THE TRUTH - Part 06

THE TRUTH

The truth is Macedonia was never historically Greek. Macedonia was forcefully invaded, occupied and partitioned by Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria during the 1912, 1913 Balkan Wars. After signing the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest, 51% of Macedonia was given to Greece, 39% was given to Serbia and 10% was given to Bulgaria. This was done against the wishes of the Macedonian people who, since Macedonia’s occupation and partition, have fought for their rights. Macedonians fought for their rights during World War II and during the Greek Civil War. While the part of Macedonia under Serbian/Yugoslav control won its freedom and was declared a People’s Republic of Macedonia in 1945 under the Yugoslav federation, the parts under Greek and Bulgarian control remained occupied and its people are without even the most basic human rights. Greece is refusing to recognize the existence of a Macedonia beyond its own borders to hide the fact that; 1. Macedonia was partitioned by force i.e. its armies fought to gain control. 2. Greece is holding 51% of Macedonian lands that don’t belong to it. 3. Greece has exiled hundreds of thousands of ethnic Macedonians, including the refugee children and will not allow them to return. 4. Greece has illegally expropriated properties belonging to Macedonians for which no compensation was made. 5. Greece has committed atrocities against the Macedonian civilian population during the 1912, 1913 Balkans Wars and during the 1946 to 1949 Greek Civil War and does not want the world to know about them. 6. Greece is refusing to recognize an indigenous Macedonian minority living within its borders.

Here is a history lesson for the Greeks: 1. The ancient Macedonians defeated the ancient Greeks at Chaeronea in 338 BC and subjugated them and they never recovered. Their largest City States, including Athens, were occupied by Macedonian garrisons until 197 BC when they were freed and re-occupied by the Romans. The ancient Greeks never set foot on Macedonian soil! 2. Since their defeat in 338 BC the ancient Greeks, including Sparta, were politically subordinate to the Macedonians and for over 140 years were under Macedonian control. So historically speaking which is more correct, “Macedonia is Greek” or Greece is Macedonian?

The truth unfortunately matters not for the Greeks when it doesn’t serve their interests!

BIG Greek Lie # 10 - “Greeks claim no Macedonians, Turks, Albanians or Vlachs live in Greece today”

(Greek beliefs don’t include Macedonians, Albanians, Vlachs and Turks as part of Modern Greece)

It is indeed a strange phenomenon for Greece to be the only homogeneous country in an otherwise multi-ethnic heterogeneous Balkans! Is this true or has Greece developed amnesia about its past? Before we delve into the subject of “a homogeneous Greece”, let’s get a few things straight. What exactly is homogeneous? I mean in a demographic sense. A country is demographically homogeneous when its entire population is of the same culture, speaks the same language, practices the same religion and shares similar customs and traditions. Let us now take a trip down memory lane, back to a point just before Greece became a country for the first time and see if Greece was homogeneous then? If I am not mistaken, outside of some high ranking Christian Church clergy and a very small minority of Christian educated, middle class Ottoman families, no one spoke Greek before Greece was a country. In fact, the language spoken by the above mentioned people then was not even called Greek. I am talking about the Koine language, the ancient language of trade and commerce. Koine, which has its roots in ancient Attica, was popularized by Alexander the Great when he made it his international language of trade and commerce for his vast Macedonian Empire. Later Koine was adopted and preserved by the Orthodox Church as the language of liturgy in some parts of the multi-ethnic Byzantine Empire. After the establishment of Ottoman rule in the Balkans it resurfaced and found its way into the Ottoman administration, spoken by a rich multi-ethnic Christian educated middle class people based in Istanbul. More recently the ancient international Koine was adopted by the Greek State as the official language of Greece and was renamed “Greek”. So what language did the vast majority of the so-called “Greek people” speak before that? If history serves me right, in 1821, just before Greece was established as a country, its people did not speak Greek. In 1829 when Greece became a state, for the first time, it was a small country covering the region of Morea, modern day Peloponnesus (Greece proper). The majority of people living in Morea at the time spoke Albanian, Turkish, Vlach and Slav. Athens itself, the cradle of the ancient civilization, was nothing more than an Albanian village.

So if “Greece proper” was not “pure Greek” why would anyone expect Epirus, Thessaly, Thrace, or Macedonia, regions that were never Greek to begin with, to be “pure Greek”? The argument for “a pure Greece” used by modern Greeks today is that even though Greece was not pure at its inception, it was purified after the population expulsions in 1913 and after the population exchanges with Turkey in the 1920’s. If Greece was not “pure Greek” why would it release statistics in 1928 claiming 98% of its population to be “pure Greeks” and 2% of it to be Muslim Greeks? This is a strong argument if one trusts Greek statistics! Unfortunately I don’t! Many Greeks today believe that Greece was purified after it expelled a large number of people in 1913 during the second Balkan War. Many Greeks today also believe that the population imported from Asia Minor and other parts of Turkey was “pure Greek”. The fact is; 1. The population expelled from Greece in 1913 was not expelled because of its ethnicity, but rather because those people refused to be assimilated in the Greek fold. They simply refused to become Greeks. 2. The population remaining in Greece was labeled “Greek” only because it agreed, mostly out of fear, to pledge loyalty to the Greek State. 3. The population imported from Turkey in the 1920’s was not imported because it identified with Greece. It was imported because it was Christian. Christianity and Islam were the only criteria separating the so-called Greeks from Turks. The vast majority of the Asia Minor Christians, culturally and linguistically, identified more with the Turks than they did with the Greeks. That, however, did not stop the Greek State from turning them into Greeks. So who were the original so-called “pure Greeks”? Was it the Slavs of Morea, the Albanians of Epirus, the Vlachs of Thessaly, the Turks of Thrace, or the Macedonians of Macedonia? You see I am having difficulty identifying these elusive “pure Greeks”. If they were not Albanian, Vlach, Turk, or Macedonian who were they then? What criteria can we use to separate the “pure Greeks” from the Albanians, Vlachs, Turks and Macedonians living in the pre-Greek Ottoman territory of Modern Greece? Obviously not language, since only a very small minority of the total population of Greece spoke Koine, which was later renamed Greek. Religion? Greece at one time used religion alone to distinguish Greeks from Turks. Wasn’t that why Greece expelled Muslims to Turkey because they were thought to be Turks and imported Christians from Turkey because they were thought to be Greeks? This criterion unfortunately is also flawed. If Orthodox Christians were Greek then everyone in the Balkans who was Orthodox Christian qualified to be Greek! This included Bulgarians, Serbians, Albanians, Macedonians, Vlachs, Turks, etc. Are Bulgarians and Serbians Greek? They don’t think so! Obviously religion alone was not a good criterion to separate Greeks from the rest! So back to the original question, “who were the pure Greeks?”