Greek Province Research Articles

Primary Students’ Views toward STEM Education in Greece

This paper presents the findings from a survey conducted on primary students to map their views toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in Greece according to their urban or rural setting and gender. The sample included 281 primary students from different public schools in Attica and 69 primary students from a Greek province. A close-ended questionnaire was digitally distributed to collect the data. The findings revealed that most students, from both settings, consider themselves good at mathematics and science. At the same time, they do not report it to be very likely that they would follow a career that is related either to these subjects or engineering and technology. Regarding their personal skills, most of them stated that they have communication and cooperation skills. Concerning differences between the two settings, there were statistically significant differences in favor of rural students in whether they believed they could improve, both in mathematics and science, their belief that their knowledge in STEM subjects could be useful in their adult life, and their views on the causes and effects of environmental issues. Finally, limited gender differences emerged in favor of the boys’ responses regarding future STEM careers. The implications for further research on geographical, gender, and socioeconomic disparities in STEM education are discussed.

Effect of Milking Vacuum and the Supplementation of Vitamin E and Se in Milk Quantity, Quality, and Hygiene of Mammary gland in Mountainous Greek Sheep.

The aim of this research was to study the effect of two machine milking vacuum levels on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of milk and mammary gland hygiene of ewes, when vitamin E and Se were administrated supplementarily. The experiment was conducted at the Vlasti Research Station in the Greek province of West Macedonia. Ninety-six ewes of the Mountainous Greek sheep breed were used. Animals were separated in four equal groups of 24 ewes per group. A 2 × 2 factorial design was applied, with two milking vacuum levels (38 kPa and 46 kPa) and two rations, one supplemented with vitamin E (300 I.U.) and Se (3 mg/kg DM feed) and one without any vitamin E and Se supplementation. Six test days were assigned (evening and morning milkings) at 14-day intervals, from April to July. Following milk yield control, milk samples were collected for chemical composition and somatic cell count (SCC) determination. At the end of milking of each lot, the milk from the terminal receiver of the milking machine was received for the evaluation of total bacterial count (TBC). The results revealed that milk yield was improved considerably in the case of 46 kPa vacuum level. Moreover, the chemical composition of milk was not influenced by vacuum level; however, the administration of vitamin E and Se appeared to have a positive effect. Moreover, the addition of vitamin E and Se decreased somatic cell counts (number and log10) at the two assessed machine milking vacuum levels. In reference to TBC and their log10, significant differences were not observed at both milking vacuum levels, regardless of vitamin E and Se administration. Statistical analysis did not indicate any interactions between the factors that were studied. Therefore, it is concluded that the quantity of vitamin E and Se supplemented to the ration has a positive effect on decreasing SCC and consequent positive action in the hygiene of the mammary glands of machine milked ewes.

Impact of the rootstock genotype on the performance of grafted common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) cultivars

Grafting is an excellent tool to investigate shoot/root interactions involved in root nodulation by rhizobia and biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) in legumes of high economic and nutritional importance, such as common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). Considering this, three landraces and one commercial cultivar of common bean were grafted onto eight different legume genotypes to identify possible rootstock × scion combinations that increase yield, and to study the impact of the root genotype on nitrogen fixation. The genotypes were three Greek landraces of Phaseolus vulgaris L. (namely ‘Chandres Therines’, ‘Pyrgetos’ and ‘Tsaoulia’), and one commercial cultivar (cv. ‘Helda’). These were grafted onto six different Greek landraces of Phaseolus vulgaris L., particularly ‘Chandres’, ‘Papouda’, ‘Pastalia’, ‘Vanilla’, ‘Zargana Chryssoupolis’ and ‘Zargana Kavalas’, one Phaseolus coccineus L. landrace originating from the Greek province Feneos, and one cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp) landrace originating from Arta, Greece. Grafting success was mainly determined by the rootstock genotype. The best rootstock/scion combination, attaining 100% success, was ‘Tsaoulia’ grafted onto ‘Zargana Kavalas’. Moreover, the use of P. coccineus L. as rootstock enhanced appreciably the fresh pod yield by increasing the number of fresh pods. In contrast, cowpea was an incompatible rootstock for grafting P. vulgaris, as all plants grafted on it failed to survive. Most grafting combinations reduced the% of N derived from the atmosphere (%Ndfa) through BNF. Despite the decreased%Ndfa, some rootstocks increased the biologically fixed N per cultivated area unit due to higher total biomass production, which indicates involvement of mechanisms causing rootstock/scion interactions.

Insularity and Imperial Politics: Hadrian on the Greek Islands

Since its conquest by Rome in the 2nd century BCE, Roman notables were a constant presence in Greece. While various sites on the mainland served as battlegrounds for Roman civil wars during the 1st century BCE (e.g., Pharsalus, Actium, Philippi), the early imperial period was characterized by the use of various Greek islands as places of – often self-imposed – exile and/or isolation for such notables as M. Vipsanius Agrippa (Lesbos) and Tiberius (Rhodes). Other imperial Romans sojourned in the Aegean islands for different reasons. Augustus spent a winter on Samos after his victory at Actium, using it as a temporary powerbase for the refinement of his imperial plans, and he visited it and other islands again as emperor. While the first two Julio-Claudian emperors maintained close contacts with the Greek world, in the 2nd century CE Hadrian took this connection a step further and promoted Hellenism as a major part of his imperial policy. Naturally, the Greek islands played an important role in imperial politics during his reign, but only as components of the wider Hellenic world and not as isolated entities. Hadrian visited Rhodes and Paros to restore and venerate older Hellenic monuments – the Colossus and the tomb of the poet Archilochus respectively – and possibly Samothrace in order to be initiated into the Mysteries of the Great Gods. He also visited other islands in Greece, but his exact travel itinerary can only be speculative given our fragmentary literary and epigraphic evidence. In this paper, I focus on Hadrian’s presence on the Aegean islands and argue that during his reign they served mainly as sites that allowed for the implementation of his imperial plans by virtue of their easy access from the mainland Greek and Asian provinces. Accordingly, by promoting certain aspects of older Hellenic culture on specific islands, Hadrian conferred renewed prestige to these islands in the Roman Empire.

Farewell Anatolia: Refugees & the Political Economy of New Greece

The population exchange of 1923 between Greece and Turkey consolidated the influx of more than 1.5 million refugees from Anatolia and East Thrace into Greece. In this paper, we exploit the regional distribution of refugees at the sub-prefectural level as a natural experiment in order to delineate the political and economic effects of what the Greeks call Asia Minor Catastrophe. We find that the settlement of refugees produced positive persistent effects on the electoral share of left-wing parties such as the Communist Party in 1932 and the United Democratic Left in 1963. This is particularly the case for province districts with a high settlement rate of refugees originating from Asia Minor rather than from East Thrace and the Pontus (Black Sea) region. Mortality rates also persistently rose in Greek provinces with a high share of Ottoman Greek refugees both in the interwar and the postwar period. Moreover, Asia Minor refugees appear to have contributed to a rise in Greek human capital in the postwar period.

Restoring the African origins of philosophy

The standard bias is that philosophy originated in Miletus, in the Greek province of Ionia in Asia Minor. The bias also upholds Thales, a citizen of Miletus to be the first human ever to engage in formal philosophy. The creed of the bias is that the blessings of philosophy spread to the rest of the world from this salvific Greek city. The world owe it to the ingenuity of the Greeks, the appearance of philosophy and science as formal enterprises of learning. This is the “truth”, at least according to mainstream Western literature. Abundance of documentary evidence stating otherwise did not matter. It did not matter also that Thales himself travelled to Egypt and spent many years there, studying philosophy. It did not matter also, that Thales merely reechoed in Ionia, the teachings he received from the school he attended in Egypt. But facts are sacred; biases are optional. Philosophy, indeed had been formally taught in Egypt for thousands of years before Thales ever travelled to Egypt. Literature abounds to that effect. However, the Greeks played a pivotal role in the spread of philosophy to the rest of Europe. The Greeks were the first European nation to philosophize. But that did not amount to the origin of philosophy. It was an epoch in the spread and popularization of philosophy. The fall of Egypt to the invading armies of Alexander the Great, the edits of emperors Theodosius and Justinian of the Roman empire, the invasion of Islam, the slave trade, the experience of colonialism and the subsequent racism changed all that. Africa came to be denigrated as the “Dark Continent”, and as such was deemed incapable of culture and intellectual advancement. This bias significantly influenced, and has arguably continued to colour Western discourse on African themes, covertly and overtly. African intellectuals and researchers all over the world, owe it to posterity, the duty to render the truth about the origins of philosophy. This research relies solely on library research in unearthing oft neglected classical documents that point abundantly to the African origin of philosophy.

Looking for an Identity. The Patria and the Greek Cities in Late Antique Roman Empire

From the second century AD onwards, many patria were written in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. Although none of these works have survived, the mentions of them in the later tradition demonstrate the importance they had in the Greek provinces. The aim of this paper is to analyse the link between the political evolution of the late Empire and the production of patria. I argue that these literary products testify to the changes of the cities within the urban hierarchy of the eastern Empire. In particular, they show the development of the centres linked to the three capitals of the Roman east : Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople. Indeed, the presence of the imperial court (and the resulting flow of taxes and supplies) put these cities at the centre of extended urban networks. These urbanized areas connecting the three capitals and their hinterland have been defined by Peter Brown “ corridors of Empire”. The centres entering these large-scale corridors had to justify their new position in the imperial network, and the best way to achieve the goal was linking themselves to the mythical and historical circuits of the Greek world. The patria served this purpose. While modelling the collective memory of myths, histories, and traditions of these cities, they canonized the acquired status.

Ex Situ: On Moving Monuments-Introduction to <em>Future Anterior</em>

Ex Situ:On Moving Monuments—Introduction to Future Anterior Jorge Otero-Pailos and Mechtild Widrich The geographical stability and permanence of monuments has been both a paradigm and a myth, particularly when it comes to monuments constructed for commemorative purposes, but also for buildings or sites turned into monuments by cultural definition and the fluctuation of political regimes. Whether empires rise and fall, taking the built remnants of prior power with them, monuments are expected to remain where they are—as if they had "received orders not to move," to borrow the ironic military-sounding caption artist Barbara Kruger attached to an image of a pin-encrusted woman in 1982. That the myth of immutability has not lost any of its power might be gathered from the recent debate over Confederate monuments that has been brewing over the last decade but boiled over in the summer of 2017 with the shocking news of a far right protest in Charlottesville that turned violent, and even deadly, for a counter-protester. The headlines obscured the fact that millions had lived with the sculptures in question, wittingly or not, for decades. And in the wake of that traumatic spectacle and its fitful afterlife in the mass media, monuments ranging from a Roman column gifted to Chicago by Mussolini to biographical markers of nineteenth-century doctors and politicians have been regarded with a critical eye. The demand that they be moved or even dismantled (a demand advanced, interestingly, also for certain works of studio art in the same period) has been met, from the cultural conservative and political far right of the spectrum, with hypocritical calls to defend the unchanging beauty or historical content of the problematic objects, as if monuments too and not just gun-toting vigilantes must "stand their ground" against forces of change. For academics and urban practitioners observing or participating in these debates, an urgent need seems to be to go beyond the reductive and sweeping imperatives of unselective destruction and conservation to understand the social and aesthetic mechanisms at work in historical consciousness. How can stone sculptures neglected for the better part of a century suddenly appear to their partisans (few of whom take any interest in the history of art) as irreplaceable aesthetic triumphs? How do works of belated reaction and Jim Crow repression come to be identified with the very historical subjects, which they (distortedly) commemorate? And when did the right adopt Richard Serra's stark formula of site-specificity—that "to move [End Page iii] the work is to destroy the work"—anyway? These questions are not merely local ones: from plans to clean up the desperately polluted Ganges as a Hindu nationalist project to the recent name change of the Republic of Macedonia (the name being contested by a Greek province), fundamentalism about the past is overtaking both the built and the natural environment, often in ways that are anything but conservative (or conservationist). The ongoing controversy over Confederate monuments, and with it the political scrutiny of older instances of art in public places, calls for a larger reconsideration of monuments and their treatment beyond any assumed U.S. exceptionalism. Indeed, they and many other monuments, globally speaking, point to highly problematic histories materialized in public space. While we included authors in this issues that move the contemporary debate further by both historicizing and theorizing it, we find it also important to look at examples from other times and geographies, and other controversial contexts. One central example, ex-situ preservation, is born out of an attempt to move valuable historic buildings and monuments out of harm's way, out of a hostile environment and into a more nurturing, safer context, where they may survive. The practice is not unique to historical preservation: wildlife conservators employ ex-situ conservation when a species' natural environment is under pressure, and they might, for instance, breed wild animals in captivity or move them to another similar environment. One could say that ex-situ preservation is one of the origins of modern preservation. Historians celebrate Alexandre Lenoir, as one of the founders of preservation, for creating the Museum of French Monuments, a sort of safe environment, where he moved monuments...

Educational activism across the divide: empowering youths and their communities

ABSTRACTThis paper tells the story of the Creative Youth Workshops (CYWs), a social space for youths, members of the minority/Muslim and the majority/Christian society, in jointly constructing alternative possibilities of living positively together in the conflict-ridden social environment of Thrace, a North Eastern Greek province bordering Bulgaria and Turkey. The CYWs constitute a sub-project within the overall frame of a comprehensive intervention inside and outside the classroom, called ‘Education of Muslim Minority Children’.

Insomnia and PTSD one month after wildfires: evidence for an independent role of the “fear of imminent death”

Objective: The relationship of insomnia with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) one month after wildfires and more specifically with the experience of ‘fear of imminent death’ were investigated.Methods: Ninety-two randomly chosen victims of wildfires in the Greek province of Ilia, were assessed through a specifically designed semi-structured psychiatric interview comprising of questionnaires and scales to measure psychopathology, as well as psychosocial and environmental parameters. PTSD was set according to ICD-10 research diagnostic criteria, while insomnia was assessed with the Athens Insomnia Scale (AIS).Results: The presence of insomnia was identified in 63.0% of the victims. 46.7% of the participants were diagnosed with PTSD in the first post-disaster month, while 51.1% of the total sample experienced ‘fear of imminent death’. The majority of sleep complaints were significantly more frequent in subjects with PTSD. Female gender, PTSD, older age, and ‘fear of imminent death’ were independently associated with insomnia.Conclusions: The findings of the present study indicate that the diagnosis of insomnia, as well as, certain specific insomnia complaints were more frequent in female victims of wildfires who have experienced ‘fear of imminent death’ and have developed PTSD.

A Cultural Panic in the Province? Counterurban Mobilities, Creativity, and Crisis in Greece

AbstractIn this paper, we explore the link between counterurban mobilities and a potential emergent cultural economy in rural locations, associated with the economic crisis in Greece. Drawing on a quantitative survey of Athenian residents and qualitative interviews with counterurban migrants, we observe that in the context of the economic crisis in Greece, many urban‐based households have relocated or seek to relocate to the Greek province, creating perhaps a new paradigm for conceptualising rural mobilities and their associated transformations. In that regard, we observe that counterurban mobilities are linked with changing cultural mobilities and phenomena including a new wave of ideas and creative activities (characterised by voluntarism and collectivism) and a shift in the patterns of cultural consumption. Therefore, we stress the need for a reconceptualising of counterurban mobilities in this context and highlight the need for more research that explores the role of creative expression and activity in times of crisis, particularly in the context of supporting the opportunities that an organically triggered rural cultural economy may offer. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Alatzas

In the Greek provinces of Argolida and Corinthia, women wove striped or checked cotton fabrics called alatzas for a variety of purposes including clothing. Alatzas fabrics are not well understood, as they represent a relatively short transitional period from the older forms of village dress based on Byzantine prototypes to modern Western ready-to-wear attire. In the Peloponnese, they appear about 1890 and fade away after the Second World War.These fabrics represent the first stage of development in Greece’s early industrial period. Improved transportation, particularly the railroad, brought manufactured goods to market towns where they were sold in shops or peddled to outlying villages. These goods included machine-spun cotton yarns, aniline dyes, sewing machines, commercial patterns, ribbons and other trims. This fieldwork study provides an insider perspective on the introduction of the concept of fashion to isolated villages, which informs our understanding of the process of fashion itself.

The Authority of States to Use Names in International Law and the Macedonian Affair: Unilateral Entitlements, Historic Title, and Trademark Analogies

AbstractThe international legal entitlement by which a state constitutionally designates its name, or a province therein, involves a unilateral act. Where, however, another state wishes to choose the same appellation, as is the case with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), the matter can only be resolved by reference to the first user and the maxim prior in tempore potior in jure. The first user must provide evidence of continuous use and of protest in those cases where the same appellation was appropriated by a third state. Under such circumstances the entitlement becomes exclusive, rather than concurrent, because the prior user may be said to possess a sound historic title, such that has been recognized by international judicial bodies to determine acquisition of territory, effective administration, historic bays, and so on. The exclusivity of the entitlement is further reinforced by analogy with general principles derived from the law of trademarks. At a practical level, the application of the international law of geographical indications clearly demonstrates that the designation ‘Macedonia’ cannot be used for a significant number of products originating in FYROM, since the Greek province of Macedonia has for a long time branded and registered such products. This will create insurmountable problems for producers in FYROM when they try to brand their goods under the country's constitutional name. A change of name, particularly through the compromisory use of a compound, would alleviate legal, political, and financial concerns.

New and noteworthy records of lichenized and lichenicolous fungi for mainland Greece

Abstract Christensen S. N. & Svane S.: New and noteworthy records of lichenized and lichenicolous fungi for mainland Greece. — Willdenowia 39: 187–198. — Online ISSN 1868-6397; © 2009 BGBM Berlin-Dahlem. doi:10.3372/wi.39.39120 (available via http://dx.doi.org/) 55 species are reported new to Greece, 43 new to the Greek mainland and 172 new to one or more of the Greek provinces. A considerable proportion of the newly reported lichens are hitherto known to have a Central European distribution. For these lichens the new records represent significant range extensions.

Cancer screening in Greece. Guideline awareness and prescription behavior among Hellenic physicians

Background Primary cancer prevention is offered by the Greek health care system to the population on an opportunistic basis. This means that screening depends on advice from primary care providers and on individuals' request for screening, since a centralized invitational register is lacking. In planning preventive services, an accurate identification of baseline levels of performance for preventive activities is fundamental, so that realistic goals can be set. Methods 366 primary care physicians (39.3% response rate) from nine Greek provinces were surveyed by means of a self-reporting questionnaire of prescription habits. Physicians' screening behaviors and screening recommendations were analyzed for both cost-effective and non-recommended tests during usual check-up visits and targeted cancer screening activities were analyzed. Results A wide variety of recommendation habits were observed among primary care physicians. With the exception of PAP test, cost-effective tests were advised at sub-optimal rates, with colorectal cancer screening being much less than desirable. Moreover, non-recommended tests were frequently advised. Conclusion Screening tests are performed sporadically and an overall understanding of primary care prevention is lacking. More focused educational interventions must be implemented if primary care is to make an impact on cancer mortality.

Remarques sur l’épigraphie de l’instrumentum domesticum dans les provinces de langue grecque

This paper takes stock of the epigraphical research concerning instrumentum domesticum in the Greek provinces of the Roman Empire. It deals with what this epigraphy tells us about the production of goods of these provinces and about their diffusion in the two halves of the Empire. Even if it provides some information about the epigraphy of quarries, it is mainly devoted to amphoras and pottery.

The effects of cold storage on the quality of peeled, raw or heat-treated Greek chestnuts packed under vacuum

SummaryChanges in the quality attributes of European chestnuts (Castanea sativa Mill.) from the Greek provinces of Chania and Volos were studied during cold storage at 0°C or at 4°C over a 3-month period. Samples of peeled chestnuts, raw or heat-treated, were packaged under vacuum in plastic bags (high density polyethylene, 80 μm-thick) then stored. Total sugars, fatty acids, moisture, polyphenols, starch, and lipid contents, as well as colour and sensory evaluations, were measured periodically throughout storage. The dominant sugar was sucrose [10 – 21% (w/w)], while fructose and glucose were almost undetectable. The main fatty acid in chestnuts was linoleic acid. Generally, mono- and poly-unsaturated fatty acids represented approx. 85% of the total fatty acids. Heat-treatment did not significantly influence the composition of chestnuts. No significant differences were found in any of the parameters measured between the two storage temperatures. Chestnuts were well-preserved under all the conditions studied.

Screening chest radiography: results from a Greek cross-sectional survey

BackgroundPublic health authorities worldwide discourage the use of chest radiography as a screening modality, as the diagnostic performance of chest radiography does not justify its application for screening and may even be harmful, since people with false positive results may experience anxiety and concern. Despite the accumulated evidence, various reports suggest that primary care physicians throughout the world still prescribe chest radiography for screening. We therefore set out to index the use of chest radiography for screening purposes among the healthy adult population and to analyze its relationship with possible trigger factors.MethodsThe study was designed as a cross-sectional survey. Five thousand four hundred and ninety-nine healthy adults, coming from 26 Greek provinces were surveyed for screening practice habits in the nationwide anticancer study. Data were obtained for the use of screening chest radiography. Impact of age, gender, tobacco exposure, family history positive for malignancies and professional-risk for lung diseases was further analyzed.Resultswe found that 20% (n = 1099) of the surveyed individuals underwent chest radiography for screening purposes for at least one time during the previous three years. Among those, 24% do so with a frequency equal or higher than once yearly, and 48% with a frequency equal or higher than every three years. Screening for chest radiography was more commonly adopted among males (OR 1.130, 95% CI 0.988–1.292), pensioners (OR 1.319, CI 1.093–1.593) and individuals with a positive family history for lung cancer (OR 1.251, CI 0.988–1.583). Multivariate analysis confirmed these results.ConclusionDespite formal recommendations, chest radiography for screening purposes was a common practice among the analyzed sample of Greek adults. This practice is of questionable value since the positive predictive value of chest radiography is low. The implementation of even a relatively inexpensive imaging study on a national scale would greatly burden health economics and the workload of radiology departments.

Macedonia

Canadian ambassador to (former) Yugoslavia from 1983-7. Since retiring from the foreign service in 1994, the author has given a course in Balkan affairs at the Institute of European and Russian Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa.A VISITOR TO THE (former Yugoslav) Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1962 would have found, as is certainly still the case, that Macedonia produces excellent wine. Until the 1991 insurgency by Albanian Macedonians disrupted supplies, a popular brand of Macedonian red wine was stocked by the LCBO (the Ontario liquor board).THE GREEK CONNECTIONA bottle of excellent white wine, ordered in the restaurant of a Skopje hotel, had a little booklet hanging from its neck. 'Ever since the times of Alexander the Great,' it proclaimed, Macedonia has been famous for the quality of its wines. Had there been Greeks in the restaurant, the noise of grinding teeth would probably have been deafening. The Greeks object fiercely to this kind of identification with the legendary figure (apparently known in Iran as 'Alexander the Barbarian') by a small Slav entity occupying a part of what once was Macedon. 'As all the world knows,' Greeks say, 'Alexander was Greek.'That is debatable. The Greek argument goes on to assert that Alexander (who, whatever his ethnic composition, was certainly not a Slav) had been assimilated into Greek civilization, which he propagated, after a fashion, to the limits of the known world.Greek objections extend to the very use of the name 'Macedonia' by their northern neighbour, which they see as an implicit territorial claim to the Greek province of the same name. This is an emotive political issue in Greece, and Greek governments have been successful in impeding international recognition of the new state. It has only been admitted into the United Nations under the provisional title of The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), presumably seated between Thailand and Togo.Greek concern about the status and identity of Macedonia was not new, nor was it entirely fanciful. There were Slav Macedonian nationalists who sought the recovery of all 'Macedonian lands,' including those in what they called 'Aegean Macedonia.' The Macedonian constitution had contained language that could be interpreted in that sense, and the first national flag featured a star associated with Alexander the Great. Both have since been removed.The creation of a Socialist Republic of Macedonia as part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ('former Yugoslavia') had never sat comfortably with Athens. Negotiations for an agreement on the mutual elimination of a visa requirement between the two states had broken down when the Greeks insisted that it should not apply to Macedonia. In the mid-1980s the Greek Ministry of Education announced that it would no longer accept degrees or diplomas issued by the University of Skopje, on the grounds that they were written in a non-existent language.Although some of the Greek contemptuous wariness may be rooted in preoccupations about their own historical identity, a more recent trigger was the Greek civil war that raged from 1944 to 1949. Tito openly supported the Greek communists, much to the dismay of Stalin, who did not want to provoke his former allies too soon and certainly did not want Tito to drag the Soviet Union into a premature confrontation. Furthermore, in the last phase of the civil war, up to 40 per cent of the communist forces were Slav Macedonians from both sides of the Greek-Yugoslav border.(1)There has always been a problem with Macedonian identity. Hugh Poulton, for many years a Balkans specialist with Amnesty International, even wrote a book entitled Who are the Macedonians? The British historian R.G.D. Laffan, in lectures given in 1917 to British troops on the Salonika front, observed that the Macedonian 'peasant is reluctant to say what is his nationality. Ask one of these Macedonians what he is. …

Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913-1983: Patterns of Jewish Survival in the Greek Provinces before and after the Holocaust (review)

Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913-1983: Patterns of Jewish Survival in the Greek Provinces before and after the Holocaust (review)