Date: Wed, 07 Feb 1996 16:33:12 -0500
Subject: FYI: Cambridge cancels Karakasidou book about Greece.
"Cambridge University Press has canceled publication of a book about Greece because of the possibility of reprisals from nationalist extremists there, The Washington Post reported Saturday.
The manuscript, Fields of Wheat, Rivers of Blood, by Anastasia Karakasidou, is a scholarly study of ethnicity in the Greek province of Macedonia and had been endorsed for publication by the panel of experts to which the university press had submitted it. The news was first reported in The Guardian, a British newspaper.
A spokesman for the press told the Post that while "there was no doubt that the manuscript was extremely high quality," Cambridge had not formally contracted to publish it. He said that after consulting with others, including British diplomats in Greece, the publisher had decided that the author and the subject were too controversial and could endanger Cambridge University Press employees in Greece.
Three academics -- editorial -- board members and manuscript reviewers, have resigned or dissociated themselves from the publishing house in protest, the Post reported, and a fourth is reportedly threatening to quit the editorial board unless the decision is rescinded.
The controversy over the book centers on the author's contention that some inhabitants of the Greek province consider themselves more Slavic than Greek -- more akin, in other words, to the population of the Macedonian republic across the border in what once was Yugoslavia. Many Greeks suspect that new republic of harboring claims on the Greek province of the same name.
Ms. Karakasidou, a Greek-born scholar who teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, received death threats in 1993, reportedly from Greek nationalists, after presenting results of her research. "