Rising from the lush slopes of Mount Vistra in North Macedonia, the Vardar River flows eastward to dissect the city of Skopje. From there, it turns south, coursing through the central Balkan watershed until it meets the militarized EU border with Greece. To cross the barbed wire, concrete walls, and Frontex patrols—deployed since the 2015 humanitarian crisis—it must change its name: from Vardar to Axios. Eventually, the river empties into the Aegean Sea, threading through a wide, fertile valley shaped by millennia of sediment and retreating shorelines. Some six thousand years ago, this delta was a limnic basin—swampy, shell-strewn, and rich with clay and silt—gradually infilling the edge of the Thermaic Gulf, west of Thessaloniki. A century of monoculture farming, damming, and extractive land practices has drained its flow. What was once a landscape of swamps and tributaries has hardened into cracked earth, its surface fractured by drought. Below-average precipitation since 2021, coupled with rising temperatures and soil depletion, have precipitated a profound ecological breakdown. The villages that line the plain are depopulating, the wheat monocultures failing, and nationalist fervor intensifying.

This essay tends to this valley in southern Macedonia, a place, a borderland that has been the site of violent displacements of peoples and ecologies. It traces one such moment of rupture: the agrarian refugee settlement project implemented in the aftermath of the 1923 Lausanne Convention on the Exchange of Populations between Turkey and Greece. It focuses on the work of the Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC), an extraterritorial humanitarian agency established by the League of Nations to permanently resettle over one million displaced people in Greece. Through an ambitious agrarian program of land redistribution and mass shelter provision, the RSC sought to transform this historically multiethnic and geopolitically volatile region into a monoculture landscape. Here, monoculture refers not only to the agricultural practice of dedicating arable land to the production of a single crop, but also to the state’s attempt to construct a homogenous cultural, religious, and linguistic identity out of a historically heterogeneous territory. These two meanings of monoculture—ecological and ethnopolitical—are inseparable. In this agrarian program national consolidation, economic development, and territorial transformation violently converged. At the center of this apparatus was the smallholding: both the principal productive asset and the tool for converting displaced populations into cultivators, landowners, and debtors. Borrowing from colonial administrative systems, the RSC applied a logic of subdivision and standardization—parsing territory and classifying people according to productivity, kinship, and origin. Together with the rural shelter, the smallholding was one of the two spatial instruments that tethered displaced bodies to property, property to debt, debt to labor, and labor to the construction of the ethnostate.

[link to the full article]