both Greece and RN Macedonia. The open-pit mines and the ensuing protests against the destruction of the environment reveal the porosity of the border created both by transnational companies and also by the protestors who challenge (sometimes successfully and sometimes not) the agendas of these companies. Protests create porosity in central Skopje where the monuments and buildings frame a stage for political and social transformations that appear invisible at the actual borders. These different border porosities detailed in the chapters of the book demonstrate that while political borders between states restrict or regulate the movement of people and things they are also always permeable in telling ways that exceed state governmentality. And yet, I do not want to downplay the importance of the power of the nation-state. In one of the most inspiring analyses on borders in the South Balkans, Myrivili (2004) views the liquid border in the Prespa Lakes – the trilateral border region of Prespa shared between Greece, Albania and RN Macedonia – as a place of materialization of state power at its limits, where violence becomes instrumental to the institution of the nation-state and the legitimation of its powers. Her research shows how the local people see the border as a threat (even a ghost) of an abstract power of the nation-state and the embedded realities of their own individual lives (Myrivili 2004, 6; Myrivili 2019). With her work Myrivili highlights the value of ethnographic research that is crucial to capturing the process of subjectification of “border subjects” as they occupy specific subject-positions in relation to the Greek nation-state’s limits. I also want to draw on Saskia Sassen’s work where she urges social scientists to consider what she calls “the before method” (Sassen 2013). To explain what this method actually means, Sassen gives an example and refers to the IMF and European Central Bank’s 2013 declaration that Greece’s economy was back on track.1 This declaration was based on the measure of GDP, but neglected to account for “a shrunken economic space, an economic space that has basically expelled 30 percent of workers, of households, of small businesses (interview with Sassen for Sage Research Methods).” This illustrates how social scientists need an awareness of what they are measuring and what is left out. Or, as Sassen puts it, “what is the knowledge vector that organizes an explanation?” (Sassen 2017, 24). By critically examining and de-theorizing categories before commencing research, social scientists can move beyond the “echo chamber of research.” I use the term de-theorizing à la Sassen, who insists on going back to “‘ground level” so as to see these new alignments. In other words, “to de-theorize in order to re-theorize” (Sassen 2017, 18). Sassen describes this method as the freedom and flexibility to position herself in relation to the

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Conclusion 145 object of study however she wants. It is an analytical tactic to de-theorize phenomena when first studying them. This avoids the pitfall of following learned methodologies that create expectations, and then forcing data to adhere to those expectations (Sassen 2013, Sassen 2017). This book in a way applies such a “before method” approach to studying borders. While I draw on the important contributions on borders in the social sciences, especially in anthropology, I have felt that the available approaches have constrained my own approach to what borders mean and what they actually do. They allow us to focus on both micro and macro history, to politics and economy, and, indeed, on ecology and architecture away from the actual borders. I tried to explain why I have been fascinated by the concept of porosity and by the way that natural scientists approach it. The most compelling facet of “porosity” is, in a way, its detachment – not political but, rather, methodological and theoretical. Much in line with Sassen’s “before method,” geologists and petroleum engineers take porosity seriously as they try to measure the internal voids and pores of a rock, and how liquid or other matter will pass through these formations. The trains, the mines, the tourists, shopping- or beauty-driven travel represent both the pores and deposits within and across the border that require similar ethnographic precision but also sound theoretical and epistemological sensitivity. I coined different qualifications of porosity to let me move through the chapters and tell the story without being entangled in previous “echo chambers.” I concur here with Sassen that I do not want my story to (entirely) comply with previously learned methodologies and “to adhere to their expectations.” Not that nation-states, identities, history, or migration and movement of displaced people do not matter. So much has been written on borders as demarcations of nation-states, or about borders as disciplinary devices that subject people to severe regimes of exclusion, marginalization, and dehumanization, that I have been propelled to reach out to an approach that would give me a fresh look into the convoluted past and present of the borders between Greece and RN Macedonia. I was gripped by how the natural sciences address porosity and its relevance for the Earth and humankind. Not that such a move to hybridization of knowledge is new. But instead of the earlier “authority” of positivism, the marriage between social analysis and concepts from the natural sciences should capture processes that enable transgressions of disciplinary boundaries, and also processes of transgression of social and natural character. I draw here on Eriksen’s use of the term “overheating,” where he explains the accelerated world and the three major crises that haunt the contemporary globalized world: the environment, the economy, and identity (Eriksen 2016). These three crises are excruciatingly present at the border between Greece and RN Macedonia. And, as Eriksen points out, they are both interconnected and relatively

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autonomous (Eriksen 2016, 3). They also underscore the fundamental contradiction in the global system, namely the conflict between growth and sustainability, which is sedimented in both countries due to the global forces of capital in the age of extraction and expulsion. As much as I have tried to propose porosity as a new analytical tool, the same question that I started with remains relevant and unexhausted. What makes borders so powerful in their ontological existence? How do they acquire their power? I do not claim to have answers to these questions, but I was enlightened by Gieryn’s (2018) work on “truth-spots” as I was trying to answer them. Gieryn argues that the grounds for assigning credibility to some claims or places but not to others involves putting that assertion on the ground somewhere – literally, taking it back to its geographical and material provenance. “Places are not idle backdrops – they have agency and exert a force of their own on the direction and pace of knowledge and belief” (Gieryn 2018, 23). Even when a border appears stripped bare of any national(istic) content, the authority of border guards and regimes is not merely performative. Despite appearing sterile and stripped of any individual expression, it is precisely this bare outlook that plays the main role in giving borders their “truth-spot” character. To appear as a threshold to a “serious” states, or, to use Gieryn’s words, to become a truth-spot with its own agency, a border has to have a bare appearance. Gieryn examines a lab, a courthouse, a botanical garden, and the site at Delphi – the site of an ancient oracle – to show how certain places acquire a make-believe character over time and through their special appearance (Gieryn 2018, 18). I find that Gieryn’s argument resonates at borders too. Any adornment or intentional (explicit) aesthetics at the border would bring a “theme-park element” to a place that has to appear serious and devoid of interpretations. “Too many meanings and embellishments, and one gets the association of a banana state beyond the border” (Gieryn 2018, 18). It is within these unintentionally or deliberately created visible or invisible voids, gaps, and emptinesses that we need to pay close attention to the relevance of porosity as an essential feature of the border. Crossing a border is an affective experience. Fear, apprehension, irritation, curiosity, or excitement often accompanies the act of border crossing, especially in zones where the past and the present are entangled in violent and unresolved conflicts. In contrast, the architecture and aesthetic appearance of state borders rarely grasp the attention of travelers. In this respect borders can be considered quintessential non-places, to borrow Marc Augé’s famous label, that nonetheless are saturated with power (Augé 1995). He refers to “anthropological spaces” of transience where human beings remain anonymous. These are places that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places,” such as airports, shopping malls, or gas stations, to which I

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Conclusion 147 would add refugee camps as well (Augé 1995, 12). In recent decades, however, airports and embassies have become focal points where nations are represented and display their national achievements in terms of architecture and efficiency. In contrast, land-border checkpoints are most often stripped of any intention to display details of national representation or pride, and often with their display of power borders enforce degradation and dehumanization. Only recently have architects ventured into looking at border checkpoints not only as security and surveillance areas but also as places that could showcase more aesthetically pleasing encounters with the territory that lies ahead.2 The violent history of the border between Greece and RN Macedonia throughout the twentieth century has left very few material traces in the region, aside from the occasional cemetery. The materiality of the actual border is stripped of any signifying hints of the turbulent history of the twentieth century, or of the ongoing ideological struggle between RN Macedonia and Greece, and also between the other Balkan countries such as Serbia and Bulgaria, around the name and region of Macedonia. For the entire twentieth century Serbia and Greece, for instance, agreed upon that border. Bulgaria sort of changed it in World War Two, for just a short period of time when most of the Jewish population in Greek and Vardar Macedonia were murdered, while the Jews of Bulgarian Macedonia, as elsewhere in Bulgaria, were mostly spared. The seemingly “neutral” border devoid of indications related to its historical or ideological contexts poses the question of how to read this invisibility. An effective lens through which to analyze the border between Greece and RN Macedonia and the absence of any material traces of the name conflict is the notion of abjection, as developed by Julia Kristeva.3 In social theory the “abject” exists somewhere between the concept of an object and the concept of a subject, representing elements of the self (viewed as a Cartesian conscious agent) separated off in a liminal space. Kristeva claims that within the boundaries of what one defines as subject – a part of oneself – and object there reside pieces that were once categorized as a part of oneself or one’s identity that have since been rejected – the abject. Just like Bakhtin’s argument of gaps and voids between “words and worlds” that I employed in Chapter 5 to discuss the Colorful Revolution and the role of “Skopje 2014” in creating porous conditions for social transformation and regime change, Kristeva’s concept of abjection is another theoretical tool that can help us in explaining the porosity in a social context. Applied to border spaces in the southern part of RN Macedonia, with the lingering past visible in cemeteries, the abject element creates a liminal border space where the symbolic order (naming and labeling) is suspended, thus creating “productive” liminality. This liminal space accommodates silences and

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excludes or disavows emotions or affects, as well as practices within the border and beyond, enabling people to adopt roles, identities, and discourses to avoid the consequences of the otherwise social and symbolic abjection related to the name dispute. Going back to the nitty-gritty details of border crossing, border checkpoints reveal plenty about geopolitics and international hierarchies, despite the uniform, unnoticeable, and generically stylized aesthetics. Their outlook is informed by geopolitics and international regulations addressing how “modern” nation-states should standardize their borders and guard their territory. This is especially true for the Balkans, where the countries in the western part (Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania) aspire to become EU members and harmonize their border protection with EU standards.4 The bare border appearance is not characteristic of the Balkans only. In the “Übergang” project, designed and carried out by German photographer Josef Schultz, we see similar features in the practice of building border checkpoints within EU territory. These checkpoints were erected in the period prior to the abolition of borders within the EU in 1985. Schultz sought out and captured abolished border checkpoints in the Schengen Zone; only a few displayed creativity and unique features, such as the Hungarian–Austrian border, built in the style of a wooden and the checkpoint between Andorra and Spain built in the style a cable car typical of that region.5 Unlike the borders that divided the states of the EU before the Schengen Agreement, the borderless socialist Yugoslavia made travel within the country smooth and easy, without visa requirements for both Western (capitalist) and Eastern (socialist) countries (Jansen 2009). After 1991 and the bloody dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation, however, each newly established state set up heavily guarded borders that had not existed prior to 1991. To finish, simply put, the overall aim of the border project between Greece and RN Macedonia has been to go beyond the political and symbolic conflict over who has the “legitimate” right to the name “Macedonia,” a conflict that has effectively overshadowed all other levels of interaction and contact since 1991. There is no better place to grasp the intensity of this interaction but the border area, where different porosities have both connected and divided this region, and the different nation-states – depending on the specific historical period – have overlapped and clashed. Porosity remains a way to look at borders beyond the prevailing paradigms of border zones as productive areas of hybridization and empowerment, or as sites of militarization and exclusion. I have repeatedly stressed that the value of the concept of porosity is precisely the way that it allows for heterogeneous analysis. That is, this

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book rejects the move to construct a “unified theory of borders” and instead celebrates the diverse ways that borders and their crossing are made and remade as significant and consequential. As I have argued throughout the chapters, “porosity” provides a conceptual language for doing just this, and thereby avoids established tendencies to treat borders either as sites of extreme governmentality or as sites of emancipatory hybridity.

Notes 1 methods.sagepub.com/podcast/saskia-sassen-on-before-method. 2 An example of this new approach is the Turkish–Georgian Sarpi border checkpoint on the shore of the Black Sea designed by J. Mayer Architects and built in 2011. One of the main intentions of J. Mayer Architects was to use architecture’s potential to shape space, and thus to change how borders are perceived. The Sarpi border intended to combine the need for quality space and the need for security, thereby elevating the checkpoint from a military to a more cosmopolitan experience (“Sarpi Border Checkpoint in Georgia / J. Mayer H. Architects”, 15 November 2011. ArchDaily. www.archdaily.com/184315/sarpi-border-checkpointin-georgia-j-mayer-h-architects/ ISSN 0719-8884 (accessed 10 January 2019). 3 In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva proposes that we first experience abjection at the point of separation from the mother. This idea is drawn from Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory, which underpins Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Kristeva argues that abjection represents a revolt against that which gave us our own existence or state of being. At this point the child enters the symbolic realm, or law of the father. Thus, when we as adults confront the abject we simultaneously fear and identify with it. It provokes us into recalling a state of being prior to signification (or the law of the father) where we feel a sense of helplessness (Kristeva 1982). 4 The borderless EU territory established by the Schengen Agreement rendered these checkpoints unnecessary. Signed in 1985 in Luxemburg, the Schengen Agreement became effective ten years later with the abolition of internal border checks. The Agreement introduced reduced-speed vehicle checks, which allowed vehicles to cross borders without stopping and also allowed residents in border areas to cross borders away from fixed checkpoints. Many of the checkpoints had been removed, but many remain as silent reminders of the divided territory that the EU once was. However, the celebratory tone of a united EU territory that has dominated the international and domestic perceptions was reconsidered in 2016–17 with the arrival of migrants and refugees when hundreds of thousands people crossed the Balkan corridor and entered the EU. These events revived the debate between EU members as to whether internal borders within the Schengen area might need to be reestablished, given the difficulty of controlling the numbers of those who entered the EU countries. The COVID-19 pandemic did actually result in the return of some of these borders in 2020. 5 www.itsnicethat.com/articles/josef-schulz-ubergang (accessed 11 January 2018).

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References 159 Наковски, П. 2008. Македонските бегалци во Полска. Државниот архив на Маке донија, Скопје. Пандевски, М. 1978. Илинденското востание во Македонија 1903. Инст за Национална Историја, Скопје. Пандевски, М. 1993. Македонската револуционерна организација меѓу 1893 и 1918 година: формирање и развој. Прилози, 24(2), 5–15. Пачемска, Д. 1985. Внатрешната македонска револуционерна организација (Обед инета). Студенски Збор, 57. Тодоровски, З. 2014. Тодор Александров. Државен Архив на Пепублика Македо нија, Скопје. Шериф, А. 2001. Пударството во Македонија во Време на Османлиското Владеење. Институт за Национална Историја, Скопје. Websites https://english.republika.mk/news/macedonia/warrior-on-a-horse-becomes-a-hellenicmonument/ http://vistinomer.mk/site-prislushuvani-razgovori-objaveni-od-opozitsijata-video-audiotranskripti/ https://prizma.mk/kompleten-materijal-od-site-bombi-na-opozitsijata/ www.gtp.gr/LocPage.asp?id=13602 https://anemi.lib.uoc.gr/php/pdf_pager.php?rec=/metadata/8/e/b/metadata-388 –0000002.tkl&do=121610.pdf&pageno=3&width=841&height=595&maxpage= 42&lang=en

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Index

abject 147, 149 abjection 147–9, 154 abstraction 44, 118–19 Adriatic Coast 24, 35 Adrianopole (Edirne) 25, 29 Aegean 34, 37, 96, 153, 157 aesthetics 16, 124, 126, 135, 139–40, 146, 148, 152–3 Afghanistan 19–20 agency 10, 59, 66, 72–5, 103, 137, 146, 152 agriculture 5, 24, 62, 69, 86, 103, 111, 116, 121 Al Jazeera 20 Albania xiv, 5–6, 17, 35, 46–7, 49, 60, 82, 87, 91, 92–5, 122, 126, 134–5, 141, 144, 148 Albanians 6, 82, 135 Alexander the Great 2–3, 101, 129–30 Alexandropolous (Dedeağaç) 27–8, 30, 32 Allied Powers 33–6 alluvial 9 Alpha Bank 86 American dollar 84 amnesty 96–7 Andorra 148 Antartiko (Želovo) 94 antiquity 2, 100–1, 124, 126, 130, 138, 140 Anzaldúa, G. 150, 10–11 Apasiev, Dimitar 113

Apolonia 56 Appel, H. 13, 118–19, 150 Arc De Triomphe 140 Archaeological Museum 128 Aridea 94 Aristotle 101 asylum 20, 46 asymmetry 66, 74 Athens 15, 41, 68, 86, 93, 101, 104, 150 Augé, M. 146–7, 150 austerity 58, 71, 74, 87, 90, 154, 158 Austro-Hungary 33, 35 authenticity 11 authentic 11–13, 150 authority 39, 89, 132, 145–6, 157 Avtokomanda 130 Bakhtin, M. 137–9, 147, 150, 152, 157 Bakalaki, A. 67–70, 77, 150 Balevski, Dimče 110 Balkan(s) xi, xii, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 17, 19, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31–6, 38–9, 41, 43–5, 47, 49, 52, 54, 56, 74–5, 87, 92, 113, 117, 120, 125, 143–4, 147–52, 154–8 Las Vegas 15, 54 Western 49, 87, 7 Ballinger, P. 12–3, 18, 49, 150–1 Balovo 110 Baltic xiii, 13

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Index 161 Banac I. 30, 95, 151 banana state 146 bankruptcy 102, 118, 131 Baron De Hirsch 25 Baroque 124, 126, 130, 139, 151–4 beekeepers 104 before method 144–5, 157 Bekla 95 Belgrade 14–15, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 33, 36, 40–1, 55, 92, 95, 152 Bela Crkva 95 Berlant, L. 73–4, 151 Berlin 39, 140 Bhabha, H. 11–12 BIRN (Balkan Investigative Research Network) xi, 113–14, 122, 127, 141, 151 Bitola (Monastir) ix, 17, 25, 27–8, 30–2, 34–7, 39, 46–7, 50, 53, 56, 67, 69, 75–6, 83, 86, 93–5, 130, 157 Black Sea 149, 152 Bleichart Company 36 Bogdanci 16, 100, 107, 109, 115, 121 Bogorodica-Evzoni 50–1, 53, 96 bombs 133 Bor 110 border theory 11, 155 crossing xv, 14, 50–1, 53, 56, 58, 60, 72, 74, 81, 96, 98, 143, 146, 148 porosity xiv, 16, 44, 71, 79, 124, 143 studies 10–11, 14, 153 borderland 11–12, 50, 74, 150–2, 154, 157 bordero 84 Bosnia and Herzegovina 40, 49, 87, 148 Boué, Ami 24 Bourdieu, P. 83, 151 Brajkovci 110 Brandenburg Gate 140 bribery xiv, 75 Brown, K. 29–30, 92–5, 99, 151 Bucharest 1–2, 4, 7, 32–3, 37, 47, 126, 130 Treaty 1, 7, 32–3

Budapest 27, 29, 95, 153, 158 Bulgaria xiv, xv, 1, 7, 13, 17, 27, 29, 31–40, 55, 88, 91–2, 94, 100, 107, 129, 147, 155 bureaucracy 63, 80 cable car 36–7, 148 camp xiv, 15, 42, 52, 54, 57, 76, 81, 87, 109, 147 camping 15, 87 campaign 92–3, 106–7, 112, 115, 136, 156 Canada 95, 102, 118, 120, 158 canyons 23, 27 carnival 137 casino(s) xiii, 15, 48, 53–9, 62–6, 75–6, 143, 151, 157 Cassandra ix, 81 Cattelino, J. 65–6, 76–7, 151–2 cementation 8, 80 cemetery 147 census 5–6 Central Powers 33–6 Chamber of Commerce 85, 151 Chania 63–4 checkpoints 50, 52–3, 96, 147–9 child refugee 16, 40, 79–81, 90, 94–9, 143 Churchill, Winston 38–9 civil society 114, 137 CO2 117 codification 138 Cold War 13 Colonel Fournier 33 Communist Party of Greece 5, 90, 92, 95 conditionality 66 constitution 1, 3, 4, 6, 13, 39, 47, 65, 97, 115, 128, 130 Constitutional Court 128 consumerism 48, 75, 82 contingency 63–4, 155 Converse All Star 83 corporation(s) 16, 66, 75, 85–6, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117–19, 121, 123 cosmeticians 56, 58, 61, 67 COVID-19 xiv–v, 149 Crete 63

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162 Index crisis xiii–xiv, 15, 19, 22, 35, 39, 41, 43, 47, 53, 57, 63, 70–2, 74, 76–7, 85–6, 90, 98, 102, 105, 127, 130, 133, 152, 154 financial xiii, 15, 19, 41, 53, 63, 70–1, 74, 76–7, 85–6, 90, 98, 102, 127 migrant 22, 43 Croatia 12–13, 41, 82 cruel optimism 73–4, 151 corruption xiv–xv, 75, 115, 132, 135 cultural diversity 11–12 difference 12 Czech Republic 13, 82, 92, 95, 102 Czechoslovakia 92, 95 Danforth and Van Boeschoten 91–4, 99, 152 Daniels, Jill 95 de-theorizing 144, 157 debt ix–x, 75, 78, 87, 102, 152 deficit 70, 78, 85, 102 Delčev, Goce 29, 113, 129 Delphi 146 Demir Kapija 20, 37 democracy 38, 39, 71, 78, 120, 136, 155 Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) xi, 90–1 deposit(s) 9, 14, 16, 24, 80, 90 Diavata 42 Dimova, R. x, 13, 55–6, 82, 124, 126, 152–4, 156 discourse xv, 12–13, 46, 72, 138, 148, 155, 158 Dojran (Doirani) ix, 27–8, 32, 34–5, 37, 47, 50, 53, 100, 107, 109, 112, 115 Dolno Dupeni ix, 94 Donnan and Wilson 18, 80, 125 drachmas 84, 98 Drama 27–9, 66, 76 Drenovo 36 DSE (Democratic Army of Greece) xi, 90–5, 98 Dumonceau Laugrand 24 earthquakes 37–8, 40, 47, 105, 129–30 Eastern Europe 7, 12, 49, 92, 94, 143, 151, 153, 155

echo chamber 144–5 ecology 103, 105, 145 Edirne (Adrianopole) 25, 29 Elbasan 94 Eldorado Gold 100–5, 118, 120, 131 Elefteros Tipos 86 emancipatory 4, 14, 44, 149 embargo xii–iii, 41, 85 empowerment 4, 10, 14, 72–3, 148 engineers 23–5, 28, 36, 76, 121, 145 ENP (European Neighborhood Policy) 49 entertainment xiii, 48, 53, 62, 64, 137 Environmental Impact Assessment 110–11, 114, 118 erasure 7, 138–9 erga omnes 3, 6 Estonia 13, 154 ethnic cleansing 90 ethnography xii, 63, 119 EU enlargement 157 European Central Bank 144 eurozone 141 evacuation 92–3, 95 Evros 94 exclusion 11–12, 14, 68, 73, 124, 145, 148, 154, 157 exile 90, 151 Experia 106 exploitation 14, 23, 28, 100, 106, 113, 114–15, 122–32 fantasy 48, 62, 64 Fassin, D. 84, 153 femininity 59, 68, 72–4, 151 feng shui 54 feudalism 137 filtration 106 Finkel and Brudney 136–7, 153 First Balkan War 17, 31, 47 First World War 153–4, 157 fisheries 103 Flamingo 55–6, 59, 61, 75–6 Florence 129 Florina (Lerin) ix, 5, 50, 53, 67, 83, 93, 99 fluidity 9 fluvial 9 folklore 137 forestry 103

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Index 163 gambling 48, 56, 62–4, 75–6, 155, 157 gaming 63, 65–6, 75–6, 152 GDP (Gross Domestic Product) xi, 70, 77–8, 85, 119, 144 geology 8, 19, 45, 74, 79, 143 Germany 33–5, 46, 85, 95, 152 German mark 84 Gevgelija ix, xv, 14–16, 22, 25, 30, 32–4, 37–8, 40–1, 43, 48, 50, 52–63, 65–6, 69, 75–6, 94, 96, 100, 107, 109, 111–12, 115, 121–2 ghost 144, 156 Gieryn, T. F. 146, 153 Golobrdo 47 Gora 47 Gounaris, B. 23–6, 46, 153 governmentality 143–4, 149 Gradsko 30, 32, 34, 36–7 granite 9 Grandits and Taylor 18, 81–2, 152–3 grassroot 107 Greece x–xv, 1–7, 10, 13–16, 19–20, 22, 30–5, 37–43, 45, 47–53, 57–65, 67–93, 95–105, 107, 110, 112–15, 117–18, 120, 124–6, 130–1, 140, 142, 144–5, 147–8, 150, 152, 154–8 Greek Civil War 5–6, 16, 41, 68, 71, 79, 90, 96, 98–9, 143, 152, 155 Government Legislative Edict 5, 60 Grand Vezir Ali Pasha 19, 25 Graz 82–3 Green, S. ix–x, 16, 18, 44, 153 ground level 144 Gruevski, Nikola 2, 17, 113, 121–2, 131–4, 141 guest workers 68 Gumendže 30, 34 habitat 104 Hagia Sofia 101 hairdresser 57, 61–2, 67–70, 77 Halkidiki viii–x, 15, 57, 81, 86–8, 98, 100–5, 110, 118, 120, 131 Haniotis 81

health xiii, 15, 52, 60, 71, 77, 93, 105, 110–11, 115, 117–18, 123 hegemony 14 Hellenization 5, 60, 76 Hellenic 2–3, 17, 70, 86, 101, 126, 159 homophobia 11 humanitarian 20, 23, 43, 90, 92–3 Hungary 13, 33–5, 40–2, 85, 92, 95 hybridity 10–14, 143, 149 identity 11, 46, 64, 80, 82, 84, 89–90, 140–1, 145, 147, 151–6 ideology 5, 7, 13, 17, 45, 60, 151, 153 Idoumeni 22, 42 illegality 84, 112 Ilinden 3, 5, 28, 29–30, 33, 46 IMF (International Monetary Fund) xi, 70–1, 103, 105, 144 industry 24, 36, 111, 118 construction 127–8, 141 gaming 75–6 mining 112, 119 textile 86 inflation 38, 70, 84–5, 102 infrastructure 3, 19–20, 22, 24, 34, 37, 41, 44, 45, 77, 105, 128, 141, 143, 150, 152 insurgents 31, 98 Interim Accord 2–3, 140 International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes 116 International Court of Justice (ICJ) 140 Istanbul 24–5, 27–32 Istria 12 Italy 12, 35, 40, 82–3 Ivanov, Gjorge 121, 133, 136 Jansen, S. ix, 44, 148, 154 Jewish 146 Johnson Control 141 Julian borderlands 12 Justinian I 129 Kachanik 31–2 Kajmakčalan 35 Kalinka 109 Kallithea 81

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164 Index Kamburovski Paskal 94, 99 Karakasidou, A. 5, 60, 154 Kastoria (Kostur) 30, 93–4 Katerini 83 Kazandol 100, 105–16, 118, 121–3, 131 Kefalari (Setoma) 94 Kilkis (Kukuš) 37, 64, 75 Kingdom 1, 32, 125, 32 of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 1 of Yugoslavia 1, 38–9, 47 Kitanoski and Doneski 92–3, 154 knowledge ix, x, 11–13, 75, 84, 90, 106, 117, 142–6, 151 Kočani 38–9 Konitsa 91–3 Konsko 107 Korça 93 Kosovo 30, 49, 87, 148 Kozani 94 Kožuf 94, 108, 110, 113 Kristeva, J. 147, 149, 154 Krukulj, Tatjana 135 Kruševo 4, 46 Kumanovo 26, 31, 38, 88 Kyrgyzstan 131, 136 Køvraa, C. 49, 154 Lacan, J. 48, 149, 156 Larissa 24, 83 Latvia 13 Lefebvre, H. 131, 154 Leipzig 36 Leptokaria 15, 81, 98 Levi’s 501 83 Lichtenstein 85 liminality 49, 147 Lithuania 13 Ljubljana 15, 40, 55, 155 Ljubojno 93–4 Lotto 64 Luleburgaz 29 Luxemburg 149 Macedonia Former Yugoslav Republic of xi, 1, 140 Ottoman 23 Republic of North xii, 3–4, 6 socialist 81–2, 97

Macedonian language 60, 97, 122, 142 Opera and Ballet 128 Railway Infrastructure 20 Railway Transport 20 Mackenzie Institute 101–2, 120, 155 Malaby, T. 63–4, 76, 155 manicure 56, 61 materiality 16, 127, 147, 152 Médecins Sans Frontières 42 Medžitlija-Niki 50, 53 Metamorfosi (Kondorobi) 94 Michaelsen and Johnson 10–11, 12, 155 migrant vii–viii, 15, 19–22, 41–3, 45–6, 49, 117, 149 crisis 22, 43 transportation 19 mine(s) vii–viii, xiii, copper 16, 105, 108, 115, 121 gold 16, 100–1, 103, 105, 107, 111 open-pit 100–7, 110, 115, 117, 128, 144 Milevska, S. 7, 155 militarization 44, 148 mineral(s) 14, 19, 23, 45, 79–80, 101, 105–6, 109–11, 113–5, 117–8 Ministry of the Interior xiv, 46, 52, 109 of Culture 128, 130, 139–40 of Economy 155 of Energy 103 of Transport 123 minority 60, 68, 91, 96–8, 124, 126 Miravci 37 Mitchell, T. 13, 38–9, 45, 120, 155 Mitrovica 14, 19, 25–8, 30, 32, 38, 43 modernization 15, 30, 69 Mogherini Federica 133 moldic 8–9, 14, 23, 33, 43, 45, 74 Monova, M. 99, 155 Montenegro 31, 148 moral economy 84, 89 multiculturalism 11–12 Munich 15 municipality 65–6, 105–7, 109, 128, 130 Mustafa Pashina Mosque 5 MPs xiv, 6, 112, 147 Myrivili, E. 144, 156

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Index 165 Nakovski, P. 93, 156 narrow-gauge line 36, 38, 45 National Bank of Greece 86, 101 nationalism 13–14, 16, 66, 126, 152, 157 Native Americans 65–6 NATO xiv–xv, 2–4, 6, 10–11, 125–6, 130, 140 Nea Moudania 81, 98 neoliberalism 13, 73, 151, 157 NGO (Non-governmental Organization) xi, 16, 20, 43–4, 131, 137 Niš 25, 27 non-places 146, 150 nouveau riche xiii oil 41, 45, 57, 70, 85–6, 104, 107, 110, 116, 118, 150, 155 OKTA 86 Olympia 3 Olympiada 100–3, 120, 155 ore 102, 107, 117 Oteševo 5 Ottoman Empire 17, 25–6, 28, 31, 99, 154, 156 overheating 145, 153 ownership 33, 79–80, 87, 138 Paralia 15, 81 parliament 4, 6, 20, 38, 102, 105, 111–12, 115, 121, 123, 135–6 parlor 53, 57–8, 61–2, 74, 143 particles 8–9, 79–80 PASOK 70–1, 96 passport 40, 50–1, 90, 96, 154 patriarchy 11 Patterson, P. 82, 156 Pčinja 26 pedicure 53, 56, 61 periphery 48–9, 74 petroleum engineering 8, 14, 45, 74, 86, 145, 150, 157 Pevkohori 81 Phelps-Dodge 113, 121 Pirin 37 Platamona x, 15, 81, 84, 98 Pletvar 36 Phillip II 2–3, 101, 130, 156 Pijpers and Eriksen 13, 120, 156

Pindus 94 Pirava 110 Poland 82, 92, 95 Polichrono x, 81, 87–9 pollution 52, 106–7, 112, 116 Polycastro ix–x, 74 positivism 145 President 2, 33, 99, 112, 123, 133, 136 Prespa Lake 4–5, 93–4, 144 Agreement xiv, 1–4, 6, 17, 43, 97, 125 Prilep 32, 36, 39, 86 Prime minister 1, 5–7, 38, 112–13, 115–16, 121–2, 133 Princess 54–6, 59, 61, 64, 75 Priština 25 privatization 13, 103 propaganda 51, 93 Psarades (Nivitsi) ix, 5, 17 psychoanalysis 143 Pulkkinen and Helms ix, 48–9, 73, 156 purity 11, 13 Queen Frederica 93 Rabelais 137, 150 radioactive 117 railway line 14–15, 19, 23, 25–34, 37–40, 42–3, 45 tracks 20–1, 28, 45 Ramada 56 real estate x, xiii, 15, 80, 87–9, 98 rebranding 128, 140 Red Cross 95 referendum 1, 16, 107, 109, 112, 121, 130 refugees 16, 20, 22, 40–3, 45–6, 71, 79–81, 90, 94–9, 143, 149, 152, 155 rehabilitation 102 religion 12, 156 renaming machine 7, 155 Revolution Bulldozer 131 Colorful 6, 16, 124, 131–2, 134–9, 147 Orange 131 Tulip 131 Velvet 131

166 Index

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Rhodope 94 risk 58–9, 63–4, 69, 133 Romania 13, 31, 33, 40, 92, 95 Romanovce 26 Rosaldo, R. 10–1, 18, 156 Rossos, A. 29, 81, 95, 99, 156–7 Rumelia 1 Russia 33–5, 87, 102, 150, 153–4, 156 Saakashvili, Mikheil 131 science 8–9, 14, 111, 143, 145, 150, 152–4, 157 earth 8, 14 Salonica Front 26, 34–5, 46, 156 Sardic MC 105–6, 109, 112–6, 118, 121–3, 131 Sarajevo 40, 154 Sarpi 149 Sassen, S. 13, 117, 144–5, 149, 157 Schengen 148–9 Schulz, Josef 148–9 Schüll N. 55, 63–4, 76, 157 SDSM xi, xv, 112, 115, 118, 141 seaside property 15, 80, 87, 143 Second Balkan War 7, 31–3, 47 sediments 9, 15–16, 79–80, 89–90, 96, 98, 143 sedimentary 79–99 semantic landscape 138 Serbia 1, 7, 19–20, 22, 27, 31–5, 37–8, 40–1, 43, 47, 49, 52, 81, 83, 87, 95, 100, 110, 121, 131, 136, 147–8, 152, 155 Seres 27–8 sexuality 10, 12, 155–6 Shevardnadze, Eduard 131 shopping xiii, 48, 53, 59, 72, 75, 81–5, 145–6 Skenderbeg Square 141 Skopje (Shkup, Üsküb) vii–ix, 2–3, 7, 14–16, 22–3, 25, 26–8, 30–3, 36–43, 46–7, 55–6, 66, 76, 81, 84, 86–9, 95–6, 116, 124–42, 144, 147, 152–8 Skouries 100, 102–5, 120, 131 Slavic ix, 5, 17, 60, 99 slot-machine 64 Slovenia 12, 41, 55, 82, 85–6 social reality 138

socialism 15, 53, 79–81, 85, 97, 131, 138, 143, 153 Soros 137 SOS 100–1, 104, 107, 109–10, 112, 114, 116, 120–2, 131 sovereignty xiv, 13, 44, 65, 100, 152–3 Soviet Union 90, 95, 151 Spain 121, 148 Spasenovski, A. 121 spatial 7, 14, 16, 50, 79, 138, 143 special prosecutor xiv, xv, 133 Stalin 95, 151 Statistical Office 17, 47, 86, 157 Steiner, Emanuel 30 Stefanovska, Valentina 129 Stepanci 36 Stezijoska, Irena 135 Stopanska Banka 86 Stratoni 102 Stratos 102 Struma 31, 35, 47 Strumica 33, 37, 107 subversive 72, 137 Suez Canal 24, 26 Sultan Abdül Aziz 24 Sultan Mehmet V Reşâd 30 surgery 73, 153 Swiss franc 84 Switzerland 85 Syriza xiii, 103, 118 Šatev, Pavel 29 Šekerinska, Radmila 113 Štip 32, 38–9, 97, 113 Tabanovce 22, 41, 52 tax xv, 15, 24, 64–5, 75, 80, 87–8, 103, 141 evasion 64, 75 property xv, 15, 80, 87 tectonic 14, 19, 45, 150 temporal xii, 7, 14, 16, 44, 50, 81, 138, 143 territoriality 13, 152 Tetovo 56 Thessaloniki (Seljanik, Solun) ix, 14–15, 17, 19–20, 22–30, 32–4, 36–8, 40–3, 50, 53, 55–8, 61–2, 64, 68, 75, 82–5, 87, 104–5, 150, 157 Thrace 94

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Index 167 tidemark 16, 44, 125, 153 Tito 7, 95, 142, 151 tourism 16, 46, 57, 79, 98, 103–4, 111, 153, 157 tourists 15, 47, 50, 79–83, 85–7, 89–90, 105, 115, 139, 145 toxic 111, 117 trace(s) 7, 16, 35, 44, 74, 106, 126, 139, 144, 147, 153 train(s) 15, 19–20, 22–3, 26, 29–34, 37–9, 41–3, 45, 94–5, 145 transgression 43, 139, 145 Trieste 82–3 trust xv, 59–61, 67, 70, 75, 84–5, 87, 89, 158 truth-spots 146, 153 Tsar Samuil 129 Tsimiski 83 Tsipras Alexis xiii–xiv, 7, 103, 115, 118, 125 TVX Inc. 101–2, 118, 120, 155 Udovo 33, 37 UN Interim Agreement 2 union(s) 38–9, 45, 78 United Macedonian Diaspora 96 US 63, 65, 90, 95, 97, 118, 122 US/Mexico 10–12 Übergang 148–9 vacation 79–81, 83, 143 Valandovo ix, 16, 33, 100, 105–7, 109–12, 114–15, 121–2, 131 Van Hool 141 Vardar 26, 33–4, 37, 127–8, 147 Varna 25 Velegrakis, O. 103, 156 Veles 14, 9, 32, 34, 36–8 veto xiv, xv, 2, 142 Via Egnatia 27 Militaris 27 victimhood 10 Vienna 27 vilayet 1, 28–30 Vinožito (Rainbow) Party 96

violence 10–11, 44, 133–4, 144 visa x, 34, 40, 79–80, 86, 97–8, 127, 148 Vlahs 135 VMRO-DPMNE xi, xiv, xv, 2, 6, 16–17, 97, 100, 106, 111–12, 121–8, 130–1, 133, 136, 139–41 Voden (Edessa) 34, 64, 76 Vojvodina 95 Volkovo 37 Vranje 25 vuggy 8–9, 14–15, 19, 23, 33, 43, 45, 74, 150 Warrior on Horse 2–3, 17, 120, 129–30, 134, 159 Washington DC 116, 151 welfare 70–1 Wilkinson R. 32, 158 wiretap xv, 17, 122, 126, 131–3 World Bank 141, 158, 70–1, 77 World Refugee Day 96 Youth Balkan Forum 92 Youth Work Actions 40, 45, 66, 92, 158 Yugoslav dinar 84, 98 Yugoslavia 1, 7, 12, 15, 17, 22, 38–41, 45, 79–85, 90–3, 95, 98– 9, 143, 148, 151–3, 156, 158 Yushchenko,Viktor 131 Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler 124–5, 158 Zaev, Zoran xiii–xiv, 7, 112–13, 115, 116, 118, 131–3 Zagreb 15, 40, 55 Zherebkin, M. 137, 158 Zigon, J. 89, 158 zone of uncertainty 138 Želovo 94 Битоски, Пистиќ and Крстески 19, 23, 27–34, 36–9, 158 Вистината за Македонија 17, 131