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Near the Byzantine walls of Thessalonica, which threw back waves of medieval Slavs, nestles the Byzantine Church of St. David. Lamp flicker animated a beardless fifth-century mosaic Christ and caressed the deep-etched face of a woman. She told me of the tragic exchange of populations—one and a quarter million Greeks from Turkey, 400,000 Turks from Greece. Her gnarled hands clasped and unclasped, tears ran down her cheeks as she recalled her family’s being wrenched, when she was fourteen, from their village near Ankara, and dying one by one of malaria in a refugee camp in a Macedonian swamp.

I had visited a village like hers near Konya (Byzantine Iconium) in Anatolia, its Greek Orthodox church padlocked, the screened women’s balconies empty, the ornate ikonostasis gaping eyeless, stripped of icons.

I had climbed a spectacular mountain gorge behind walled Trebizond, the last Byzantine city to fall—in 1461, eight years after Constantinople. Ancient Trebizond, where Xenophon’s 10,000 Greek soldiers exulted to reach the Black Sea. Fabled Trebizond, where caravans brought riches of Persia and China, and monarchs sought the beauty of its Byzantine princesses. Noonday Trebizond, where phalanxes of schoolchildren in black smocks pour out onto cobbled streets teeming with colorfully garbed women and turbaned merchants hawking fish, hot chestnuts, and fruit.

Eight hundred feet over a foaming mountain stream I had climbed to a great monastery that seemed to cling to the towering rock wall by faith alone. Founded even before the age of Justinian, Soumela in the later Middle Ages was one of the richest monastic establishments in the East. I found it gutted, blackened by fire. Since 1923 no chant of Greek liturgy has sounded in that solitude, as it still does in the western mountains and valleys of Cyprus, where achingly empty Turkish villages tell of another more recent transfer of populations. These have lessened the danger from fifth columns but have done nothing to allay the hatred that has poisoned relations between Greek and Turk.

There on Cyprus I saw barbed wire and military checkpoints in the divided capital city of Nicosia, and white-painted UN tanks patrolling the advance lines of the Turkish Army, which had invaded in response to a Greek overthrow of the island republic. This 1974 coup brought to mind the Megali Ithea—the Great Idea—that fired the Greek imagination for generations: reconquest of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire.

“For Greeks there is only one city. The City—Constantinople,” the widow of a Greek Army officer told me in Thessalonica. “Even the Turkish name ‘Istanbul’ comes from the Greek eis teen polis—‘in the city.’ ” Her sentiments echoed nineteenth-century patriots: “Our capital is Constantinople. Our national temple is Hagia Sophia, for nine hundred years the glory of Christendom. The Patriarch of Constantinople is our spiritual leader.” In cherished legend a priest bearing the chalice, interrupted in the last liturgy in Hagia Sophia, will emerge to complete the service when the shrine is again Christian.

The Greek dream, however, collided with Balkan dreams of imperial glory. The sultan fanned endemic hatreds by classing all his Orthodox subjects—whether Serb or Bulgar, Greek or Albanian or Romanian—as the Rum Milleti, the Roman people, and putting them under the civil as well as ecclesiastical control of the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople. Patriarchs adopted the eagle symbol, ceremonies, dress, and functions of a Byzantine emperor and set their Greek bishops to hellenizing the proud Balkan peoples.

In the 1820s Greece rose against the Ottoman overlord; in 1830 it was the first Balkan nation to break free. But many more Greeks lived outside the new kingdom than in it. With énosis—union—with Greece the battle cry, the modern map of Greece was assembled piece by piece, escalating the hatred of her neighbors, who watched with cannibal eyes and devoured one another in two Balkan Wars.

Then Sarajevo … 1914. Today it is a market city tucked