Those who refused were made to crawl under barbed wire, or beaten with thick bamboo canes. It's an insult to Greek civilisation. It harms Greece's good name. September Tens of thousands of fighters with the Democratic Army, about half of them Slavic-speakers, went into exile in Eastern bloc countries during and after the civil war.
About 20, children were taken across the border by the Communists, whether for their protection or as reserve troops for a future counter-attack.
Many Slavic-speaking civilians also went north for safety. Entire villages were left empty, like the old settlement of Krystallopigi Smrdes in Macedonian near the Albanian border, where only the imposing church of St George stands witness to a population that once numbered more than 1, souls. In , more than 30 years after the conflict's end, Greece's socialist government issued a decree allowing civil war refugees to return - but only those who were "of Greek ethnicity". Ethnic Macedonians from Greece remained shut out of their country, their villages and their land; families separated by the war were never reunited.
Mr Fokas's father-in-law and brother-in-law both died in Skopje. But, he points out, that decree tacitly recognised that there were ethnic Macedonians in Greece, even though the state never officially recognised their existence: "Those war refugees left children, grandchildren, fathers, mothers behind.
What were they, if not Macedonians? It's impossible accurately to calculate the number of Slavic-speakers or descendants of ethnic Macedonians in Greece. Historian Leonidas Embiricos estimates that more than , still live in the Greek region of Macedonia, though only 10, to 20, would identify openly as members of a minority - and many others are proud Greek nationalists.
The Macedonian language hasn't officially been banned in Greece for decades, but the fear still lingers. A middle-aged man I met in a village near the reed beds of Lake Prespa, where the agreement between Greece and the North Macedonian republic was first signed last June, explained that this fear is passed down through the generations. To protect me. We don't even remember why we're afraid any more," he said.
Slowly the language is dying. Years of repression pushed it indoors; assimilation is finishing the job. And yet speaking or singing in Macedonian can still be cause for harassment.
Mr Fokas's son is a musician; he plays the haunting Macedonian flute for us as his own small son looks on. He and a group of friends used to host an international music festival in the village square, with bands from as far away as Brazil, Mexico and Russia.
But in , just as we were expecting the foreign musicians to arrive, the local authority suddenly banned us from holding the festival in the square, even though other people - the very ones who wanted us banned - still hold their own events there. At the last minute, the festival was moved to a field outside the village, among the reeds and marshes, without proper facilities - which, Mr Fokas's son points out, only made Greece look bad.
But outside the village they were afraid to join in - they would have drawn attention to themselves by doing that. The words of Alexander do not show anywhere that he and the Macedonians were Greek. Notice that Alexander himself states that for him the Greeks Hellenes are foreigners. In other words, Alexander clearly distinguishes between his Macedonians and the Greeks whom he calls foreigners and barbarians.
If you prosper in this war, forget not to do something for my freedom; consider the risk I have run, out of zeal for the Hellenic cause, to acquaint you with what Mardonius intends, and to save you from being surprised by the barbarians.
I am Alexander of Macedon. We will prove with facts below, that Alexander I was not a Greek, and as a foreigner was not allowed to participated in the Olympic Games, which were reserved for the Greeks alone. The year is obviously B. The Greek armies had taken defensive positions at Tempe Pass.
Amyntas I, had long before this recognized the suzerainty of Darius I. His daughter Gygea, the sister of Alexander I, had married an Iranian nobleman, and his son Alexander I loyally served his suzerain, continuing to profit by Persian favours and protection. The Kingdom of Macedon enjoyed prosperity and enlarged its own territory. Being a shrewd politician, Alexander plays both cards in this conflict; took care to build bridges towards the Greeks — giving them good advice that would not harm his overlords.
With the Persian overlord gone for good, cooperation with his southern neighbors became an essential aim of policy. Let it be known that there is no evidence whatsoever of any Macedonian claim to a Greek connection before the Persian war. Let us go point by point, and weigh each statement separately against the political thinking of that time, and place its contents in a comparatively measurable scale.
And if one finds solace in the fact that many Greek cities in Asia were under such an arrangement with Darius, I must caution you that we are talking about mainland Greece. Here, the Asian barbarian was seldom invited or welcomed, for obvious reasons, of course. One must also bear in mind that Mardonius was not a man of deliberate miscalculations. He was in a position to know who was and who was not Macedonian.
Does it make any sense to entrust your negotiations into the hands of a Greek when negotiating with Greeks? I surely do not think so, and most likely, neither did Mardonius. This appellation speaks much louder than what the Greeks like to reveal. Why is this compulsion reserved for the Macedonians only? When was the last time that any of the Athenian commanders have proclaimed their Greekness? When did Memnon, Harpalus, Charidemes, Agis, or anyone else for that matter, asserted their Greekness?
It is evident that this apparent statement of Alexander I, given to a biographer Herodotus carried different ticket, the door to the Olympic games where he was promptly rejected and turned away exactly for that reason and that reason alone: He was not a Greek, and those games were reserved for Greeks Hellene only. Evidence shows that the Persian armies entered Macedonian soil in B. This puts the Persian armies in Macedonia for 12 long years before they entered Greece. Therefore, shall we assume then, that the Greeks did not regard Macedonia as their own land?
Should we, further, suppose that the Persian armies flew over Macedonia to reach Thessaly? Or, should we conclude that Herodotus was wrong in his calculations? There is nothing ambiguous about their stand. Olympus was the dividing line, and there was nothing to suggest the opposite. One is hard pressed to arrive at any other conclusion when one bears in mind that Herodotus would not make such a glaring omission. My own view is that there is some underlying veracity to the Mt.
Vermion reference as evidenced by the Phrygian connections , that among the Makedones a family of Vermion background emerged as pre-eminent, but that the Argive context is mythic, perhaps a bit of fifth-century B. To deny such fables and attribute them to contemporary Macedonian propaganda may appear minimalistic.
But given the historical milieu in which such stories were spawned and then adorned, the denial of myth seems prudent. The revised version was transmitted without criticism or comment by Herodotus. Thucydides His is not an independent version.
The Temenidae must disappear from history, making superfluous all discussion of them as historical figures. But Macedonian kings seem hard put to argue in behalf of their Hellenic ancestry in the fifth century B.
Even if one were to accept that all the Herodotian stories about Alexander were true, why did the Greeks, who normally were knowledgeable about matters of ethnic kinship, not already know that the Macedonian monarchy was Greek? But—following Herodotus—the stade- race competitors at Olympia thought the Macedonian was a foreigner Hdt.
Alexander I was a Macedonian, not a Greek]. It may be proven that Macedonians spoke Greek since Macedon, the ancestor of Macedonians, was a brother of Magnes, the ancestor of Thessalians, who spoke Greek. Hammond had been proven to be incorrect not only in the case of the ethnicity of the ancient Macedonians, but also on other matters regarding the history of Macedonia in Makedonika and In the Shadow of Olympus by Borza.
In the Shadow of Olympus p. That is, the Attic dialect could hardly be native, and its use is likely part of the process of Hellenization. To put the question differently: if the native language of the Macedonians is Greek, what is its Macedonian dialect?
In the Shadow of Olympus. Here at Virtual Macedonia, we love everything about our country, Republic of Macedonia.
We at the Virtual Macedonia are grateful for your generosity as we continue to pursue our mission. Your donation will help us to continue to work on this website and to promote Macedonia.
Thank you! Enter your email address to subscribe to Virtual Macedonia and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address. Its nothing to do with Greek propaganda. The conclusion that the ancient Macedonians were a Greek race comes from Historians and scholars.
I would say the same. Macedonian born and raised in city of Ohrid, Macedonia. As I can remember Greeks are trying to take Macedonia under their control, faulse claims that Macedonian are Greeks.
Those are Greek Propaganda who dont know the Macedonian clean History. They dont even know their own history, advice them to learn their History. Macedonia bordering with Greece and some connection with them just like Macedonia bordering also with Bulgaria.
That does not mean we are Greeks or Bulgarians. Because Bulgarians claiming we are bulgarians too. Just because of the borders they trying to change Macedonian History and also faulse claiming Macedonian churches belong to them, even the Saints. Rediculous Propagandas! What ever they have it is their history and should stay in their country.
What Macedonian people have is Macedonian History and stays in our country from the ancient time and today too, will never change. Hey guys! Excellent work, Basil Chulev also did a good job of pointing out modern Macedonian similarity to what we know of ancient Thracian and Phrygian language.
Macedonians are arguably essentially a sub-group of Thracians, Balkan natives, and when you look at Macedonia on a map of the Thracian world it essentially looks like a regional province within the broader Thrace region as does Sarmatia within Scythia.
It is propaganda, they stole the heritage of others back then and continue to now. This controversy, in many ways a dispute over national symbols such as names, flags, and famous ancestors, has been largely confined to the arenas of international diplomacy and public relations. Nevertheless, the potential for violence is real, because the conflict between Greeks and Macedonians is an expression of the same forces of ethnic nationalism and irrendentism - the desire to create ethnically pure and homogeneous nation states - that lie at the heart of the more violent conflict that rages now between the Serbs, the Croats, and the Moslems of Bosnia.
The Macedonian Question has dominated Balkan history and politics for over a hundred years. During the Ottoman period, which lasted in Macedonia from the fourteenth century until , the population of Macedonia included an amazing number of different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, including Slavic and Greek speaking Christians, Turkish and Albanian speaking Moslems, Vlachs, Jews, and Gypsies.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century the population of Macedonia was increasingly being defined from various external nationalist perspectives in terms of national categories, such as Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, and Turks.
Ottoman authorities, however, continued to divide the population of the empire into administrative units, or millets, on the basis of religious identity rather than language, ethnicity, or nationality. The hegemony which the Greeks exercised over the Orthodox Christian millet was seriously challenged for the first time by the establishment of an independent Bulgarian Church in Orthodox communities in Macedonia now had the choice of affiliating with either the Greek or the Bulgarian national church.
This marked an intensification of the "Macedonian Struggle" in which Greek, Bulgarian, and to a lesser extent Serbian, irredentist claims came into conflict over who would gain control over the people and the territory of Macedonia. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the three Balkan states had each fielded irregular bands of guerrilla fighters who attacked the Turks, fought each other, and terrorized the local population.
In addition, through the construction of churches and schools and the assignment of priests and teachers, each state conducted an intense propaganda campaign, whose goal was to instill the "proper" sense of national identity among the Orthodox Christians of Macedonia. The Macedonian Struggle reached its climax in the Balakan Wars of , which ended with the partitioning of Macedonia among Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia later Yugoslavia.
The Greek government has consistently denied the existence of a Macedonian minority in northern Greece and has adopted a policy of forced assimilation toward the Slavic-speaking inhabitants of Greek Macedonia.
After , all Slavic personal and place names were Hellenized, and all evidence of the existence of Slavic literacy was destroyed.
As a result of the population exchanges which took place between Greece and Bulgaria and Greece and Turkey in the s, the number of people in Greek Macedonia who had a sense of Greek national identity increased substantially. Under the Metaxas dictatorship of repression of the Slavic speakers, who by this time had increasingly begun to identify themselves as Macedonians, was particularly severe: people who spoke Macedonian were beaten, fined, and imprisoned.
Its goals were to detach territory. Its goals were to detach territory in Greek Macedonia from the Greek state and establish there a "Free Greece" within the framework of the Balkan Federation, envisioned by leaders of the Communist Parties of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. After the Civil War, some 35, Macedonians fled to Yugoslavia and other countries in eastern Europe under extremely difficult circumstances.
In the decades that followed, conservative Greek governments continued this policy of persecution and assimilation. Perhaps the most egregious examples of this were the "language oaths" administered in several Macedonian villages, which required Macedonians to swear that they would renounce their "Slavic dialect" and from then on speak only Greek.
According to the Greek nationalist position on the Macedonian Question, because Alexander the Great and the ancient Macedonians were Greeks, and because ancient and modern Greece are bound in an unbroken line of racial and cultural continuity, it is only Greeks who have the right to identify themselves as Macedonians, not the Slavs of southern Yugoslavia, who settled in Macedonia in the sixth century AD and who until called themselves "Bulgarians.
The negation of Macedonian identity in Greek nationalist ideology focuses on three main points: the existence of a Macedonian nation, a Macedonian language, and a Macedonian language, and a Macedonian minority in Greece. From the Greek nationalist perspective, there cannot be a Macedonian nation since there has never been an independent Macedonian state. The Macedonian nation is an "artificial creation," an "invention" of Tito, who "baptized" a "mosaic of nationalities" with the Greek name "Macedonians.
Similarly, Greek nationalists argue that because the language spoken by the ancient Macedonians was Greek, the Slavic language spoken by the "Skopians" cannot be called "the Macedonian language. Finally, the Greek government denies the existence of a Macedonian minority in northern Greece, claiming that there exists only a small group of "Slavophone Hellenes" or "bilingual Greeks," who speak Greek and "a local Slavic dialect" but have a "Greek national consciousness.
From the Greek nationalist perspective, then, the use of the name "Macedonian" by the "Slavs of Skopje" constitutes a "felony," an "act of plagiarism" against the Greek people.
By calling themselves "Macedonians," the Slavs are "stealing" a Greek names; they are "embezzling" Greek cultural heritage and "falsifying" Greek history.
As Evangelos Kofos, a Greek historian employed by the Greek Foreign Ministry, told a foreign reporter, "It is as if a robber came into my house and stole my most precious jewels - my history, my culture, my identity. Macedonians, on the other hand, are committed to affirming their existence as unique people with a unique history, culture, and identity, and ot gaining recognition of this fact internationally. In asserting what they sometimes refer to as their "ethnospecificity," Macedonians insist they are not Serbs, Yugoslavs, Bulgarians, or Greeks.
They also reject hyphenated names such as Yugoslav-Macedonians or Greek-Macedonians, claiming them to be "divisive labels" indicative of a "partition mentality" that needs to be overcome. According to many Macedonians, Greeks and Bulgarians who live in Macedonia whose nationality is Greek or Bulgarian may identify themselves as "Macedonians," but in regional or geographical sense only.
Extreme Macedonian nationalists, who are concerned with demonstrating the continuity between ancient and modern Macedonians, deny that they are Slavs and claim to be the direct descendants of Alexander the Great and the ancient Macedonians.
The more moderate Macedonian position, generally adopted by better educated Macedonians and publicly endorsed by Kiro Glogorov, the first president of the newly independent Republic of Macedonia, is that modern Macedonians have no relation to Alexander the Great, but are a Slavic people whose ancestors arrived in Macedonia in the sixth century AD.
Proponents of both the extreme and the moderate Macedonian positions stress that the ancient Macedonians were a distinct non-Greek people. In addition to affirming the existence of the Macedonian nation, Macedonians are concerned with affirming the existence of a unique Macedonian language as well. While acknowledging the similarities between Macedonian and other South Slavic languages, they point to the distinctions that set it apart as a separate language.
They also emphasize that although standard literary Macedonian was only formally created and recognized in , the Macedonian language has a history of over a thousand years, dating back to the Old Church Slavonic used by Sts. Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. Although all Macedonians agree that Macedonian minorities exist in Bulgaria and Greece and that these minorities have been subjected to harsh policies of forced assimilation, there are two different positions with regard to what their future should be.
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