ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1914, a tobacco workers' strike broke out in eastern Macedonia, just after the region and its multicultural center, Thes-saloniki, were annexed by the Greek state as a result of the Balkan wars. This strike, in a trade that was central to the economy, lasted three weeks and involved more than thirty thousand men and women from the main ethnic groups in the region—Greeks, Jews, and Muslims. It occurred at a formative moment in the development of Greek national identity, when the relative positions of these three ethnic communities were being transformed as a result of the wars. In the transition from Ottoman multicultural coexistence to modern Greek national sovereignty, the Greeks, as victors, became integrated into a nation-state in which the Jews and Muslims now found themselves to be “aliens.” 1
