Also there is a bathroom and it is always funny to watch the people come back from it for the first time. It is straight back in between the buildings in a concrete pillbox usually unblemished by the honesty of lighting. There are swinging doors like in an old Wild West saloon and you can bluster through them, take a few steps and indiscriminately open fire, because there is no one there and the floors and walls are soaking wet already. In terms of cleanliness the Idomeni toilets rival those of the train itself, except that at least the water from the tap is potable here. Still it is better to wash off or fill a bottle at the spigot outside, set up right before the bushes. At least you can see what you’re doing there. The spigot has fierce water pressure and the water is very cold. It doesn’t freeze, even in the dead of winter.

There is now nothing to do but wait with the other people in front of the police window, a little further down. The windows are long and you can see the men inside at their desks; curved metal black bars in front of the glass keep them safely away from the barbarian supplicants to the Greek state clamouring in a collapsed circle outside. The policemen stack the passports in opposite piles like Tarot cards, handing them back first to those with the good fortune to be Greek, followed by whatever EU nationals there may happen to be. Then are returned passports issued by traditional ally Serbia. At the penultimate moment the ill-fated Macedonians are processed, their passports filled with the painful full-page inserted visa that took months to acquire. Finally, the ‘others’ of the world take their passports back and now it is only a matter of time.

Back on the train, if you didn’t have a compartment to yourself already, you do now, unless you’ve met someone promising and have forgotten all about the pleasures of solitude. Eventually comes the double chime of the intercom and the announcement that the eight-forty train to Thessaloniki is about to depart. And so begins the final push to Thessaloniki. Most of it transpires in blackness, with few villages along the way. It is almost haunting, this absence of life, especially when considering the traumas of the twentieth century that thrice uprooted whole peoples and forged a brand new Macedonia out of its oldest region. The fledgling states that emerged out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire saw huge forced migrations. The Turks of Macedonia were sent to Turkey, the Greeks of Asia Minor taking their place. The Bulgarian and Macedonian Slavic populations were sent north to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, respectively. By the 1940s, when Hitler eliminated the Jews of Thessaloniki and the Greek Civil War did away with thousands of Macedonians identified with the Communist side, the process was complete.



Sometimes, just when you can see the far-off shimmering lights of a city the train comes to a dead stop in the middle of nowhere. It waits for a few minutes. Why? It goes backwards. Again, why? If you didn’t know that there was another train coming from the other direction and they were waiting as a precaution you might feel with dread that you are leaving Macedonia after only thirty minutes and going back to Macedonia again.

If you don’t know this, you might ask a Greek policeman on the train and he might explain. But when the conversation arrives at its unfortunate truncated conclusion the border policeman has made it abundantly clear that he would never visit up ‘there,’ because those people from ‘Skopia’ had tried to steal his history. In any case, it’s probably better; visiting a country one names after its capital city usually ends with one getting lost. And what if they were to steal not just one’s history, but one’s wallet? A sobering thought. You talk about Greek beaches instead.

Coming in to Thessaloniki is always the same. Stealthily, you cross first through the urban periphery, the industrial stretches, disused railway cars and agricultural pallets to the right, to the left the first real streetlights and thickset buildings of white along straight city roads. If you feel beat, it’s a good kind of beat and Jack Kerouac would certainly have approved. Things start to look less industrial and there are more cars on the streets and pretty soon there are more empty tracks running along with you too, like well-wishers giving support at the end of the marathon. And the people have already clutched their bags and started to amass in the hallways and, now that it’s almost over, you wish you had a little longer to talk with your new acquaintance.

It’s a strange sort of longing, considering that you have by now endured the whole five hours without heating and with the thin metal panel guarding the precious fuse boxes and antiquated electronics knobs flapping open and shut at the end of the hall. And you’ve faded in and out of sleep innumerable times, like the dull cabin light that makes someone’s tongue click every time it dies out and interrupts their crossword puzzle, gazing upon the very essence of weariness as it stared back at you from the cracked mirrors above the seats. And then there were the very old warnings written identically in Slovenian and Serbian and Italian and German that you respectfully noted on the way to the bathroom, a foul cupboard at the end of the car, where the connecting rods grind and twist underneath and you sometimes find both the outside doors were left unclosed and there is a whole exhilarating whoosh of frenetic wind from all directions and that wakes you up again.

But then the train gracefully alights and there’s no time for that. For now is Thessaloniki and out the window you can see people there excitedly waiting for other people to jump down, and you jump down too and it’s time to buy a phone card or take a bus and begin the next part of the adventure and even you’re on the Aegean coast. But always first you must thank the old train for having the decency to not give up and somehow make it back home after all.

Christopher Deliso is an American travel writer and journalist, and author of the new travelogue, Hidden Macedonia: They Mystic Lakes of Ohrid and Prespa (Haus Publishing, London). He also writes travel guides on the Balkans for Lonely Planet, and travel articles for Travel Intelligence and Hidden Europe Magazine, among others. He is the director of the Balkan news website Balkanalysis.com. Chris has an MPhil with Distinction in Byzantine Studies from Oxford University, UK.

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