DEMOCRACY STREET: “Which side, then, has committed more crimes here, the Right or the Left?”

A note to Iason Athanasiadis 'A sense of the region as a unit'? What a challenge - to make sense of any region prior to the super-imposition of its formal boundaries, negotiated by powerful men, as shown on 'political' atlases with separate colourings, titles and occasional coincidences with the natural features - rivers, deserts, mountain ranges, lakes - that we also see on those atlases that focus on terrain alone, or those created by old explorers with monsters and angels. I've been enjoying Mark Mazower's 2021 history - 'The Greek Revolution' - trying to make sense of 'the Morea' and 'Rumeli' and peoples who called themselves 'Rhōmaîoi', and the myriad ways their inhabitants identified themselves as individuals and social groups before the 'Romeiko'.

Decades ago my stepfather was trying to make sense of 'the Balkans' and the term 'Balkanisation'. "In many places the peasants heard the soldiers coming, fled and hid in the woods, caves and cellars, and then, when the marauders had moved on, emerged to wander the smoking ruins, slaughtered animals and pillaged barns, they asked themselves 'In what country are we in now?".

I, with feelings for Greece that you know, balk when my half-Greek brother, fiercely proud of his Greek ancestry - George Pericles Baddeley (my photo is of George and Dad in 1968)

- muttered that 'we' Greeks are a bunch of 'Balkan mongrels'. My dad, John Baddeley CMG, fluent in Greek, married to Maria Roussen (my spelling), previously wife of Yiannis Moralis, having invited me to Athens when I was 16 in 1957 ...

Yannis Moralis "Portrait of Maria Roussin", 1941

... sat me in a cafe in Kolonaki and ordered us two diplos sketos διπλός σκέτος. When they arrived my dad pointed at each little dark brown drink and their accompanying glasses of water "That's Greek and that's Turkish. If you really want to try to understand this country you need to understand the difference between them."

I hope you'll share what you learn about pre-partitioned Thrace. Kevin Andrews (The Flight of Ikaros, (1959)) p.185: On his way towards Kalamata on a route up to the Langádha Pass, Andrews sees a village with burned-out houses. No-one locally will tell him who is responsible. A little later, a man on his road, a merchant refugee from Smyrna with a ‘thin cultivated voice’, offers his donkey to carry Andrews’ pack. They talk as they walk. Andrew feels it safer to ask ‘the question to which' he writes 'I had long been seeking the answer':

“Which side, then, has committed more crimes here, the Right or the Left?”
“I can only tell you the side that happens to have most power in one district or another also has the most opportunity to commit them.” ’

Perhaps you need a map of the distribution of power in earlier Thrace.