And In Flew Enza

With “swine flu” leading the news of the day, I felt it was a good enough time as any to revisit one of my all time favorite books, Mark Mazower’s excellent panoramic  history of Salonica (Thessaloniki) and his chapter dealing with how Ottoman Salonica dealt with the dreaded plague.

The same trade routes that made Salonica a center of commerce and trade, also brought in the plague. A Ukranian  captive Pylyp Orlyk is our eyewitness to the epidemic of 1724, which as Mazower noted, while not as bad as the outbreaks in 1713 and 1762, show a “astonishingly rapid trajectory from rumour to full-scale panic and mass death.”

From Orlyk’s journal:

On Wednesday morning, after I came back from the Orthodox Church after mass, I was told by my people that the small daughter of a man who lives close by the cemetary at the Orthodox Churc is extremely sick with the plague. A young English merchant who went yesterday to Thessalonica, came back from there this evening and told me that the plague spreads more and more, that each day thirty people dies and even more leave the town.”

As for the current pandemic  several Balkan countries have impossed a ban on pork imports from the US or Mexico, while reviewing their emergency response.