Front Matter

A Century of Silence (1913 – 2013)

By Stoian Kochov (Translated from Macedonian to English and edited by Risto Stefov)

A Century of Silence (1913 – 2013)

October 14, 2014

Chapter one – Returning to my roots

“Born in me is the need to tell: why I love the world, why I admire it, why I am grateful...” (Nikiforos Vretakos)

The beauty and the human spirit, with which Nikiforos created his works are for higher justice and a world for all the people.

Returning to my roots and facing the person whose seed had been destroyed.

1. One morning I walked into the courtyard of the old “Kosturki merak” café, such named by Husni Hussein - Pasha, a great friend of Ali - Pasha from Ianina. This is where the Kostur nobles and property owners got together for their morning coffee.

I sat under the weeping willow and on the opposite side of me, in the corner, sat an old man dressed in a traditional walnut coloured Kostur folk dress, which attracted my attention. But what I especially liked was that he adhered to our great tradition and wore a silver chain tied to a pocket watch resting in a tiny pocket in his vest.

The old man couldn’t have been more than seventy years old, but his white hair, beard and moustache made him look older. He was a tall, bony man with a rosy face, hollow cheeks and a big forehead with locks of white hair covering both sides of his head. Under them rested his white eyebrows and below them his two peaceful and gentle blue eyes.

He was playing a weird looking miniature clay instrument. I later found out from him what instrument this was and what it was called. He said the instrument was called “Okarina” and that he had excavated it many years ago in the ruins of his grandfather’s house. The instrument was many centuries old. Used even before Christ...

The melody was particularly attractive when he played the songs “Leno mori ...”, “Zaidi - zaidi, iasno sontse...” But I was even more impressed when he played “Kalesh bre Angio”, “Aide slushai, slushai, kleto bre Turche…”, Anama ne biduvam…”, but the best

song of all was “Tsrna se chuma zadala, tam dolu Kostursko…” The instrument squealed like the cry of a beaten down mother crying for her lost child... The songs were tearing my heart out and bringing tears to my eyes.

All the customers in the café were frozen in their seats and listened intently in silence. More people started coming in!

When the first tear dripped down my cheek, I said to myself: “This music comes from the depths of a flaming Macedonian heart...”

As I watched him play we exchanged glances a few times. I was anxious to find out: “Who was this man? What was his name?” Maybe he belonged to the old Ilinden revolutionary guard?

I always get excited when I hear about someone who was a revolutionary; who fought for Macedonia. Then I know that this man or woman has a big heart and that he or she sincerely loves their native Kostur and Macedonia and strives to drive out the plague (the occupiers; the Ottoman Empire until 1912 and Greece after that).

The old Ilinden revolutionaries used to say: “Do something worthy of being happy...” This was a message for the young.

The old man looked at me with sincere concern on his face and stepped towards me. When I looked at his face from closeup, I started to mumble to myself. His face was rigid and I could read the pain that his torturers had carved in the wrinkles of his cheeks. How many years had this man served in the dry Greek island prisons for being who he is?

I could see that I had something in common with this man. As much as I was sad, I felt joy in his presence. I used to think that I was the only one who had had such experiences.

A moment before the old man hugged me, he reached out his hand, looked at me with a sad look in his eyes and said: “Are you one of ours (Macedonian); one of those people… from General Markos’s last cleanse, when Markos’s men collected you by force? What was

it you called them during the (Greek) Civil War… ‘bright faced colonists from Pont (Asia Minor)’ and later they chased you out and sent you up north?”

I first asked him to “please sit” and pointed at the chair next to me. I then, in reply to his questions, said:

“Yes! I am one of them! You know, no matter how poor you are, it is not easy to leave your home... memories of home are painful, but after so many years I came back to my roots and want to collect the bones of my father and my brother. They were revolutionaries but at that time I was only 13 years old. And yes, in 1947 I was taken by force by Marko’s partisans and was made to fight for communism. But to this day I don’t know if anyone survived the experience. After the war I roamed the world… Your music… you know… reached my soul. I especially love those old songs you played. These were songs that my grandmother Dora and my mother Vana sang for me, the two special women in my life who gave us life and kept our family going. For me, when I found myself among thousands of our people, far away from Kostur, my birthplace, these memories were my spiritual sustenance. It has been more than half a century that I have been looking for my fate but there is no child, no sound, no laughter and no joy. Everyone has been exiled, everything has been uprooted and our footprints remain as scars on the world. The people of Kostur have forgotten how to laugh from the heart.”

He looked at me but his glance passed right through me. He must have remembered something, I thought. I sat down at my table. That which did not kill a person, made him stronger, I thought to myself. I then asked: “And who are you?”

There was a ringing sound in his voice and he spoke well. He had a smile on his face which changed depending on what he was saying.

He said: “It is good that you came. Otherwise, how would you get to know yourself? Who you were? Who we are? Half a century of living abroad has eroded your consciousness, something from which you cannot recover on your own. But here in your native Kostur it will be your duty to discover yourself and, as a son of this country, to find out how much you’re valued. Here you will find out why you

left your father’s home and why our ancestors sacrificed so much for this country! My grandfather used to say: “Insanity takes only a moment in life, but regret is a lifetime!”

Calmly and soberly he recounted his unfinished story of his life in Kostur and the wider region and then said: “So, you ask me who I am?”

He then began to talk again while I listened: “Mine is a strange story,” he said, “It is so strange it is difficult for people to understand; for those who have not been in this kind of prison camp, of course. A person who is not familiar with the depths of this underworld cannot possibly understand the realm of hatred. This kind of camp exists at the bottom of life. The underworld is the bottom of the largest bottoms. The camp where we were at, where they kept the Kostur revolutionaries fell beyond the realm of human existance. Every revolutionary in that camp had something lasting, something significant that helped him stay alive; something that helped him survive. He had to hang on stubbornly: in the summer under the infernal sun, in the winter under the ice while enduring daily hunger and endless humiliations inflicted on him by the soulless people who ran the camps.

It was dangerous to be in the right, where the powerful were in the wrong. We, the revolutionaries, experienced that in those barren islands where no humans existed…”

It was a strange look with which this old rebel stared at me. It was a look full of immense sadness and anger, and at the same time full of historical truth, wisdom and an endless desire to tell me all about our suffering. He said:

“I am one of the missing Kostur revolutionaries from the Ilinden era and, as you can see, I am alive but cursed. I am a person without youth and without family. I am a man whose masculinity was destroyed. I am no longer a man. Castration was my penalty on the dry island “Anafi” and then they said I was free to go! ‘Leave and go to your beloved Kostur,’ they said, ‘but remember your seed will never sprout a rebel tribe’...”

I have no relatives and no love. Death? Let them teach me to forget death along with my love for Macedonia, for which I fought. Now nobody calls me Krsto, which is my real name, the name my mother and father gave me, by which I was baptized and by which everyone in my family called me. Now they call me “Stavros”, by my slave name, a name which was imposed on me by a law published in an ‘Official Newspaper’, law E. K. number 332, enacted on November 21, 1926.”

The old man mumbled something and silently disappeared into deep thought... It seemed like his thoughts were drying up. He mumbled again… something about my tears tearing at his heart...

“May God protect us,” I said, “from such beastly acts! How could they even be possible? How could one human being do that to another? Where did all this madness come from in these people? They must really have been enraged, mad, in order to do that and be able to live with it? I know this happened back in 1904 at the same time all the appalling village massacres took place, especially in Zagoricheni and Zelenich.”

A moment later Krsto looked compassionately at me and said: “This instrument produces original Macedonian melodies from which spring sadness, tears, melancholy, joy, happiness… that is why I made it my duty to play it and I have played it for years. It soothes my solitude and loneliness because I am a man who has lost everything and feels colder than winter.”

Suddenly the old man perked up, shook with delight and began to talk again, this time about his more recent past when he was a partisan in violent Kostur. He mentioned his grandmother Vana and how lonely and sad she was and how she cried all the time... He mentioned the long columns of ELAS fighters and the captured fighters. “The column was endless marching on its way south, to its destruction,” he said, “they were leading us to the deserted islands while our ancestral homes, the homes of our grandfathers, were set on fire.

He hesitated for a moment and then said:

“We were unsure of many things… We never knew who to trust and who was going to stab who in the back... I was disappointed with things but never lost hope. One thing remained with me and kept me going; the thought that someone wonderful was waiting for me at home, my beloved Kiratsa. But, as time passed, my fate sent me in a different direction. I had to fight for my life on a daily basis from the damned officer in charge of the main camp.”

“What kind of a person was this officer?” I asked.

Krsto looked at me and without hesitation said: “Let me say that he behaved like an animal, an animal that likes to torture. There is no animal that enjoyed as much torture as this man. My grandfather used to say: ‘Animals understand you by your scent, people understand you by your word.’ But this man, he was something else!

I used to watch him torturing people and, from the unconscious grimace on his face, the frightening snarl in his voice and from his body jerking and shaking with anger, he looked and sounded twisted, not like a human. He sounded more like a mad, rabid angry wolf in panic. But only a person who has gone through such suffering and pain would know the pain and suffering of a true rebel or of a freedom fighter. They would know what real suffering is...

This person spat on everyone. He did not leave a single rebel alone. He had to beat and spit on all of us to relieve his madness; to relieve his anger. Was this a curse or did God make him this way to punish us? His problem was chronic and incurable. He had a scent about him which we could detect from the distance. As time passed he began to lose his saliva and was unable to spit on us but was killing us with his bad smell. Later he was diagnosed by a top specialist who said he had a disease that attacks the salivary glands, brought on by excessive spitting.”

Krsto paused for a moment, looked down and began to speak again: “The older he got the uglier he looked. His chest was larger than it should have been. When he walked his breasts trembled, especially in the summer. During the extreme heat his breasts clumsily jumped up and down but that did not worry him because his focus was on inflicting pain on others.”

The old man stopped talking, turned towards me, looked me in the eyes and smiled. He then said: “When I think of my walks along ‘fishing’ street in Kostur and of Kiratsa’s first words to me about how she was ‘madly in love with me’, I couldn’t wait to return to my home, to my native Kostur.”

Krsto paused again, looked away and continued: “One day all the prisoners were carrying stones the way they were often forced to do, for no reason. Take them from one place and put them in another... While I was walking along carrying a stone, I heard a voice very quietly say: ‘Krsto watch out for Tsitskarakis... he is following us...’

I looked without turning and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him move sluggishly, like a lazy cat walking around bags full of garbage. The stone was heavy and I still had a long way to go. The sun was up high and burning hot.

Seconds later, there he was in front of me. I was very angry at him because I knew he was reading my letters from Kiratsa. I decided to say something: ‘My soul is burning for home,’ I said, ‘last night I dreamed of my beloved Kiratsa running towards me and throwing herself into my arms... I want to see Kiratsa and my young son Doncho. For days I have had bad thoughts. In her last letter she wrote to me saying that someone has been following my child every day and she does not know what harm will be done to him… I am bothered by my dream… Dreaming of her running towards me is a nice dream… but it bothers me... because she was not alone. In my dream, beside her ran more women, young girls and a few old women. I dream the same dream every day…’

He gave me a dirty look, messed up his hair with his oversized hand, angrily squirmed and lunged at me, determined to kill me. When he hit me in my groin I began to bleed like a slaughtered pig. The sight of my blood gushing sent shivers and panic all over me and I started to scream like a dog being neutered. I went wild. The pain was so great I saw stars. He had smashed my testicles… I was in so much pain I was pulling out my own hair; I was scratching my face with my own fingers… I stood there in front of everyone ashamed of

what had just happened to me. More painful than that was that fact that I was now no longer a man.

The idiot stood there laughing out loud while saliva dripped out of his mouth like a wolf before a feast.

The pain was unbearable, I whined like a dog as bells rang in my head. The pain lasted for days. I could not sleep and when I did sleep I woke up with stiff arms and legs. My suffering was unbearable, not only from my pain but also from the giggling of the man who had done this to me. On top of my pain he had to mock me and shout out loud that he had castrated me! He destroyed my ability to reproduce offspring. That damned rebel seed was dead... (as Karavangelis used to call it… But the Macedonian people knew Karavangelis as a man without a soul).

When last I saw the man that did this to me, saliva was dripping from his big dog teeth as he walked around like a hungry crocodile. He had the murderous passions of a wild man, a beast, and he would not hesitate, not even for a moment, to destroy my pride and humiliate me for no reason at all. What evil possessed him!?? What kind of civilized man who wields power could be so heartless??!

In the camp we were powerless to do anything, so we suffered and suffered horribly.

It did not take long before all kinds of anxieties began to appear in the camps. Anxiety and panic attacks became prevalent and common, which destroyed many lives. Some of the prisoners became obscessed with bacteria and uncleanliness and developed urges to constantly wash their hands.

No prisoner was immune to the beastly acts of this officer and his henchmen so they tended to avoid them at all costs by hiding behind the rocks, well at least until commander Dzimaras’s rage subsided.

What did I do to deserve what was done to me? To be sent to Hell! So help me God, I don’t know what I did…

I don’t remember much of what happened after I was kicked in my groin. My brain simply blocked all memories. I remained frozen with my hands clenched and head down. I was digging at myself with my nails but did not feel pain. My throat became tight and I lost all my strength. Everything became blurry and foggy. Fear stopped me from thinking or talking. I thought I was going to die. Fear took my last breath away.

At that moment my whole world had collapsed, like a house of cards. All I remember is seeing a tear fall on my hand, like a drop of rain, then another and another. I felt many tears rolling down my face, blurring my eyes and washing my cheeks. I cried like a child and my whole body was shaking. That’s all I remember.

I was overcome by an overwhelming fear, I thought а monster was born or was produced by the power of the state! Shivers crawled all over me as I watched him giggle...

It was summer. The air around me was hot and burning… but I felt cold. All night long I spent feeling cold and depressed. I lost a part of me that I will never be able to regain.”

* * *

Krsto looked at me for a moment with a sober look on his face and then looked away. He continued: “Later, after that beast was done with me, a young and handsome sergeant serving in this camp, but born of a good mother, came over to see me. He was shaken by my ordeal and took me into a small tent and left me there. Before leaving he said: ‘Try and calm down. The person who did this to you is the most miserable person among all of us here on the island. God will not forgive him for what he did to you. God will not forgive those who inflict pain. Never! Why this fate, why this pain. Dear Lord...’

After the young sergeant left I thought that it was my time to die. I will die now I thought. Then I remembered what my grandfather used to say: ‘The happiest person is the person who brings happiness to others and a person who has not suffered knows not how to forgive.’

I was bleeding and trembling with fear and concern. I felt like everything in life had faded away. I was overwhelmed by the sense that I would never understand my fate and why this and why I had to die this way. It was night. It was a dark dawn. There was neither light nor sound. All I could hear were the waves at the seashore splashing and coming closer and closer to my tent. There was not a word to be heard anywhere, only silence, as my ill-fated life hung in the balance in this open space among the rocks.

That night I had a terrible, painful, restless and sleepless night. It was also terribly lonely. Not a single word was spoken, to be heard, to relieve my loneliness. My fate was hanging in the balance but I had no idea how to live or how to surrender to death. A terrible thought came to mind: ‘Who will write my obituary? Will it be the truth…? And how would I know?’

I don’t know when I fell asleep or if I passed out from exhaustion but when I woke I was amazed to be still alive. Life was the strongest miracle in times such as these. But the moment I thought I had learned something was the moment I had to forget it because it led to more pain. I was trying to die but my life was eager to return and so I found myself caught in this endless and silent void. I tried to think about Kiratsa, remembering her long golden blond, braided hair and that’s when I noticed that dawn was breaking. I forgot my pain as I looked up at the beautiful reddish sky becoming brighter with every passing moment...

I closed my eyes because a disturbing thought began to creep into my mind. Why did this man do this to me? What is the limit of shame and sin that this man inflicted on me and what did I ever do to him or anyone else for that matter? Where did such rage come from? These thoughts sent a chill down my spine that surged all through my body, making me shiver, twitch, kick and feel awful. I am now a man whose life as been destroyed and whose future has been ruined.

I was very troubled and felt like I was going crazy... God, my God! What a disaster! My heart trembled and I had long, long thoughts about what to tell her; my beloved Kiratsa who was waiting for

me… Waiting for me for many years so that we could expand our family...”

Old man Krsto stopped talking. Suddenly he looked very sad. He stooped his head forward. I noticed droplets of tears hitting the ground. He took a deep breath and resumed talking:

“I only had a short time left on my sentence and was due to be released in a few months. I had plans to resume my life in my native Kostur with my beloved Kiratsa and with my son Doncho. I was planning to have many more children...”

He stopped talking again, thought for a moment and then looked down at his own crotch. Then he looked at me but had nothing to say. I too stared at him without saying a word.

Then suddenly, breaking the silence, the old rebel Krsto Krapov began to speak and said: “A person who has not lived can never know or understand what life was like in the deserted island Anafi. It is very difficult for me to tell you what I had gone through on the island. Outside of my tortures, the summers were intolerable and the winters were horribly cold.

No person can ever forget that hell. There are moments of that part of my life that I simply don’t want to remember and other moments I just don’t want to speak about. My life was so insignificant that I barely thought about it, and yet my thoughts keep taking me there...”

The old rebel told me a lot about life in the camp. He also told me that since then no one wanted to get close to him. Nobody wanted to share their lives with him. Then, after he lost his beloved Kiratsa, he was all alone living in a void, in an atmosphere of silence. Life flowed all around him yet he was unable to establish contact with anyone. No one had the desire or was able to help him. Human contact was one of the most essential features in his life.

All the time I sat there motionless, like a statue, and I could not believe my own eyes and ears? After two and a half decades of being absent from my beautiful Kostur, I had finally met a person, willing to die for Kostur, who not only told me intimate parts of his

personal life but played for me the most beautiful Macedonian songs on an instrument I had never seen before; an old instrument that my great ancestors used to play.

Even my thoughts and memories from my own youth began to flood back to me, thanks to this old man and to God for bringing us together. We sat there and talked until midnight and even had a few drinks.

The uncomfortable silence lasted a long time before the old man raised his head, looked at me with sad eyes and asked: “Do you remember the old days…?”

But before I had a chance to reply he began to talk again: “Oh, my good friend,” he said, “You came back to your roots, to your ancestral home, to your memories that hurt the most. You came home where you were born.

The people of Kostur here have closed hearts, obsessed with themselves and their families, skeptical about a bright future and hence immune to disturbing surprises. The war years 1940 – 1949, the Second World War and the Greek Civil War did not bring us together but rather separated us and sent us all over the world. Now I no longer believe in any “great truth” or in any “great people”. There is no longer a need to sell the idea of ‘brotherhood and unity’, but only to respect our differences. While we are living ‘afflicted’ we cannot call the Greeks our ‘brothers’.

Yes, Kostur, our birthplace, is a city which has left many human fates open…” he said and went silent again.

He slowly raised his head, like a person feeling like someone was watching them, looked around and then looked at me. I responded by slowly raising my eyes and then looking into his. I thought to myself: Oh, Jesus, the poor man what he has gone through!

He told me so many things that I did not expect to hear and by now his throat must have tightened because I could hardly hear what he was saying.

He must have realized that he never did answer my question when I asked him who he was so, after mumbling for a while, he piped up and said: “My name is Krsto Krapov and I was the youngest rebel leader during the Ilinden Uprising. My father was Done Krapov. When he died he was buried in an enemy grave. When my mother Vana Krapova heard the bad news her heart broke. I don’t know who buried her or where she was buried. No one wants to talk about those days.

We Macedonians in those days allowed the Greeks to come here but did not think about the problems they would bring us. Those problems seemed very distant then. But now that we are being persecuted and suffering, we are full of worries and feel sick and unsure of ourselves.

Now, every time I think about it, my hands begin to shake. Yes, I am a member of the revolutionary Krapov family. My great-great grandfather Grigor was a fisherman that specialized in catching large carp (krap in Macedonian) and sold his catch at the famous Kostur fish market; hence the name Krapov. The Ottoman too called him Krapov which in time became a respected name.

Now I am living alone. Completely alone! I am left without a family and that is my punishment... Why… I don’t know! I never wronged anyone, yet nobody wants to talk to me and I too don’t want to talk to anyone. I will not accept anything and I would not give anyone anything.

He spread his hands and fingers apart, placed them over his cheeks and began to pull down on his face, stretching his skin on his forehead and over his eyes. Watching him do that made me very sad and very happy to have met such a person, a man who was willing to frankly talk about his past with a complete stranger! I was indeed honoured!

But I do have one regret for which, to this day, I cannot forgive myself and that is about asking him the question: “Did you ever think of committing suicide at the worst times on the island?”

He replied with an abrupt military style answer: “No! Never! My love remained with me like an endless dream full of a rainbow of complex colours. She belonged only to me and we belong to our people, to the people of Kostur…”

I was dazzled by his answer as I began to interpret his words. Then I came back to reality. He was still silent. He was waiting for me to say something. He felt disappointed as I said nothing and that made me very sorry to this day... It was too much for me and I did not know what to say so I said: “The past brought us together!” He then placed his finger on his temple and said:

“Our Kostur, gifted by God to light the path of the Macedonian rebels... Kostur is a spiritual source of our ancient Macedonian and biblical past, a foundation built by our ancestors, and now it is someone else’s; we have allowed it to fall into foreign hands...” Very powerful words indeed!

I thought a lot about what the old rebel said and I am bothered to this day as to how we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by outsiders and foreigners and have fallen so low?!

Strangers organized the spirit of our division and divided us into compromised (ELAS and Communists) and uncompromised Macedonians (Rebels, children of the Ilinden Uprising).

I am afraid we were all horribly in love with our slavery... fighting each other for foreign interests in the name of some foreign ideology that made no sense to us… Thinking about it now blows my mind… How could we have been so naïve and stupid?

The Kostur Region villages and Kostur itself looked like a burnt forest. We did this to ourselves when we brought the war home. This was when the Macedonians from ELAS and the Macedonian Communists were fleeing from the war and were looking to save themselves by joining Tito’s army, while fighting the rebels and children of the Ilinden Uprising in Kostur and the Kostur villages. Macedonian ELAS fighters and communists were dreaming of internationalism and foreign ideologies when they were attacking

the Kostur rebels and labeling them “nationalists” and burning their homes.

Thinking about this reminded me of the story of the beasts and the fire: “When the great and powerful beasts were fleeing the terrible fire, only the tiny humming bird with a mouthful of water was flying towards the burning forest. The bigger and smarter beasts warned the little bird that what it was doing was crazy and impossible and its attempts were futile. To that the little bird replied: ‘I am doing this because it is the right thing to do. This is exactly what we all need to do’…” This is a lesson for the people of Kostur. This is exactly what they should have done… stay and fight to defend Kostur and save their homes and their future. The only ones that stayed and fought were the Kostur rebels. Yes, that is exactly what happened but there are some who do not want to admit that we could not have defended our homeland by leaving it.

After they (the Macedonian ELAS fighters and communists) left, many questions were opened for Macedonia’s history!? It was a time, as my grandfather used to say, when: “A wise man had more use of his enemies than a crazy man of his friends.”

The old man made a short throat noise as if wanting to say something. I looked at him and it looked like something was bothering him, something was on his mind. He finally spoke up and asked:

“Why do we think that people in the old days were happier and life was simpler? Why do we continue to reminisce of better times? Why do we look at old photos and feel sad? Why do we listen with admiration to stories of the deeds of our ancestors? Do you want to change something from our past!?

It was a time when the lives of Macedonians, especially the lives of the people of Kostur Region, were filled with anger and uncertainty. I left a beautiful wife and child, for whom I cared deeply in my heart, who I considered my greatest heritage and when I returned to my sacred home I found my life in ruins.

My grandfather used to say: ‘They separated and divided us and today we hear all sorts of foolishness that a wise person from Kostur needs to be silent in order to protect his hearth, and if he does do that then there will be eternal warmth for them’...”

I said: “You are an honest man...”

Impatiently he replied: “I am a rebel and I always tell the truth! If I was truly a hypocrite do you really think I would have shown you my face?”

He paused for a moment, looked at me and continued: “We lost Kostur in less than ten years (1940 to 1949) because we did not act wisely and responsibly. Exactly in those dire years we divided ourselves into rebels and ELAS fighters without regard to what we were doing to ourselves. We allowed outside propaganda to fill our heads with garbage and acted cruelly against one another. We allowed outsiders to impose their will and lead us into oblivion without any alternatives… We accepted their lies and propaganda wholesale and turned on each other like mad dogs… They wanted a Macedonia without Macedonians and we were only too eager to give it to them. The Greek Andartes (terrorists) causing havoc in Macedonia in 1903 used to say: ‘We want your Macedonia but without Macedonians’!”

* * *

I asked him: “Tell me, what kind of people were the rebels?”

He hesitated as he looked at me with his sad, glowing eyes. The silence was long and seemed like an eternity but he eventually came around and said: “Listen compatriot, if we want to be honest and truthful for the sake of our future generations, then we must be open about all this. Our roots stem from here. This is our country and we have the right to be here. We deserve to be here because this is our heritage, our inheritance from our ancestors. We all deserve to return to our hearth, where we were born, where our ancestors were born and lived, where our most precious, sad, happy, angry and painful memories were created. This will be the toughest test yet that we will have to face but the younger generations must return, they must

be allowed to return, our offspring must come home! Our exile was not of our own doing… of our own will. We were lied to and deceived! The chaos that we lived through was ordered and planned by outsiders. They planted false values, immorality, spiritual poverty and illusions into our minds and souls in order to betray us and send us into oblivion. And you ask me what kind of people the rebels were?

I will tell you! I will start from the beginning and I will awaken old, painful times of our past that touched so many of our lives…”

He looked me in the eye and said: “The rebels were ordinary people who decided to face their fears and doubts and stand up to their persecutors and cause unrest. They had nothing to carry in their hands except their courage with which they paved the way to freedom and independence in a country that was theirs. They craved freedom and fought for it with their bare hands against overwhelming odds because they were oppressed and more importantly because they were patriots. Macedonia was a nation of Macedonian people without a country of their own to rule. The only way for them to be free as Macedonians was through a great liberation war, and that is exactly what they did… that’s what the Ilinden Uprising was all about… freedom for the Macedonian people as a nation and freedom for Macedonia as their country. No more and no less. Unfortunately that’s not exactly what happened; very unfortunate for our people! Outsiders, even in those days, interfered in our affairs and the situation, as you know, went from bad to worse. Our Christian brother neighbours, as it turned out, lied and deceived us. They turned out to be worse than the Ottomans. In 1912 our neighbours rushed in to save us and with our help they drove out the Ottomans. Then in 1913, after they had fought each other for more of Macedonia, they portioned and annexed our country for themselves with us in it…”

We exchanged glances and suddenly I felt uneasy and sensed anger building in the old man. He looked me in the eye and said:

“The rebels may have been radicals but they were level headed people. They never thought of leaving Kostur unprotected. They had virtue and courage to say out loud what they belived: ‘Kostur is

ours! Macedonia is our homeland. There is no other Macedonia or another Kostur anywhere in the world! This is our native land!’ All their ideas and discussions were in Macedonia and the Macedonian people’s interest. Now if we are to look at what the other side was doing we will find that the Macedonian communists were discussing events… and not their country. And the small minded ELAS subjects, all they did was discuss people: who is who and so on...

I can tell you that when the Kostur rebels and freedom fighting band were marching through our streets, the people cried because their lives and freedom depended on them. I saw that with my own eyes. The rebel fighters fought for their families, for their villages and for their Kostur, everyone knew that and respected their sacrifices. Macedonians fighting for home, family, village and for Macedonia and not for some foreign ideology that made no sense to them…

Yes, our people placed a lot of hope in the rebel bands and watched them closely and listened to them very carefully. In those days our enemies, particularly Karavangelis and Metaxas, were busy planting hatred in our nation and dividing our people and the people of Kostur into ‘Grkomani’ (Greekophiles) and ‘Bulgaromani’ (Bulgarophiles, or Paleo-Vulgari as the Greeks used to call them). But during the Italian and German occupation, when Greek influence was non-existent in Kostur, our people walked with their heads held high…

Yes, during the rebel marches people were shouting: ‘We are here to witness the Macedonian army to which we are proud to belong!’

Kostur and the surrounding villages echoed with excitement as the church bells rang and all the people, Macedonians, Jews, Vlachs and others, were all out on the street. Only the ‘Grkomani’ stayed home and peeked through their windows and watched the Macedonian rebel army march.

I can see them right now, at this very moment, marching through the centre square.

After that speeches were delivered by Paskal Dobroliski, Vasil Maniatski, Pando Chetirski, Luka Drenovski, Bai Kolio and other chiefs from General Headquarters.

In these days, it was rare to see a Macedonian army marching freely, especially after the failed Ilinden Uprising. It was not the same as when the bands of Vasil Chakalarov, Pando Kliashev, Lazar Poptraikov, Mitre Vlaot, and others were proudly and freely marching through the Kostur villages but it was indeed a sight to see a Macedonian army return to its native soil. This army was not like the armies of Macedonian soldiers serving under foreign flags and commanded by foreign officers, following someone else’s orders. This was an all Macedonian rebel army, recognized and accepted by the Macedonian people…

The people took advantage of their freedom and shouted: ‘Here we are! This is Macedonia, our country! We are natives of this country!’ And they wasted no time in letting their oppressor know... I swear to you, it is all true! Macedonians marched with heads raised up high in their native Kostur. We are the original owners of this country and the Greeks are our occupiers. The occupiers cannot flourish in this country, we will not allow them. Even the Pontians (Turkish Christian settlers brought to Macedonia during the 1920’s) cannot flourish in this country because they know that they are invaders, they know that they are not Macedonians and they know very well that they are not even Greeks… because they are Turks!

The rebel leaders also took part in the celebrations in Kostur…

One of the first leaders to speak was Dobroliski. He spoke loud when he said: ‘This is a great day for Macedonia. Today is Ilinden, a day of our future, a day of affirmation for the Macedonian Nation! Our enemies will have to come to terms with it! The time has come for us to say we have had enough! No more attacks and killing by these merciless gangs sowing death and destruction in our villages so that foreigners can conquer Macedonia.’

He said: ‘We will defend Kostur to the death! At this moment we are all united in one body as the people of Kostur and our hearts are

beating as one for Macedonia and for Kostur, our place of birth!’ and that’s what he said in his speech.”

Krsto Krapov, the old rebel, the old warrior, raised his head up high and said: “What the Kostur rebels did in those days were things that will be long remembered for generations to come. They were the brave and proud sons of Macedonia. They stayed true to their Ilinden ideals and loyal to their fathers and grandfathers.”

He paused for a moment, looked down and continued: “My people were illiterate in their own mother tongue. Not because they were not smart but because they never given the opportunity to read and write in Macedonian. In fact, here in Greek occupied Macedonia, they were prohibited by law to speak their Macedonian mother tongue. But, in spite of everything that was done to stop them, our oral tradition survived. Macedonian mothers continued to speak to their children in the Macedonian language and when the Greeks were gone out of Kostur, the Macedonian language came back out on the streets. Children began to sing Macedonian songs everywhere, songs they had secretly learned from their mothers. There was no person from Kostur, no matter where in the world they lived, that did not sing a Macedonian song, particularly this one:

Mori Chupi kosturchanki, Rashirete go oroto, Rashirete go oroto, Da vi vime fustanite, Da vi vime fustanite, Chii e fustan damkalia, Chii e fustan damkalia, Da se stora sevdalia, Po fustanot na chupcheto…”

Old man Krsto Krapov became excited as he sang the song. The veins on his forehead and on his neck began to bulge as if everything that had accumulated over the years in him was about to burst.

I truly had sincere respect for him when I shouted out “What will you drink my friend?” Then I said quietly: “Oh, Jesus, I feel such a relief.”

I was so happy I thought I could fly. Nothing was destroyed, our song echoed again in Kostur, my birthplace.

Silence followed as the old man began to look nervous and uneasy. A moment later he began to speak again.

He said: “I remember the dreadful times I had on the islands… I remember everything… I spent the best years of my life on those desert islands, far away from my home… far away from Kostur… far away from my beloved Kiratsa and my boy Doncho.

I remember Kiratsa’s last words. She was squeezing my hand tight when she said: ‘Krsto, you will be alone… Look for our son…’ This is the legacy she left me with. When I asked her: ‘How many years have you been waiting for me?’ I had a few more words to say but I couldn’t say them… they still remain in me…

With tears in her eyes she replied: ‘Thirty-six years, five months and 12 days...’

Now she is gone. I do miss her very much and every time I think of her I feel sadness, sorrow and turmoil which frustrate my speech and thoughts… She was a strong woman!”

I think this misfortune has affected many Macedonians; we have floundered on the bare islands and in foreign countries for eternity. I can hear my heart beating. When I remember the bizarre things that had taken place I get the urge to laugh and then, right after, to cry.

Oh, that dog, I should not have come back… I should not have killed him, I should have just spat on him, and it bothers me now because I put myself down every time I mention this! It would have been better if I had not returned alive from the island...

I remember the waves of our lake, the Kostur fishermen, the melodies of the magic flute, the colours of the sunset, the aroma of

fried carp… These were memories that made my eyes tear... When I thought of my beloved Kiratsa, I used to hum the song:

Si zalubiv edno mome Kosturianche… (I fell in love with a girl from Kostur…) Oh, aman, aman... Padna mome se razbole, Belo litse potemnelo, oh, aman, aman… Tsrni ochi zatvorilo… oh, aman, aman…”

I watched the old man cry as he sang. I was certain now that the tears we shed are our best interpreters of our deeply hidden feelings.

He straightened up, wiped away his tears, rubbed his eyes and put his lips together as if wanting to scream and said:

“What have I done to God to punish me so badly...? It would have been better if he had taken my life!”

It was next to a miracle how this man spoke and the command he had of his mother tongue, in spite of what had been done to him. He spoke with a booming voice full of throaty tones and his eyes glowed with tears. He continued:

“The Greeks ruined my ability to reproduce. They took my right to have offspring, to be part of my people, to be part of the human race in the future. That essentially was their goal, to end our line… They killed me in an underhanded way, only my soul knows how that feels...