An article I wrote for the AMHRC Review (I posted it on Maknews but the topic has mysteriously disappeared, I wonder why?). I would post the link from the AMHRC website but it seems down probably due to the site being updated. If you guys are serious about doing something then it is imperative that we not only promote Macedonian human rights but that we show everyone we can information like the article below.
Greek Evidence on a Distinct Macedonian LanguageMacedonian Identity and LanguageBy Ivan Hristovski
Politicizing ancient history for modern propaganda purposes is a trademark standard in Greece; especially when one takes into account the numerous unsubstantiated claims about Macedonia. Claims that span from antiquity to the present a litany of falsifications designed to establish an ideal historiography in support of an absurdity:
'a pure, ethnic Greek Macedonia‘.Anthropologist Loring Danforth asserts with clarity that
"According to the Greek nationalist position (which is rejected by the vast majority of scholars and diplomats around the world), because Alexander the Great and the ancient Macedonians were Greeks, and because ancient and modern Greeks are bound in an unbroken line of racial and cultural continuity, it is, therefore, only Greeks who have the right to identify themselves as Macedonians, not the Slavs of southern Yugoslavia. Therefore, many Greeks deny the existence of a Macedonian language, a Macedonian nation, and a Macedonian minority in Northern Greece." (Danforth, 2001: 89) Maintaining such myths in Greek society has serious consequences as Danforth confirms
"...the Macedonian minority of northern Greece has been the victim of what could be called 'symbolic ethnic cleansing,' a policy by which the Greek government simply denies the existence of the Macedonian minority in Greece and attempts to assimilate it into mainstream Greek society. In this way, the Greek government seeks to maintain the fiction that Greece is an ethnically pure and homogenous state inhabited exclusively by Greeks." (Danforth, 2001: 90)
This extreme Greek form of nationalism has created a highly toxic environment of fear, intolerance, racism and violence towards the Macedonians and other ethnic minorities. I shall now quote a sentence from Gerda Lerner's book
Why History Matters; it succinctly expresses an essential aspect of relations between Macedonians and the Greek authorities:
"Selective memory and the distortion of history have long been powerful tools of oppressive regimes" (Lerner, 1997: 206). So it is against the grain of Greek selective memory and distortion of history that we consider the following Greek evidence that demonstrates the existence of a distinct Macedonian identity and language.
One of the most outspoken nationalists in support of the Greek anti-Macedonian struggle (as the Greek author, Dimitris Litoxou, has termed it) during the early 20th century, was Ion Dragoumis. Dragoumis, whose family moved from Albania to a vil-lage outside of Lerin (in Macedonia) in the 16th century, was a diplomat, writer, and politician in the Greek government (Dragoumis, 2005). He was also the brother-in-law of Pavlos Melas who perished in Macedonia during the Greek anti-Macedonian struggle (1904-1908) and thereafter became a 'martyr' for Greeks. Dragoumis wrote a book titled
Martyrs‘ and Heroes‘ Blood in 1907, in it
"Dragoumis wrote in broad, general categories of 'Greek' and 'Bulgarian'. Yet occasionally, particularly when articulating a detailed ethnographic point, he also spoke of the 'Macedonians of Macedonia' and the 'Vlachs of Hellenism'." (Karakasidou, 1997: 91) Indeed, Dragoumis argues that
"Macedonian" is the correct term for the language used by the inhabitants of Macedonia, which the Bulgarians, he says, misleadingly call
"Bulgarian" (Mackridge, 2009: 301). Peter Mackridge, Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford, points out
"In view of Dragoumis' attitude, it is ironic that today Greek officials and Greek linguists refuse to countenance the existence of a Macedonian language" (Mackridge, 2001: 54).
Indeed, Pavlos Melas himself describes the language of the people in Macedonia as
"Macedonian" in a letter to his wife (Mackridge, 2001: 48):
".....Pirzas translated emotionally, loudly, and with a lot of passion, as Kottas spoke in Macedonian. The teacher got the children to sing something. We couldn't tell if the language was Macedonian or Greek. All the schoolchildren know how to read and write (Greek), but hardly any know how to speak it...I learnt a few Macedonian words that I say to women and mothers, which pleases them..." (Mela, 1964: 202).
Moreover, the current Greek stance on the Macedonian language becomes totally untenable when one notes the results of the Greek census in 1920, the Abecedar episode and more recent UN documents. In the Greek census of 1920,
the Macedonian language (without any prefixes or suffixes) was listed as a language spoken by some of the population in Greece. Parts of the official census results were published and therefore recognised by the Greek state. They can be found in the General Archives of the Greek state and a copy is provided below:
The
Abecedar was a language primer prepared due to sharp criticism from the League of Nations on Greece's poor treatment of its Macedonian minority. Athens appointed a three - member commission in the Ministry of Education to prepare a primer for the schools.
"Abecedar appeared in Athens in 1925 in the Lerin-Bitola dialect but in the Latin rather than Cyrillic alphabet" (Rossos, 2008: 143). With the new language primer Greece was able to 'prove' that it was complying with the requests of the League of Nations in regard to its treatment of the Macedonian minority. Upon its creation Bulgarian and Serbian objections against the new language primer, were quickly manifested. A Bulgarian representative described the Abecedar as “incomprehensible” but the Greek representative, Vasilis Dendramis,
"defended it on the grounds that the Macedonian language was 'neither Bulgarian nor Serbian, but an independent language' and produced linguistic maps to back this up" (Rossos, 2008: 143).
"The very fact that official Greece did not, either de jure or de facto, see the Macedonians as a Bulgarian minority, but rather as separate is of particular significance. The Abece-dar, which actually never reached the Macedonian children, is in itself a powerful testimony not only of the existence of the large Macedonian ethnic minority in Greece, but also of the fact that Greece was under an obligation before the League of Nations to undertake certain measures in order to grant this particular mi-nority their rights." (Andonovski: 1)
More recently, a 1977 UN report from the Third United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names held in Athens demonstrates that in the not so dis-tant past Greece not only recognized the Macedonian language but also recognized the Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet as well. Since the early 1990‟s Greece's stance in the UN towards the Macedonian state has been nothing but hostile and this has involved frighteningly racist attempts to re-name not only the state but also the language. However in 1977 Greece signed a UN document:
"Recognizing further that in Yugoslavia the romanization of the Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian cyrillic alphabets has long been employed in official gazeteers and maps" and
"Recommends that the systems that are given in the annex to this resolution be adopted as the international systems for the romanization of Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian geographical names in Yugoslavia." (E/CONF.69/4: 29) There was no objection by Greece in 1977 to the existence of
the Macedonian language.
Notably, in spite of the current official racist state of denial, practically minded businessmen in the part of Macedonia located within the borders of Greece, have at times found it more useful to simply accept reality. For example, in 1977 the Washington Post ran a story on how Greek businesses in Solun (Thessaloniki) had posted signs on their shop windows that Macedonian is spoken:
Alevropoulos's American and Italian blue jeans go for $33 a pair. They come in all shapes and sizes, as do his Yugoslav buyers. A sign in his window announces that Macedonian, the language of Yugoslavia's southern-most republic, is spoken. The language is now a requirement for all of his clerks. In the large department stores of Glaoudatos and Dimitriadis, price tags are in both Greek drachmas and Yugoslav dinars. Clerks speaking Macedonian are given preference in hiring.Another interesting testimony making it abundantly clear that Macedonian was spoken throughout southern Macedonia (the part that Greece annexed in 1913) comes from Spirou Melas'
Oi Polemoi 1912-1913 who wrote:
"Occasionally, up by chicken-chasing, the cackle, the sounds, all of a sudden a village woman would appear and start to curse in her own heavy (difficult) Macedonian language. The soldiers offered her money, and searched for whom they should com-pensate for the damages, and also to buy bread, wine, tsipuro, butter, cheese and other eatables. Instead they got in return the same stereotypical answer, that they first heard outside Nausa (Negush) where they met the first slavic speaking villager, who answered us with his head bent down, the answer we got wherever we went, from the outskirts of Thessaloniki (Solun) and all the way to Florina (Lerin), it was the same melancholic answer to all our demands: Nema, there is none." (1972: 157)
Moreover, Greek sources also prove revealing on the issue of the existence of a Macedonian ethnic identity. In the novel
Life in a Tomb (1924) the author, Stratis Myrivilis, wrote about the trench warfare against the Bulgarians in World War I and Myrivilis includes a scene in which the narrator is recuperating at the house of a family who live north of the Greek border. After saying something about their language
he tells the reader that
"they don‘t want to be either Bulgar, or Srrp, or Grrts. Only Makedon Ortodox" (Mackridge, 2009: 303). In later editions, Mackridge (2009: 303) writes
"Myrivilis excised the last sen-tence because he no longer felt it to be politically advisable to include it" and that
"The novel was banned from 1936 until the end of the Second World War; subsequent editions do not include this sentence."In 1925, Salvanos, Greek Chief of Staff of the tenth army division in Western Macedonia, wrote a study of the 'ethnographical composition' of the county Lerin. In it he describes those with a Greek consciousness that was strengthened due to propaganda and those with a Bulgarian sentiment similarly strengthened due to Bulgarian propaganda. Another group he notes, the
majority of the people, were indif-ferent to either nationality and were more concerned with their daily lives.
"The latter, he maintained, called themselves Macedonians (Makedones)" (Karakasidou: 129).
By the 1950's, the Greek-Canadian Historian, L.S. Stavrianos, summed up the situation in general in his well known book
The Balkans since 1453, where he describes the majority population of Macedonia at the turn of the 20th century
"...as distinctly Macedonian. These Macedonians had a dialect and certain cultural characteristics which justify their being classified as a distinct South Slav group." (1958: 518)
A common practice developed in early 20th century Greek texts, of referring to Macedonians as "Bulgarians". Yet there is also evidence derived from Greek authors, on the inappropriateness of this label. In 1913 a book was published by George Demetrios entitled
When I was a boy in Greece. Demetrios refers to the local Macedonian movement for Macedonian independence, as the
Macedonian Committee, throughout his book as well as making mention of the languages he spoke:
"I could speak Turkish and the Macedonian dialect as well as my own Greek tongue." (1913: 131) Demetrios further describes these people that spoke this Macedonian dialect as
"Being neither Turkish nor Greek, we called them Bulgarian, but their language is not Bulgarian, but the Macedonian dialect, and I found loveable people among them, honest, hospitable, and kind" (1913: 132).
One of the reasons for the application of the Bulgarian label, is no doubt connected to the fact that during the first decade of the 20th century, many Macedonians attended Bulgarian Exarchate churches (the establishment of Macedonian Orthodox churches was not permitted). At this time, there was a struggle between the states of Bulgaria and Greece, to win over the hearts and minds of Macedonians, for the purpose of justifying annexationist desires. The Greek Anthropologist, Anastasia Karakasidou, by interviewing local residents from Guvezna (now called Assiros) in the part of Macedonia today located within the borders of Greece, illustrated how this interstate power struggle over Macedonia, impacted upon the local selection of labels:
"Local residents used proper (though equally unspecified) nouns that referred to national groups such as Ellines (Greeks), Servyi (Serbs), Tourkyi (Turks), and Voulgharyi (Bulgarians). Some, however, especially those whose families came from Gnoina/Palehora, used the term Makedhones (Macedonians) in reference to the Slavic-speaking population of the area prior to 1913. But those who did so insisted unequivocally that such people had a sort of commonality which marked them as somehow different from others. When pressed to clarify such distinctions, Assiriotes overwhelmingly insisted that the local Slavic-speakers had spoken a language similar to yet dis-tinct from Bulgarian. Yet nonetheless, most still referred to them and to the Slavic-speakers in general as "Bulgarians" (Voulgharyi) or "Bulgarian-speakers" (Voulgharophonyi), two broad and politicized labels that date to the ideological and military conflict between Greece and Bulgaria over Macedonia at the turn of the century." (1997: 106)
Yet a Macedonian revolutionary leader, Nikola Karev, from the town of Krushevo in Macedonia, made himself abundantly clear to a Greek journalist in a 1903 interview:
Are you Macedonian? I ask him.
- Yes.
And subsequently Greek.
-I do not know about this. I am Macedonian.
Direct descendent to Alexander the Great? I reply ironically.
-Yes. (Acropolis, 8 May, 1903 unpublished. See Tatetradya Tu Ilinden, by George Petsivas who published the interview in his book.)
Today, perhaps the most important 'Greek' evidence demonstrating the existence of Macedonians in Greece, is derived from the response engendered by the persistent racist denials of the Greek state and its lackeys:
"The official Greek claim that no Macedonian minority exists is contradicted by clear and forceful assertions by members of this minority that they do exist and that they are Macedonians and not Greeks." (Danforth, 2001: 91)
Bibliography Andonovski, Hristo. Foreword to the photoprint edition of Abecedar (1925—1985)
http://www.makedonika.org/whatsnew/FOREWORD%20To%20the%20photoprint%20edition%20of%20Abecedar%20(1925%E2%80%941985).pdf Danforth, Loring. The Macedonian Minority in Northern Greece, in Jean S. Forward (ed.) Endangered Peoples of Europe, The Greenwood Press, 2001.
Demetrios, George. When I was a boy in Greece, Norwood Press, 1913.
Dragoumis, Mark. Ion Dragoumis, the Misguided Patriot, Athens News 29/Jul/2005 page A11-
http://www.athensnews.gr/old_issue/13141/13346 Lerner, Gerda. Why History Matters: Life and Thought, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Litoxou, Dimitris. Grchka anti-Makedonska Borba, AzBuki, Skopje, 2004.
Karakasidou, Anastasia. Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood, Chicago Univer-sity Press, 1997.
- Cultural Illegitimacy In Greece: The Slavo-Macedonian 'Non-Minority', in Richard Clogg (ed.) Minorities in Greece, Hurst & Company, 2002.
Mackridge, Peter. Language and National Identity in Greece 1776-1976 Oxford University Press, 2009.
- Macedonia and Macedonians in Sta Mystica Tou Valtou (1937) By P.S. Delta, in David Ricks, Michael Trapp (eds.) Dialogos: Hellenic Studies Review Volume 7, Frank Cass Publishers, 2001.
Mela, Natalia. Pavlos Melas, Athens, 1964.
Melas, Spyros. Oi Polemoi 1912-1913 Birēs, 1972.
Rossos, Andrew. Macedonia and the Macedonians, Hoover Institution Press, 2008.
Stavrianos, L.S. The Balkans Since 1453, Rhinehart & Company Inc., 1958.
United Nations, Vol. I. Report of the Conference, Athens, 17 August - 7 September 1977, United Nations Publication E.79.I.7 (1979), E/CONF.69/4.
The Washington Post (14th June, 1977 page A-17)[/QUOTE]
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