BANITSA DURING THE BALKAN WARS AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR 1912–1918

BANITSA DURING THE BALKAN WARS AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR 1912–1918

Banitsa’s Participation in These Wars

The First Balkan War was declared on 8 October 1912, when the allied armies of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro inflicted heavy losses on the Turkish army, forcing Turkey to seek a truce on 4 December 1912. Final clashes took place in the region of Banitsa. The war with Turkey was legally concluded with the signing of the London Peace Treaty on 30 May 1913, in which the territory of the European part of Turkey was ceded to the allies without determining precise borders. The 1913 Peace Treaty between the Balkan allies, the so-called Treaty of Bucharest, placed Macedonia in a totally new position: It was divided and annexed by Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. This division was meant to forever prevent the Macedonian people from fighting for their right to self-determination and for their own jurisdictional development. However, mutual misunderstandings arose as to who should take and keep the largest part of Macedonia.

In 1913 Serbia and Greece make a pact, and on 29 June 1913 declared war on Bulgaria. Thus, began the Second Balkan War with the division of Macedonia as the cause. The regular Greek army arrived in Lerin and Lerin District and occupied all the militarily strategic positions, especially in Banitsa. The already-difficult economic and political situation was becoming even worse.

The Greek army began conscription by force in Macedonian villages to fill its ranks. In Banitsa, 25 people were mobilized and sent

to special training centres. They were quickly trained and sent to the front line against the Bulgarians.

In 1915 many Macedonians started to desert the Greek army and ran off to Bulgaria. Those who ran off to Serbia were captured and returned to the Greek authorities, brought before a military court and shot.

Several people from Banitsa managed to escape from the Greek andartes, who had become part of the regular army by that time. They were Lazo Gogov, Kitse Gogov, Pande Perov, Pande Alushev, Lazo Dzugomanov, Done Rapov, Kire Janin, Pando Malinov, Risto Kochev, Ilo Nedelkov and Kitse Chorlinov.15

Virtually all those from Banitsa who escaped to Bulgaria remained in that country. They were afraid to return to their birthplace because of the threat of court martial. Two of them, however, returned from Bulgaria to Banitsa in 1920, Ilo Nedelkov and Kitse Chorlinov. The Greek government, now definitively the occupier of this part of Macedonia, did not enact sanctions against these people. Instead, they gave them amnesty and freed them of charges of desertion.

During the First World War, from 1915 to 1918 in Lerin District the Greek and Serbian allies were joined by France. Due to Banitsa’s strategic position, the French established their operational military headquarters there. A large French military hospital was built near the village ofPadinite,and there,allthe illand wounded fromthe frontwere treated.

The Greek authorities did not rest, and with the help of some Grkomani (Macedonians who aligned themselves with the Greeks or declared themselves to be Greeks), did everything possible to suffocate the Macedonian revolutionary movement in Banitsa. Honourable Macedonian revolutionaries and Illinden veterans were betrayed to

15Pando Malinov was a second cousin to Dzole Mallin, who married Dzole Gjergev’s daughter Kitsa. Risto Kochev later became a landlord to Evan Mallin and his family on Pape Ave. in Toronto.

French military headquarters. They were tortured, beaten, and held in military prisons, some of which were in France. In 1915, the following people were interned: Petse Hrisafov, Kole Malinov, Mitse Hrisafov, Father Filip Popov, Filip Dafov, Lazo Dafov, Mitse Gogov, Dine Abov, Natse Ziskov, Filip Abov, Nunche Abov and Vasil Ziskov.

All of the above-mentioned people were court-martialled in France. Vasil Ziskov was sentenced to death and shot, while the others were sentenced to many years in prison. They were all charged with undermining military authority and treason in service to the other side, i.e. they were falsely accused of working for Bulgaria. They were all members of IMRO, combatants in the Ilinden Uprising, and members of revolutionary committees—in other words, all were honourable Macedonians fighting for their people and the independence of Macedonia.

In the French prisons, living conditions were very difficult. Forced labour lasted from 15 to 18 hours a day and prisoners were severely punished and beaten for every minor mistake and transgression. Naumche Abov and Filip Abov did not survive the cruelty and torture and died in prison. The French authorities did not inform the families of the deceased, who had, ever since their arrest in 1915, feared them dead because the prisoners had not been not allowed to contact them from prison.

With the end of the First World War, those who survived were released and went home. Only then did the families find out about the death sentence of Vasil Ziskov and the deaths of Naumche Abov and Filip Abov. The survivors spoke of the suffering they endured in the “prisons of death”. Upon their release, the survivors were hardly recognizable: they were skin and bones, and looked 100 years old dressed in prisoners’ rags. It took many years and special care for their wounds to heal and for them to recover.

In the spring of 1915, only one person from Banitsa, Gjorgi Janchev, joined the Bulgarian army to fight for the Bulgarians on Kajmakchalan. In the autumn of that same year, he returned to Banitsa on a 15-day leave and,forunknown reasons,did notgo back to the front.

The Bulgarian Army arrested him, treated him as a deserter, and executed him near Bitola under the pretext that he had tried to escape. His wife, Magda, and his two sons, Natse and Krishe, were left behind. This crime of the Bulgarian soldiers went unpunished.

Banitsa in the War Zone

An interesting fact is that in the period from 1912, the beginning of the Balkan Wars, until the end of the First World War in 1918, all of the people in Banitsa and the surrounding villages were mobilized to participate in the construction of strategic military roads, the digging and construction of trenches, storage caches, hospitals and various other military facilities. The villagers, together with their carts, were pressed into service in order to transport ammunition, food and war materiel to the front. From there they transferred severely injured soldiers and officers to the French hospital near Banitsa. Both men and women participated in the burial of the allies’ soldiers and officers.

During this period, military activities occurred both in the vicinity of the village and in the village itself. Because of its strategic position, Banitsa was often swapped from one subjugator to another. The population of Banitsa was at times evacuated to the more-remote southern villages ranging from Sorovich to Kozhani and to the northern villages of Voshtarani and Zhivojno. Banitsa was destroyed and burned down several times and rebuilt again on the same site. There were plans to re-settle the population in other villages of the Lerin district in order to stop them from rebuilding Banitsa, with the excuse of new upcoming military activity and further destruction. The villagers did not give up. As soon as a battle was done, they immediately started re-building houses and other facilities. There was a great sense of solidarity among the villagers during reconstruction.

Many infectious diseases spread among the soldiers and thence to the population as well. Despite the medical help given by the French hospital, many villagers died of typhoid and other diseases. Unfortunately, these diseases at times even struck down several members of the same family.

Banitsa after the First World War

After the end of the Balkan wars and the division of Macedonia into three parts, Banitsa became part of Greece. The people faced a difficult period, on account of the revolutionary activity of the villagers in the period from 1892 to 1918. Fierce persecution began against the families of participants in the Ilinden Uprising, especially those families whose fighters had sought refuge in Bulgaria. Those families were forced to leave their birthplace and join their family members in Bulgaria or Serbia. In the last phase of the war, the village had been demolished and burned to the ground, and re-construction efforts were notsupported by the newGreek government.Ageneralfamine occurred because the military powers confiscated all the crops for use by the military. The villagers were lacking wheat seed to plant for the following year. The last of their savings was running out, and market prices were extremely high, which meant that the black market was flourishing. The villagers asked for a loan of seed for which the promised for every one oka (1.2 kg) of wheat seed loaned a return of two to three okas from the next year’s crop. Thus, began a difficult new life for the populace. Thousands of hectares of forest in the region of Banitsa had been destroyed, cut down and burned for the needs of the army around Banitsa, thus making construction and building material unavailable. Many ruined forests were never restored.

With the signing of the Treaty of Bucharest, Macedonia was divided into three parts and distributed among three nations. Greece received Macedonia’s southern coastal territory of 35,169 square kilometres and a population of 1,042,059 people, of whom 329,371 were Macedonians, 314,854 Turkish, 266,755 Greek and 68,206 were Jews and other nationalities (Albanians, Roma, etc.).

The peace treaties concluded after World War I sanctioned the division of Macedonia. However, the victorious powers concluded an agreement with Greece on 10 August 1920 and imposed stipulations in the agreement to protect non-Greek populations in Greece. The Great

Greek Encyclopaedia of 1934, Volume 10, page 620, listed these obligations of Greece which arose from this agreement:

a) equality of all ethnic groups in terms of life, liberty, civil and political rights;

b) the free use of both Greek and foreign languages in public and private life;

c) the right of all ethnic minorities living in Greece to their own humanitarian organizations, churches and schools;

d) the provision of elementary education in their own languages for all ethnic minorities, without forbidding them education in Greek.

In order to comply with this agreement, the Greek government in 1925 decided to take steps to fulfil its obligations to the other ethnic groups and specifically to the Macedonians. Towards that end a commission was formed to create a primer for Macedonian elementary schools. The publishing house “Sakelariu” issued the first primer, “Abecedar,” in 1925 in the Macedonian language, but in Latin letters. Immediately afterwards, copies of the book were seized and its distribution to the schools of Aegean Macedonia was cancelled.16

The Greeks did not fulfil their commitments to the rights of Macedonian people and tried to obliterate every trace the Macedonian character of Aegean Macedonia.

In November 1926, a law was enacted to change the names of communities (towns and villages) as well as the topographical names of rivers, mountains, etc. This law was published in Number 332 of the official Greek government gazette “Efimeris tis kiverniseos” XXX on 21 November 1926, and in Number 342 of the same gazette, the new Greek names were published. At the same time, local governments brought in regulations to change the first and last names of every Macedonian to Greek names. They gave them identity cards with their

16The Greek government probably chose the Roman alphabet for this primer to distance the Macedonian population from its Cyrillic heritage and Slavic neighbours.

new Greek names which were also officially entered in their birth registers.

The Macedonian people, dissatisfied with the division of Macedonia, joined socialist movements and parties as soon as they appeared,in theirstruggle foreconomic,socialand nationalrights.With the victory of the socialist revolution in Russia and the appearance of the CPG (the Communist Party of Greece), the intelligentsia and working class began to join the CPG which had a policy to promote freedom, economicandsocial justicefor all nationalities andminorities. The CPG promised freedom from slavery and oppression in an open struggle against capitalism and imperialism.

At this time, several different political parties were formed, ranging from liberal-democratic to far-right. Some of the residents of Banitsa joined the party of King Constantine and the People’s Party (Lajko Koma), and but more joined Venizelos’s Fileleftero Koma because of the party’s more liberal and democratic platform.

In 1920, during the first election campaign in Greece since its occupation of Aegean Macedonia, some members of the Venizelos party were arrested, taken to Lerin and brought before the courts. Convicted and sentenced to a year and a half in prison were Dinkata Katin, Leko Katin and Tole Kochev. Mitse Robev and Mitse Katin were sentenced to two years each. The first three served their time in Lerin, the others in Solun.

In 1922, on a religious holiday, people of Banitsa went to a service at St. George’s Church. A brawl broke out between the Macedonian villagers and Greek gendarmes who tried to enter by force but were prevented by Leko Dukov and Stojche Chorlinov. The policemen were beaten up by the villagers. The mayor, Mitse Hrisafov-Tudzarot, went to Lerin to complain about the conduct of the gendarmes and requested their transfer, which was subsequently done.

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