Introduction: The Search for a Narrative of Transition

Abstract

On the outskirts of the Ottoman provincial capital of Manastir (present-day Bitola, Macedonia), trouble was brewing in the summer heat of 1908. Over a period of months, Ottoman troops staged protests over poor living conditions throughout the provinces (vilâyet) of Kosovo, Manastir, Yanya, and Salonika (within which the geographic region known as Macedonia was found). As large numbers of the Third Army Corps expressed their frustrations, local peasants and merchants, equally disaffected by the state of affairs, finally joined them. Within days, the confluence of dissatisfaction manifested in hitherto unseen alliances between civilian and soldier, creating a toxic mix of new possibilities that threatened to undermine the region’s overall stability (Adanir 1996; Gingeras 2003; Tokay 1995).

Day by day and almost minute by minute

the past was brought up to date …

All history was a palimpsest,

scraped clean and reinscribed

exactly as often as was necessary.

George Orwell, 1984