Second paragraph of third chapter:My sister was caught when the war ended. The Turkish army came to the place where we were. In the ensuing battle my sister, a young girl, was captured. A baker from Kayak took her and adopted her. He raised her as though she were really his child.
Quite a short book (270 pages) about a big big topic: the forced ( Read more... )

See note on methodologyI fear that the books I have identified so far for some countries are not always terribly highbrow, but I don't think anyone can really have grounds for complaint here. Although it does wander round the eastern Mediterranean a bit, with excursions into completely imaginary geography, most of the places described - and, ( Read more... )

Famously the basis for a film which won three Oscars (and which I haven't seen), it's a novel published in 1946 but mostly set in the early 1930s, about an intellectual young chap who gets put in charge of a mine in Crete and becomes friends with the sensual older man he chooses as foreman, Alexis Zorba. While our narrator struggles with deep ( Read more... )

james_nicoll's interest in matters counterfactual was piqued by my post about Arthur Kavanagh's 1860s cruise. He raised the question of what it would have taken to have a Dominion of the Ionian Islands in the British Commonwealth some time in the twentieth century, amd speculated that they might have got there quicker than India (1947) if not as quickly as ( Read more... )

15) The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva, by Arthur Kavanagh

My latest little project is to read up on the fascinating Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh, whose life story combines my interests in Irish history and disability. I have ordered all three available biographies second hand, but was delighted to discover that the one book which he himself actually ( Read more... )

10) Athens-Skopje: an uneasy symbiosis, ed. Evangelos Kofos and Vlasis Vlasidis
11) Μακεδονία (Macedonia): a Greek term in modern usage, [Georgia Daidikou and Anna Pasali]

One of the things about being in my line of work is that people often send you books to try and convince you of the intellectual credibility of their cause. The Research Centre for ( Read more... )

Booked the morning off work for a meeting with our financial adviser. He couldn't make it at the last minute so I can catch up on some other things, including this (via marykaykare):

( language test )

12) Salonica: City of Ghosts - Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower

This book was recommended to me last time I was in the city, and subsequently by frumiousb (saare_snowqueen, not so much use for you as it starts some time after the 11th century). It is very good - an excellent story of the city through waves of depopulation and resettlement: the ( Read more... )

5) The Story of the Salonica Army, by G. Ward Price

I spent yesterday in the city known to its inhabitants as Θεσσαλονίκη and variously called in English Thessaloniki, Thessalonica or Salonica. I was there to discharge certain duties, but happened to find on the internet this account of the Allies' campaign in the region from 1915 to late 1917. ( Read more... )

( subsequent travels )