Visiting Salonika

We have just got back from holiday in Greece and could not turn down the opportunity to visit Rutlanders who are buried or commemorated there. They all died in the ill-fated Salonika campaign when Britain sent a small force to help the Serbs fight the Bulgarians. The fighting was hard and the conditions atrocious with many men dying from disease. There are a number of British cemeteries in the country, mainly in the north around what is now called Thessaloniki, but also one in Central Greece, Bralo, which was on the old British supply line. We also travelled up to the Macedonian border to visit Doiran Cemetery, newly and beautifully restored, as well as the Doiran Memorial to all the missing of the campaign. Our efforts to cross the border and drive on to Skopje, where we have two soldiers buried, were thwarted by the Macedonian border guards and our lack of appropriate paperwork for our hire car. So that will be a separate trip sometime over the next three years…