Slaovia ?

[corisande]

Once the logistical problems had been sorted out the men had to fortify Slaovia They built trenches; quarried and built roads which men found "tedious and unrewarding" they also faced long hours of guard duty.

As you will see from my recent posts, I am struggling with names

Here is another one, it refers to the Dublin Fusiliers when they pulled back from the mountains in Dec 1915 to Salonika

Can anyone help me with "Slaovia" that seems to be the spelling given, but I cannot find it in any of the "translation" tables. Where is it?

[centurion]

Are you sure it isn't a made up name like Messopalonika (which meant somewhere that wasn't the Western Front as in "I've heard it definite from the Adjutant's orderly that we're being transfered to Messopalonika")?

[Rockdoc]

Bear in mind that, even if the name is correct, the place might well not be in Greece. The British and French forces were well to the north of the Greek border when they began to retreat so it may be in Serbia or what's now known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - FYROM for short. The other problem is that many places had several names, depending on which particular ethnicity was telling you what any given place was called! Add into the mix that the British and French often struggled to translate the local names, in their peculiar scripts, into some kind of phonetic representation. Spelling is a far from precise science when it comes to this area of the war.

Keith

[corisande]

Thanks for the inputs, I think I will probably have to write this one off as "not found"

[Rockdoc]

What's the source of your quote? I wonder if we can find any other context that might help.

Keith

[corisande]

Source is where all suspect info comes from - Wikipedia :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10th_%28Irish%29_Division

Its on that page about half way down, and unattributed. It could be a typo there. One of the problems with Wikipedia is that it is taken as an researched source and gets cut and pasted all over the web

[Rockdoc]

The account seems jumbled, to me. It talks about Kosturino in 1915 in one breath but then jumps to summer 1916 on the Struma and the same winter - when most fighting was done as the mosquitoes were absent - before jumping back to their arrival in October 1915! The spelling's pretty poor, too. I'm not sure how much I'd trust anything here unless I had it from another source.

The trouble with solving this problem is there's no context. We have no way of knowing whether they're talking about building the Biedcage between December 1915 and April 1916 or afterwards when communications along the Seres road were massively upgraded, using both military and civilian labour - or something else alogether.

Roads were very bad to non-existent in that part of Greece and the passage of huge numbers of motor-lorries caused havoc. With the Seres road the only way to get supplies to that Front, there was no alternative to building a higher standard of road throughout the whole 70-odd kilometres.

The War Diaries for the 6th and 7th Battalions for the right period are at Kew, both in WO 95/4836.

[corisande]

Yes, as I say, I think I will write this one off as suspect

Happily it is a long way from Spain to Kew, so war diaries are not instantaneous to me if they are not on the web - I will be there sometime next year and get their Salonika War Diaries then. I have all the ones that NA have down loadable, an for the RDF Salonika battalions, they stop on leaving Gallipoli.

Its no problem though, after Salonika, on to Palestine!