Tuesday is market day, where Slavic-, Albanian- and Turkish-speaking villagers bring their wares into this town of 84, people - and wait for the Greeks to come. Grapes cost from dinars in Bitola. There are 60 dinars to the euro. All farm produce is sold at similar prices. The bazaar is near the center of town, where the streets are choked with vehicles bearing Greek number plates. But it would be no surprise. On the kilometer drive from the border are tobacco farms still planted with the old and now non-commercial Latakia variety that has a strong, oriental aroma, quite different to the Virginia blend we are familiar with.
The same applies to their corn crops, introduced by the Ottomans and which, as historian Mark Mazower says, were the main reason for the demographic explosion in the hilly Balkan hinterland and therefore the relative autonomy they enjoyed. Less than 5 kilometers from Bitola, at ancient Heracleia, Atava Christovska guides us around the ancient ruins and points to a statue of Nemesis.
A kilometer further on in the village of Kravari, there are Greek signs indicating a hairdresser and a dentist. Vassilis Arabatzis said a dentist back home in Kastoria quoted him 3, euros for dental work he needed. In Bitola, the quote was euros.
The talk of the town recently was the purchase by a Greek from Karditsa of a beautiful two-story neoclassical house for , euros. And this in a town where houses are sold for no more than euros per square meters. At the end of the long pedestrian area that passes through the center of town from west to east are two Veropoulos supermarkets, the only major supermarkets in Bitola. Last year alone, 12 Greek textile factories opened on the outskirts of the town, drawn by the average wage of euros a month, in a country with an official unemployment rate of 38 percent, although there is a strong black market economy.
Banks, petroleum and mobile telephony are in Greek hands. Greece, sometimes alternating with Germany, is the top investor in the country. The traffic goes both ways. Thessaloniki's private colleges have over students from north of the border, 18 percent of the total and by far the largest group of foreign students. These privileged youth rarely return home. According to Iakovos Michailidis, who teaches at the University of Macedonia, Bulgaria recognizes the state of FYROM but not as a separate ethnic entity they consider the people there to be Bulgarians.
