By SARAH LYALL c.1996 N.Y. Times News Service
LONDON - Anastasia Karakasidou's first book, a 300-page study of ethnicity and identity in the northern Greek province of Macedonia, seemed poised for publication after surviving months of grueling academic review at Cambridge University Press and winning high praise from academic specialists for its insights and fairness. But in December, Ms. Karakasidou received surprising news: The press had decided not to publish the book after all, it said, because it feared for the safety of its staff members in Greece. Back home in Stony Brook, N.Y., the Greek-born Ms. Karakasidou, an assistant professor of anthropology at Queens College, still sounds stunned. She had appreciated that her subject was a potentially provocative one -Greeks bristle at suggestions that residents of that province consider themselves anything but true Greeks - but she never expected this. ``They had my manuscript for more than a year and a half,'' she said in an interview this week. ``I had no idea that this was happening, and I had no way of defending myself.''
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Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood, is a study of three villages in the Greek province of Macedonia that asserts, among other things, that many of the residents speak Slavic dialects and consider themselves Slavo-Macedonian, not Greek. The findings challenge the official position of the Greek government, which remains at odds with the neighboring Republic of Macedonia, a part of former Yugoslavia, and denies the existence of a Slavic ethnic minority within its own borders. In the past, the Macedonian question has spurred nationalist-led violence in Greece. Ms. Karakasidou herself was threatened by right-wing groups two years ago after she published articles with conclusions similar to those in her book. But, she says, she continued to live in Greece without incident. Ms. Karakasidou submitted her manuscript to Cambridge more than 18 months ago, sending it on a well-worn path of academic reviews and revisions. Finally, its reviewers deemed it ready to go, and Ms. Karakasidou, though she had no contract in hand, had every reason to assume that Cambridge would publish it.
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