Dress Rehearsals

Misha Glenny

• Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nation hood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990 by Anastasia Karakasidou
  Chicago, 264 pp, $38.00, June 1997, ISBN 0 226 42493 6

Eighteen months ago Cambridge University Press shocked the publishing and academic worlds by pulling Anastasia Karakasidou’s book from their list. They claimed that publication could endanger the security of their associates in Greece, not to mention the house’s commercial interests there. A Greek anthropologist working in the United States, Karakasidou had been the target of a campaign waged in the Greek media by nationalists who claimed that her work on issues of identity in Aegean Macedonia was heretical and even treacherous. These imbecilic claims were made at the height of the hysteria, encouraged by members of the Greek Government, which greeted the creation of an independent Macedonian state in the wake of Yugoslavia’s collapse.