(For more information on the plight of the Macedonian children please read cha - Part 02

In the book “The Vlachs: The History of a Balkan People”, on pages 124 and 125, T. J. Winifrith says: “There are two other difficulties involved in the Turkish period. In tracing the movements of merchandise and men in the Balkan peninsula it is extremely difficult to differentiate the various races involved. Western travelers knew little, Turkish authorities cared less. Even the polyglot Vlachs themselves neither knew nor cared a great deal and until the rise of national consciousness at the end of the eighteenth century were probably happy with the label of Greek which was good enough for outside observers.”

In the book “The Vlachs: The History of a Balkan People”, on page 139, T. J. Winifrith says: “One of Greece’s first and best Prime Ministers was John Kolettis, a Vlach who dressed like a Turk and had been court physician to Ali Pasha.”

Speaking about 19th century migrations in the Balkans, in the book “The Vlachs: The History of a Balkan People”, on pages 119 and 120, T. J. Winifrith says: “Elsewhere there is a further source of confusion with massive immigration of Albanians into Greece.”

In telling the story of the Vlachs, T. J. Winifrith gives us important clues as to the true identity of Modern Greeks. In the days when Modern Greece was molded into a nation, Vlachs, a Latin speaking people, and Albanians were the primary sources of raw material for the “making” of the Modern Greeks.

In the “Popular Science Monthly” edited by J. McKeen Cattell, published in 1915 on pages 41 and 42 we read: “Most of the old Greek race has been swept away, and the country is now inhabited by persons of Slavonic descent. Indeed there is a strong ground for the statement that there was more of the heroic blood of Hellas in the Turkish army of Edhem Pasha than in the soldiers of King George.”

In the “Popular Science Monthly” edited by J. McKeen Cattell, published in 1915 on page 42 we also read: “The Modern Greek has been called a ‘Byzantine Slav.’ King George himself and Constantine his son are only aliens placed on the Grecian throne to

suit the convenience of outer powers, being in fact descendants of tribes which to the ancient Greeks were merely Barbarians.”

Here we are told by Popular Science Monthly that not only have the ancient so-called Greeks disappeared and been replaced by persons of Slavonic descent but that even the rulers of Modern Greece are aliens.

In the “Encyclopedia Britannica” published in 1910 on page 465 in the History of Greece section we read: “In 1715 the Ottomans with a large disciplined army set themselves to recover the Morea [later renamed the Peloponnesus], the Venetians were left without support from the Greeks. The peninsula was rapidly recaptured and by the Peace of Passarowitz (1718) again became a Turkish dependency. The gaps left about this time in the Greek population were largely made up by an immigration from Albania.”

I have been told by several Greeks to “read the encyclopedia” and educate myself on the true history of Greece. So following their advice I looked up the 1910 version of Encyclopedia Britannica and lo and behold it corroborates the story that the early 19th century Modern Greek population is Albanian. It also tells us that old Greece, more commonly known as Morea, a Slav word for “ocean”, was occupied by the Venetians.

In “Greece of the Hellenes” by Lucy M. J. Garnett on page 32 we read: “The Athenian women are neither beautiful nor well made; they have neither the physiognomy of French women, nor the full beauty of the Roman dames, nor the pale white delicacy of the Turkish women –one sees nothing in the town but ugly creatures with broad noses, flat feet and ill-formed waists. It is because Athens, twenty five years ago, was only an Albanian village. The Albanians formed and still form, almost the whole of the population of Attica; and within three leagues of the capital, villages are to be found where Greek is hardly understood. Athens has been rapidly peopled with men of all kinds and nations; that explains the ugliness of the Athenian type.”

Here Lucy M. J. Garnett comes out with it and spares us no details. Athens, at Modern Greece’s humble beginning, the seat of Modern

and Ancient Greek-Dom, the pinnacle of Greek pride and glory in the 19th century was nothing more than an “Albanian village”.

Albanians, Vlachs, Slavs? Where are the so-called Greeks, descendants of the ancient Greeks, inheritors of the ancient Greek and Macedonian heritage?

We don’t need to look too far or scratch too deep from the surface to find irregularities with the Greek identity. Even with the scant evidence presented from only half a dozen sources we can see that the Modern Greek identity is not what it seems. So, how dare they [Modern Greeks] challenge our Macedonian identity when their [Modern Greek] identity is artificial at best?

One cannot pay attention to Modern Greek allegations because Modern Greeks are NOT really who they say they are. Modern Greeks are NOT the descendants of the so-called Ancient Greeks as they portray themselves to be. The so-called Ancient Greeks may have been who the world was told they were, which is yet to be proven, but they disappeared a long time ago. I can tell you with much certainty that the Modern Greeks are NOT their descendants. The Modern Greeks are nothing more than imposters and usurpers of the Ancient City State heritage. The only thing they have in common with the ancients is that they happened to live on the same lands.

When Greece established itself as a state and took control of the people who lived within its borders, it published demographic statistics. Before 1926 it published demographic statistics claiming that modern Greece was populated by 98% pure Greeks and 2% Muslim Greeks.

First, Muslim is not an ethnicity, it’s a religion. So your first hint here is that the demographic was based on religion. But how can that be? Did they accidentally omit the word “Christian” in between the words “pure” and “Greeks”? They didn’t exactly say “Greece was populated by 98% pure Christian Greeks and 2% Muslim Greeks”?

What are we to assume they meant by that, that Greece is populated by 100% pure Greeks of whom 98% are Christians and 2% are Muslims?

Or are we to assume Greece is populated by 98% pure “ethnic” Greeks and 2% “ethnic” Greeks who happen to be Muslims?

Why create such confusion?

I asked many people what they thought this meant, including my own parents. They all, without exception, said they thought it meant that Greece was populated by 98% ethnic Greeks.

“The total population in Greece rose between 1907 and 1928 from 2,600,000 to 6,200,000.” “After the Greek advances of 1912, for instance, the Greek elements in Greek Macedonia had constituted 43 percent of the population. By 1926, with the resettlement of the refugees, the Greek element has risen to 89 percent.” (Page 121, Richard Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece)

According to this new demographic, 89% of Greece was still populated by pure Greeks. This trend continued through the 1920’s even though Greece brought over one million Turkish Christian colonists and settlers from Asia Minor and settled them on Greek soil. But we Macedonians knew that these people were not Greeks because many, about 600,000 of them, were settled in Macedonia. They became our neighbours and when we got to know them we found out that they were Christian Turks and not Greeks!

So the question now was where and who were the Greeks in Macedonia that Greece referred to as “pure” Greeks in the Greek demographic?

I decided to look into this a little deeper. I started with my own parents. I said Greece claims that 89% of the population living inside its borders is Greek. I know all the people in our village and no one claims to be Greek, so who are the Greeks in our village?

There were no Greeks in my village, none in neighbouring villages and none in the region where I lived in Greek occupied Macedonia.

In places where everyone seemed to know everyone, people pointed out the non-Macedonians who they thought might be Greeks. They pointed to the grocers, the shepherds, the bakers the handymen and so on; who they thought might be Greek.

But as it turned out, the grocers were Vlachs, the shepherds were Vlachs, the baker was a Jew and the construction crews were Albanians… and so far no Greeks.

The only other people that the villagers assumed were Greeks were the police chiefs, the politicians, some of the teachers, and the settlers and colonists… but all of them turned out to be newcomers to Macedonia who came from south of Olympus and from Asia Minor. In other words they all came from outside of Macedonia and we could not identify their ethnicity.

Therefore I had to conclude that there were no “Greeks” who were indigenous to Macedonia. And as I mentioned earlier, the newcomers, the Christian Turkish settlers and colonists from Asia Minor who were deposited in various Macedonian villages, were not Greeks either.

So one has to wonder, “What’s going on here?” Where are the Greeks? Well, there have to be some Greeks further south in Greece?!

To make a long story short, I decided to look deeper into the history of Greece but not through Greek sources and Greek propaganda.

After going through about 150 books written by such authors as David Holden, Fallmerayer, Edward Blaquiere, William St. Clair, T. J. Winifrith, J. McKeen Cattell, Lucy M. J. Garnett, James Bourchier, La Pouge, Schultz, Rennell Rodd, Michael Herzfeld, Clogg, Nigel Wilson, G. Droysen (the man who actually created Hellenism), Thomas Keightley, G. Bowersock, Nicholas G. L. Hammond *, Keith R. Legg, Richard Gleason Greene, William Z. Ripley, Colin Wells, Alexandra Halkias, Charles Eliot, G. P. Gooch, Rennell Rodd, G. A. Henty, Balasz Trencsenyi, Michal Kopecek, F.W. Walbank, Peter Green, Neni Panourgia, Vamik Volkan,

Karakasidou, to name a few… I could find no “ethnic Greeks” in Greece.

* [Surprisingly even Nicholas G. L. Hammond, the greatest Philhellene historian and author, has admitted that the Modern Greeks are not what they seem. Nicholas G. L. Hammond in his book “Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas” on page 57 writes, “It was during this period [1206 to 1260] that the flow of immigrants from the western area began. It became a flood in the fourteenth century. They went as mercenaries, raiders and migrants. The great majority of them were speakers of Albanian, but others joined the movement. Whatever their language they were described by the Greek and Latin writers as ‘Albanoi’ or ‘Albanitai’ or ‘Albanenses’ and the reason of this collective term can only be that they entered the Byzantine world through the district which the Byzantines knew as ‘Albanon’. Thus the Vlach speaking Malakasii who invaded Thessaly in 1334 were described as ‘Albanoi’ by Cantacuzenus 1.474 no less than the evidently Albanian-speaking ‘Albanensium gens’ which raided Thessaly in 1325.]

All these authors said that Greece was a modern creation, created from the human raw materials that existed on the Ottoman lands that are now called Greece. There never was a Greece and there never were any Greeks… not until they were created as recently as the first half of the 19th century. So how can there be “ethnic Greeks”?

Amazingly after all that has been said about the artificial identity of the Modern Greeks, there are still Greeks out there who accuse me of “lying” for pointing out the obvious. There are still Greeks out there who insist that all these authors from whom I take quotes for my chapters are “simply crackpots” who have something against Greece or perhaps are jealous of the “glorious Greek heritage”, as I am often accused of being!

Now I would like to present the reader with testimonies from twenty different authors, all westerners and all on a mission to HELP the Modern Greeks justify their artificiality who in telling their story have inadvertently confessed to the Modern Greek falsehood.

If you think telling the truth is wrong and an awful thing to do when exposing Greek falsehood then perhaps you can explain to me how you justify denying the Macedonians their identity generation after generation. Macedonians have been denied their ethnic identity, culture, language and heritage by Greeks since Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria acquired Macedonian lands by war in 1912, 1913. For my accusers, which is more wrong, to live a lie and deny others their true heritage or to tell the truth about you?

There is no denying that the Modern Greek nation is an artificial creation created by Western Philhellenes from the Slav, Vlach and Albanian immigrants who over the centuries came to live on those lands after the so-called “Ancient Greeks” disappeared.

To put an end to the notion that this is somehow a conspiracy to “rob” the Modern Greek nation of its heritage, I will present quotes from twenty different authors who basically say that; Modern Greeks are NOT the descendants of the so-called “Ancient Greeks” of 2,500 years ago but rather the descendants of the more recently arrived Slav, Vlach and Albanian immigrants.

(1) Now let us start with Edward Blaquiere, Esq. in his book “The Greek Revolution; its Origin and Progress”, on page 21 we read “Tyranny and want had driven some families, whose origin, like that of nearly all the peasants, who inhabit proper Greece, was Albanian, to take refuge on these desolate crags [the islands Hydra, Spezzia and Ipsara], where they built villages, and sought a precarious existence by fishing.”

(2) In the book “Greece and the Balkans Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment” edited by Dimitris Tziovas on page 5 we read “In southern Albania many Orthodox Albanians and Vlachs were Hellenized during the 18th and 19th centuries.” On page 6 we read “It should be stressed, however, that the Greeks as an ethnic community during this period included many Grecophone or Hellenized Vlachs, Serbs, or Orthodox Albanians.” And on page 75 we read “For Kodrikas, and many others, it was language that determined who was a ‘Greek’ for it constituted the ‘national existence’ of the nation. But for the

Phanariot Theodoros Negris, Serbs and Bulgarians were as true Greeks as any other Christian”.

(3) In J. P. Mahaffy’s book “Greek Pictures” on pages 20 and 21 we read “In the middle ages, these Albanian mountaineers have brought both war like spirit, bright costume, and beauty of person, to refresh the Hellenic race. There are still, even in Attica, districts where Albanian is the common language; there are Albanian names famous in Greek annals, especially in the great War of Independence (1821-31), and even among the sailors of Hydra, so famed for their commercial enterprise and their deeds of war, the chief families were Albanian in origin.”

(4) Surprisingly even Nicholas G. L. Hammond the greatest Philhellene historian and author has admitted that the Modern Greeks are not what they seem. Nicholas G. L. Hammond in his book “Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas” on page 57 writes “It was during this period [1206 to 1260] that the flow of immigrants from the western area began. It became a flood in the fourteenth century. They went as mercenaries, raiders and migrants. The great majority of them were speakers of Albanian, but others joined the movement. Whatever their language they were described by the Greek and Latin writers as ‘Albanoi’ or ‘Albanitai’ or ‘Albanenses’ and the reason of this collective term can only be that they entered the Byzantine world through the district which the Byzantines knew as “Albanon’. Thus the Vlach speaking Malakasii who invaded Thessaly in 1334 were described as ‘Albanoi’ by Cantacuzenus 1.474 no less than the evidently Albanian-speaking ‘Albanensium gens’ which raided Thessaly in 1325.

The southern movement of the tribes was on a very large scale. It was also rapid because towns and cities were bypassed (Dyrrachium for instance being captured c. 1368). It had two main effects. It took possession of Epirus Nova, the area inland of the coastal strip from Dyrrachium to Valona; and it sent streams of migrants into most parts of the Greek peninsula and some of the Aegean islands”.

On page 59 of Hammond’s book we read “But the Albanian raids continued and Acarnea was laid to waste. In 1341 the Emperor attacked the offending Albanians ‘around Pogoniane and Libisda’

(Lidisda), i.e. in the central part of northern Epirus; and then in 1355 he campaigned from Thessaly as far as the Aetolia and Arcanania and was killed in action (Cantacuzenus 3.319). These campaigns did not stop the flood. Albanians were serving as mercenaries in the Peloponnesus c. 1350, and they and their families were given land there to cultivate. Other bands of Albanians and Vlachs invaded the Catalan principality of Boetia and Attica, and a great many Albanians settled there as peasant-farmers in 1368 and later years.

The penetration of the Greek mainland which we have described occurred during the hundreds or more years after 1325.”

Then on page 61 we read “Once in possession of northwestern Greece, the Albanians opened the way for other immigrants. Offshoots of Vlachs and Albanians entered Boetia, Attica and Euboea…”

(5) Keith R. Legg’s book “Politics in Modern Greece” on page 48 we read “As early as the 18th century, these areas were described as ‘hotbeds of chronic insurgency’. There were few Muslims here; the inhabitants, largely of Albanian stock, were only imperfectly assimilated into the Greek nation…”

Then on page 86 we read “At the time if independence, the range of local dialects was significant; a substantial portion of the population spoke Albanian”.

(6) In the “International Encyclopedia a Compendium of Human Knowledge” edited by Richard Gleason Greene on page 201 we read “Overrun by the Vandals and Goths it [Morea, today’s Peloponnesus] became a prey, in the second half of the 8th c. to bands of Slavic invaders, who found it wasted by war and pestilence. Gradually however these barbarians were subdued and Grecianized by the Byzantine emperors. Nevertheless, the numerous names of places, rivers, etc, in the More of Slavic origin prove how firmly they had rooted themselves, and that the Moreotes are anything but pure Greeks.”

(7) In the book “Races of Europe a Sociological Study” by William Z. Ripley Ph.D., published in 1910 on page 408 we read “Since the Christian era, as we have said, a successive downpour from the north into Greece has ensued. In the 6th century came the Avars and Slavs, bringing death and disaster. A more potent and lasting influence upon the country was probably produced by the slower and more peaceful infiltration of the Slavs into Thessaly and Epirus from the end of the seventh century onward. A result of this is that Slavic names to-day occur all over the Peloponnesus in the open country where settlements were readily to be made. The most important immigration of all is that of the Albanians, who, from the 13th century until the advent of the Turks, incessantly overrun the land.”

(8) In the book “Greece in the 20th Century” edited by Theodore A. Kouloumbis on page 24 we read “Primary school children were taught, in the 1880’s, that ‘Greeks [are] our kinsmen, of common descent, speaking the language we speak and professing the religion we profess’, but this definition, it seems, was reserved for small children who could not possibly understand the intricate arguments of their parents on the question of Greek identity. What was essential to understand at a tender age was that Modern Greeks descended from the Ancient Greeks. Grown up children, however, must have been no less confused than adults on the criteria for defining modern Greek identity. Did the Greeks constitute a race apart from the Albanians, the Slavs and the Vlachs? Yes and no. High school students were told that the ‘other races’, i.e. the Slavs, the Albanians and the Vlachs, ‘having being Hellenized with the years in terms of mores and customs, are now being assimilated into the Greeks”.

(9) In Alfred P. Schultz’s book “Race or Mongrel” on page 92 we read “From the foregoing it is evident that but very little Hellenic blood is left in Greece, and that little is so thoroughly vitiated that its disappearance is but a question of time. No race inhabits Greece. The ‘Greeks’ are descendants of races so different that their crossing can never produce anything else than human mongrels. Their ancestors were Greeks, Hellenized Asiatics and Byzantine Greeks (i.e. Hamitic-Semetic-Greek-Egyptian-Negroid mongrels), Slavs,

Sicilians, Spaniards, Huns, Bulgarians, Walloons, Franks and Albanians.”

(10) In the book “Sailing from Byzantium” by Colin Wells on page 183 we read “This revival also allowed the Byzantines to decolonize the Greek mainland. The success of that effort would prove crucial to the survival of Greek culture in future centuries, after the other lands had fallen away. Having overrun nearly all of the Greek mainland, the cities, and the islands, by the tenth century the Slavs in Greece had been converted to Orthodox Christianity and thoroughly Hellenized. Today the only evidence of the Slav’s arrival is the presence of Slavic place names, some five-hundred or so of them, scattered charmingly throughout the Greek countryside.”

(11) In Alexandra Halkias’s book “The Empty Cradle of Democracy” on page 59 we read “Through the end of the revolution in 1830, Greeks, including most of the 19th century nationalists, seemed to have had a vague but firm sense of continuity from ancient to modern Greece, though this was not articulated in racial terms, but on a basis of a common language, history and consciousness. In effect, at this time, whoever called themselves a Greek was a Greek. It is because of this that many Greek-speaking Albanians, Slavs, Rumanians and Vlachs were easily assimilated and indeed became important players in Greek patriotism at the time (Dakin 1972, 8).”

(12) In the book “Turkey in Europe” by Sir Charles Eliot on page 267 we read “Constantinople and all of continental Greece were for centuries ruled and occupied by the Romans, and during many subsequent centuries invaded and colonized by Slavs. The crusades and the Latin conquest brought a large influx of western Europeans, commonly called Franks; and, in later times, extensive Albanian settlements were made in Greek districts. Clearly, the modern Greek must be of very mixed blood.”

(13) In the book “History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century” by G. P. Gooch on pages 490 and 491 we read “General interest was first aroused by a controversy as to the racial derivation of the modern Greeks. The war of independence had won the sympathy of Europe; and it was a rude shock both to Greece and to

her champions when Fallmerayer announced that her inhabitants were virtually Slavs. The race of Hellenes, he declares in his ‘History of Morea’ was rooted out and Athens was unoccupied from the sixth to the tenth century. Only its literature and a few ruins survived to tell that the Greek people have ever existed. What the Slavs had begun the Albanians have completed. Scholars had been so busy with the Ancient Greeks that they had never inquired as to what happened to them. Leake had discovered a great number of Slavonic place names but he had drawn no conclusions. ‘I now lay the foundation of a new view of Greek history and of the whole peninsula’. He recalls the invasions of the Huns, the Bulgars and the Slavs, and the second volume shows the Morea flooded by Albanian colonists and finally conquered by the Turks.”

(14) In the “Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science for the Year 1843” Vol. XVI on page 246 we read “Next to them in this respect are the modern Greeks, who, for the most part, are of Sclavonian origin, and, where they are not purely Sclavonian, are a cross-breed in which the Sclavonian enters very largely.”

(15) In Rennell Rodd’s book “The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece” on page 17 we read “In the last year of the 15th century and the opening of the 16th, when the Morea was again the battle-field of Turks and Venetians, the occupants of the plains of Argos and of portions of Attica were practically exterminated, and Albanian colonists began to re-occupy the ruined lands.”

(16) In the book “In Greek Waters a Story of the Grecian War of Independence (1821-1827)” by G. A. Henty published in 1893 on page 40 we read “With them [the modern Greeks] it would be a resurrection, accomplished, no doubt, after vast pains and many troubles, the more so since the Greeks are a composite people among who the descendants of the veritable Greeks of old are in a great minority. The majority are of Albanian and Suliot blood, races which even the Romans found untamable.”

(17) In the “Popular Science Monthly” Volume LXXV, July to December 1919, edited by J. Mckeen Cattell on page 591 we read “The modern Greeks are largely of Slavic origin. They are not the descendants of the ancient Greeks. That noble race greatly mixed

with barbarian blood during the middle ages, was completely destroyed in the course of the frequent uprisings against Turkish rule. Slavic immigrants gradually peopled the country.”

(18) In William St. Clair’s book “That Greece Might Still be Free” on page 91 we read “The Albanians, some of whom were Christian and some Muslim, were torn by this dilemma, and when the need for decision became inescapable, they divided by religion and not by race. The Roman Catholic Greeks, who lived in the islands which had been under Venetian or Genoese rule, regarded themselves as a separate community. The Albanians of Hydra and Spetsae, many of whom could not even speak Greek, regarded themselves as Greek because their allegiance was to the Orthodox Church.”

(19) In the 1910 “The Encyclopedia Britannica”, eleventh edition, on page 465 we read “…in 1725 the Ottomans with a large and well disciplined army set themselves to recover the Morea, the Venetians were left without support from the Greeks. The peninsula was rapidly recaptured and by the peace of Passarowits (1718) again became a Turkish dependency. The gaps left about this time by the Greek population were largely made up by an immigration from Albania.”

(20) In the book “Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770-1945)”, Volume II, edited by Balasz Trencsenyi and Michal Kopecek, on page 141 we read “It is funny but also sad, to see a social gathering of different Greeks, but is to say Chiots, Cretans, Albanians, Byzantines, Orientals, Ionian islanders and others, where upon the one mixes in Turkish words, the other Italian ones, the other Albanian ones, and in the same gathering, while they are all Greek, they cannot understand each other without the use of a translation or an explanation of each word as it is uttered, with the gathering thus turning into a Babel.”

For those who are still not convinced that the Modern Greek identity is an artificial creation, please continue reading.

Being told that you are a “Greek” or pretending to be a Greek does not really make you a Greek, at least not the kind of Greek you think you are!

I have shown over and over again that “anyone” can become a Greek by accepting the “Greek indoctrination” and that is to learn to speak the Greek language, feel Greek and “pretend” to be a descendent of the so-called “Ancient Greeks”. You can learn to speak Greek and feel Greek as much as you want but you can’t “pretend” to be something you are not! People should not “pretend” to be something they are not if they want to be taken seriously! Acting like you are the descendants of the so-called “Ancient Greeks”, speaking their language and feeling like them does not make you the descendant of the Ancient Greeks! It would be to your advantage to not only learn “the truth” about yourselves but to either embrace it or accept to reject it. Modern Greeks are the descendants of the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs that immigrated to Greece during the 11th to the 14th centuries AD and all other people that subsequently settled in that region ever since.

The ancient Greeks that you think of and speak of so fondly died off even before Rome conquered Achaea (Greece proper) about two centuries before Christ. When the Romans walked into Athens they found a population made up mostly of slaves. These slaves became the new citizens of Achaea after they were freed by Rome. Unfortunately they too perished over time and that is precisely why Byzantine Emperors and later Ottoman Sultans had to repopulate Achaea first with Slav immigrants and later with Albanians and Vlachs.

Therefore the true ancestors of the Modern Greeks are the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs and all others that landed in Greece since the disappearance of the so-called ancient Greeks.

Here is evidence from fifty different authors that proves my point that Modern Greeks today are NOT the descendants of the “Ancient Greeks” and are the descendants of the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs.

1. “The [Greek] claim to southern Albania rests entirely on the assumption that the majority of the population is Greek. The Greeks

are stated to number 120,000 and Albanians 80,000. But who are the ‘Greeks’? At least five sixths of them, if not more are Christian Albanians of the Orthodox faith, Albanians in sentiment and language, who because they acknowledge the Patriarch of Constantinople are declared to be Greek in point of ‘national consciousness’.” (“The Nineteenth Century and After XIX-XX a Monthly Review”, founded by James Knowles, Vol. LXXXVI, July-December 1919, page 645.)

2. “Did the Greeks constitute a race apart from the Albanians the Slavs and the Vlachs? Yes and no. High school students were told that the ‘other races’, i.e. the Slavs the Albanians and the Vlachs ‘having been Hellenized with the years in terms of mores and customs, are now being assimilated into the Greeks’.” (“Greece in the 20th Century”, Editors Theodore A. Couloumbis, Theodore Kariots, Fotini Bellou, page 24.)

3. “The Turkish village which formally clustered around the base of the Acropolis [old Athens] has not disappeared: it forms a whole quarter of the town.

An immense majority of the population in this quarter is composed of Albanians.” (“Greece and the Greeks of the Present Day”, by Edmund About, page 160.)

4. “Through the end of the revolution in 1830, Greeks, including most of the nineteenth-century nationalists, seemed to have had a vague but firm sense of continuity from ancient to modern Greece, though this was not articulated in racial terms but on the basis of a common language, history and consciousness. In effect at this time, whoever called themselves a Greek was a Greek. It is because of this that many Greek-speaking Albanians, Slavs, Rumanians and Vlachs were easily assimilated and indeed became important players in Greek patriotism at the time.” (“The Empty Cradle of Democracy”, by Alexandra Halkias, page 59.)

5. “The first Greek who had a plan for insurrection and for a liberated Greece was Rhigas of Valestino.

Rhigas was the author of poems, revolutionary proclamations and a constitution…

In this document he spoke of a sovereign people of the proposed state as including ‘without distinction of religion and language – Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, Turks and every other race’.

It seems that in their minds the distinction between ‘Greek’ and ‘Orthodox’ was still blurred.” (“Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia and register of important events 1901”, Third Series Volume VI, page 113.)

6. “There cannot be an Athenian alive today who can trace a direct line of descent from classical times to the present day without leaving Athens. Because of numerous and protracted foreign occupations, true Athenians were a relatively small minority even in the Age of Pericles. In a later period, the city was suffering from severe depopulation and was re-stocked with Albanians. At the time of Greek independence in 1834, Athens was a miserable village with a population of only 6,000.” (“Insight Guides Athens Greece Series”, page 42.)

7. “It is one of a group made famous in the Greek revolution of 1821 by the bravery of its Albanian settlers, in defense of a country which they had never adopted for their own till this moment of danger came.

They brought to it moreover, the hoarded wealth of many years. Albanian captains, Albanian ships and Albanian gold became the strength of the Greek and the dread of the Turk. The successful close of the revolution found them as firmly allied with the Greek nationality as they have been previously alien to it, and there are now no names more honoured and beloved in Athens, no families more influential in its polite circles, than those of the Albanian leaders in the war of 1821, the Tombazis, the Miaulis the Condouriottis.” (“The Atlantic Monthly: A magazine of literature, science, art and politics Vol. XLIX, January 1882, page 31.)

8. “Among the numerous islands of the Egian, arise several barren rocks, some of which are however gifted by nature with small

and commodious heavens. Of this number are Hydra, Spezzia and Ipsara, the first two close to the Eastern shore of the Peloponnesus, and the latter not far from Scio, on the Asiatic coast. Tyranny and want had driven some families, whose origin, like that of nearly all the peasants, who inhabited proper Greece, was Albanian, to take refuge on these desolate crags, where they built villages and sought a precarious existence by fishing.” (“The Greek Revolution; in origin and progress”, by Edward Blaquiere Esq., page 21.)

9. “In reality however, just before the Greek war of independence, most Greeks still referred to themselves as ‘Romans. Vlachavas, the priest rebel leader who rose against the Ottomans, declared, ‘A Romneos I was born a Romneos I will die.” (“Bloodlines from the Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism”, by Vamik Volkan, page 121.

10. “Constantinople and all continental Greece were for centuries ruled and occupied by the Romans, and during many subsequent centuries invaded and colonized by Slavs. The Crusades and the Latin conquest brought a large influx of western Europeans, commonly called Franks, and, in later times, extensive Albanian settlements were made in Greek districts. Clearly, the modern Greek must be of very mixed blood.” (“Turkey in Europe” by Sir Charles Elliot, page 267.)

11. “But it has been argued that since the modern day Greeks are not the descendents of the ancient Greeks: ‘The Star of Vergina is not a Greek symbol, except in the sense that it happens to have been found in the territory of the present-day Greek state…’.” (“Experimenting with Democracy Regime change in the Balkans”, edited by Geoffrey Pridham and Tom Gallagher, page 271.)

12. “Contemporary historians state the Emperor Basilius also was a Sclavonian; many cities bearing Sclavonian appellations still exist in Greece, as, for instance, Platza, Stratza, Lutzana,…” (“The Foreign Quarterly Review Vol. XXVI”, published in October M. DCCC. XL., 1841, page 73.)

13. “By the fourteenth century Orthodox Christian Arvanites had made their way into the Greek thema of the Byzantine Empire,

which largely comprised the land that now constitutes Greece. They first came to Attica as early as 1383…They did not complete their immigration until 1759, when Sultan Murat III offered them land in Athens…Thus the Arvanites were already inhabiting Athens when the city became the capital of Greece in 1834.” (“Fragments of Death Fables of Identity An Athenian Anthropography” by Nani Panourgia, page 27.)

14. “I have already said, and I will repeat it, that not one-fifth of the present population can with justice be called Greeks. The remainder are Slavonians, Albanians and Turks, with a slight infusion of Venetian blood.” (“Travels in Greece and Russia”, by Bayard Tailor, 1872, page 262.)

15. “It should be stressed, however, that the Greeks as an ethnic community during this period [1840’s] included many Grecophone or Hellenized Vlachs, Serbs or Orthodox Albanians.” (“Greece and the Balkans Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment”, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, page 6.)

16. “All Greek soldiers are required to be able to read and write, and if a conscript on joining has not acquired those rudiments of education, he is put to school. Not withstanding, the educational efforts of the government, as many as 30 percent proven fifteen years or so ago to be completely illiterate, while not more than 25 per cent had advanced beyond the ‘three R’s’. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that these conscripts included both Albanians from the settlements in Attica and other parts of the Kingdom and pastoral Koutso-Vlachs, all of whom habitually speak their own dialects and learn Greek only as a foreign tongue.” (“Greece of the Hellenes”, by Lucy M. J. Garnett, 1914, pages 33 and 34.)

17. “I could speak Turkish, and the Macedonian dialect, besides my own Greek tongue, and as a curious boy in the holidays I had been here and there, wishing to know more of the world round me and the people who lived in other villages than mine.

Being neither Turkish nor Greek, we called them Bulgarian, but their language is not Bulgarian, but the Macedonian dialect, and I

found lovable people among them, honest, hospitable and kind.” (“When I was a Boy in Greece” by George Demetrios, pages 131 and 132.)

18. “The migration of the Albanians is the best attested and in many ways the most instructive of migrations into Greece….

We had difficulty staying because they were rather suspicious of us, but we stayed with a man who talked Greek as his main language, although he talked to his wife in Albanian…

The ancestors of these people probably came to the Epidaurus in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but they were still talking Albanian as their mother tongue in 1930….

Albanian was the language they talked among themselves, but they could also talk Greek. This was their second language although they lived in Greece….

The one in Epirus which was still Albanian in its customs and its language had probably been there since about 1400…

A group of 10,000 Albanians with their families and their flocks appeared there, and asked if they could be admitted to the Peloponnesus. They were accepted by Theodore, who was the principle ruler of the Peloponnesus…” (“Greece Old and New”, by Nicholas Hammond, edited by Tom Winnifrith and Penelope Murray, Pages 39 to 44.)

19. “…so, in the Middle Ages, these Albanian mountaineers have brought both war like spirit, bright costume, and beauty of person, to refresh the Hellenic race. There are still, even in Attica, districts where Albanian is the common language; there are Albanian names famous in Greek annals, especially in the great war of independence (1821-1831) and even among the sailors of Hydra, so famed for their commercial enterprise and their deeds of war, the chief families were Albanian in origin.” (“Greek Pictures drawn with pen and pencil” by J. P. Mahaffy, M.A. D.D., 1890, pages 20 and 21.)

20. “Groups of men in stately Albanian costume, with their grand walk and graceful air, stalk up and down with eastern impassibility, price an article, call for a ‘fotia’ (brazier of coals for lighting cigarettes) , at the cafés, or converse in the strange patois of Greece about the last conclusion of the ‘vouli’ or house of delegates.” (“Greek Vignettes a sail in the Greek Seas, Summer of 1877”, by James Albert Herrison, page 148.)

21. “In the 1770’s a fiery Orthodox preacher, the monk Kosmas of Aetolia, tried to stem the tide of mass conversions to Islam in the Northern Greek lands by founding Greek schools in a score of villages in Thessaly, Epirus and Macedonia, where the language had long been abandoned for Albanian, Vlach or Slav, and obliged peasants to speak only Greek.” (“Greece the Modern Sequel from 1821 to the Present”, by John S. Koliopoulos and Thanos M. Veremis, page 159.)

22. “…following the alleged discovery of Slavic buildings by the German excavator at Olympia. The claims were answered by Paparrigopoulos himself, by reinstating his 1843 position that there was indeed a Slavic presence in the Peloponnesus in the Middle Ages, but that the Greeks need not worry because the Slavs were culturally absorbed…” (“The Nation and its Ruins”, by Yannis Hamilakis, page 115.)

23. “In 1358 the Albanians overran Epirus, Acarnania and Anatolia and established two principalities under their leaders…

Naupactas fell into their control in 1378…

Other Albanians and Vlachs invaded the Catalan principality of Boeotia and Attica, and a great many Albanians settled there as peasant-farmers in 1368 and later…

The penetration of the Greek mainland which we have described occurred during the hundred or more years after 1325.” (“Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas”, by Nicholas G. L. Hammond, page 59.)

24. “When arriving by airplane at Athens, one lands at the new airport at Spata. Spata is a town situated in the Messogia region that bears and Arvanite name that means ‘axe’ or ‘sword’ (in Greek ‘spaps’, spaya from which derives the Albanian Spata). The term ‘Arvanite’ is the medieval equivalent of ‘Albanian’. It is retained today for the descendants of the Albanian tribes that migrated to the Greek lands during the period covering two centuries, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth.” (“Hellenism Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity”, edited by Katerina Zacharia, page 230.)

25. “With them it would be a resurrection, accomplished, no doubt, after vast pains and many troubles, the more so since the Greeks are a composite people among whom the descendents of the veritable Greeks of old are in great minority. The majority are of Albanian and Suliot blood, races which even the Romans found untamable.” (“In Greek Waters: a story of the Grecian War of Independence (1821-1827), by G. A. Henty, 1893, page 40.)

26. “Where are we to look for the descendents of the Greeks of old? Travelers tell us that, as late as the sixteenth century, Athens was but a castle with a small village; and that Sparta, divided by two tribes of the Slavi, the Ezeriti and the Milingi, had not only lost her ancient name, but it was impossible to recognize the site in which she had stood of old.” (“History of the Island of Corfu” by Henry Jervis-White Jervis ESQ., page 250.)