Introduction

Introduction

Our apologies to the Greek people if they find this book offensive. Our objective here is NOT to create tension between the Macedonian and Greek people but rather to highlight the problem that exists within the Greek State and its institutions. As long as the Greek State denies our existence as Macedonians with rights and privileges, we will continue to publish these kind of books.

To those numerous Greeks who wrote me to ask “Why are you doing this?” referring to why I wrote the series of articles “BIG Greek Lies”, I say this: For nearly a century we Macedonians have reasoned with you Greeks, defending our Macedonian identity and pleading our case to your governments to level the playing field for Macedonians in Greece without success. We asked that you “Recognize the Macedonian identity in Greece!” Give the Macedonians rights to be Macedonians and to speak their Macedonian mother tongue! And all we received from you is “There is no such thing as Macedonians!” You try to explain our existence by calling us “Paleo-Vulgary” (ancient-Bulgars), “Slavs”, “Skopjans”, “Fyromians”, “Gypsies”, “Tito’s creation”, etc, etc. In other words, every time Macedonians ask for their rights, Greece is quick to deny them, insisting that Macedonians don’t exist and treating Macedonians as second class citizens without even the least basic of human rights.

So, the real question is “Why are YOU doing this?”

The “Little Book of BIG Greek Lies” is an eye opener for the readers who don’t know much about the life of minorities inside Greece and the real identity of the living Greeks of today. The twenty “BIG Greek Lies” presented here reveal the “Greek Hypocrisy” and the Greek attitude towards its indigenous people and its minorities.

To my Greeks opponents I say this: “You had it your way for nearly a century with plenty of opportunity to make things right. Now it’s time for you to reflect on your 19th century creation and see what it has done, not only to the Macedonians but also to all the other cultures it has destroyed in the name of ‘Hellenism’”.

Let the airing of Greek dirty laundry begin!

BIG Greek Lie # 1 - “Modern Greeks are direct descendents of the Ancient Greeks”

(The greatest victims of Greek lies are the Greeks themselves)

How can a region in the Balkans where modern Greece is located today, which has been open to a multitude of invasions, conquests and settlements, remain homogeneous and untouched for two thousand seven hundred years? Ironically, as the Greeks claim, how can modern Macedonia, a region neighbouring modern Greece be so heterogeneous that it has completely lost its original identity?

These are questions that every Greek should be asking!

Ever since Philip II of Macedonia conquered the ancient City States at the conclusion of the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, the region south of Olympus has been without borders and open to all kinds of invasions and barbarian settlements. How can one call a people of 2,300 years ago “Ancient Greeks” since the word “Greek” was not coined until after the Roman conquests, approximately 600 years after the establishment of the City States and approximately 150 years after they were conquered by the Macedonians? If you were to say “the ancient Canadians living on their lands 2,000 years ago” you would be ridiculed and told “there were no ancient Canadians” and the people to whom you are referring who had once lived on the lands of present Canada had nothing to do with the Canadians of today! Yet, everyday you hear the word “ancient Greeks” and you don’t bat an eye! Why is that? It is also well known that the ancient City States were never united politically and never established themselves as a single state. In fact they existed politically independent from one another and fought each other for economic dominance of the region. The name “Greece” was imposed on the modern Greek Kingdom by the Great Powers Britain, France and Russia. Modern Greeks call themselves Hellenes (Ellines) and their state Hellas (Ellas), a name borrowed from the past which neither describes the elements of a nation or those of an ethnicity. By using the name “Greek” to refer to both the ancient and modern people, the Greek state falsely implies descent for the modern Greeks from the ancients. By using the name “Greece” to refer to both the ancient and modern states, the Greek State is falsely implying;

(1) continuity between the ancient City States and modern Greece, and (2) that there was some sort of political unity between the ancient City States themselves where one did not exist. In reality the words “Greece” and “Greek” were popularized by modern 19th century writers. There are no ancient maps or references with the words “Greece”. The Romans may have made some references to the ancient people living in Sicily as “Grecos” but they referred to the region south of Olympus as Achaia. During the Ottoman era the people living south of Olympus called themselves Romeos (Romans). Greece is a newly created state which never existed before the 19th century. The Kingdom of Greece, occupying the region of Morea, present day Peloponnesus, was created for the first time in 1829. Between 1829 and 1912 the Greeks enlarged their territory to present day Greece, by conquering Epirus, Thessaly and 51% of Macedonia. At its inception Greece started out with a small population of less than one million people, most of whom were Albanians, Slavs and Vlahs with a small minority of other ethnicities. By the time Greece conquered Epirus and Thessaly, its population grew to three times its original size. In 1907 it registered a population of 2,600,000. After it conquered Macedonia and exchanged populations with Turkey, its population tripled. In 1928 Greece registered 6,200,000 people. 1,100,000 of them were Christians, refugees from Asia Minor. After the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, and after the population exchanges with Turkey, Greece declared itself homogenous consisting of 100% pure Greeks with a very small Muslim but ethnically Greek population. It is estimated that after Macedonia was conquered, occupied and had some of its population evicted, more than one million Macedonians still remained and were included among the Greeks. According to Greece however, there were no non-Greeks left in Macedonia after its population exchanges. Also, according to Greece, the ancient Macedonians were extinct, killed off by the Slavs around the 6th century AD during the so-called Slav invasions. So the question that begs to be asked here is, “What ethnicity were these million or so people who remained in Macedonia and became part of Greece?” Many Greeks would argue that they were Bulgarians! If that were the case, then how can the modern Greeks claim purity and homogeneity if at least 16% of its population in 1928 was non-Greek? What about its Vlah, Slav, Albanian and Turkish elements? Clearly they are not Greeks, let alone being direct descendents of the so-called “ancient Greeks”. Even this small argument shows that there is something “fishy” about these Greek claims. For over a century and a half, Greek State institutions, organizations and individuals have been making unproven and unfounded allegations that the modern Greeks are direct descendents of the ancients. To this day they have shown no evidence to prove their claims. In fact the opposite is true. There is ample evidence that proves that this particular modern Greek claim is an outright BIG Greek lie. This exact issue was tackled by Historian John Shea [1]. Among other things, Shea proves that even the ancient people were not homogeneous. “It has been estimated that in classical times the number of slaves in Attica was roughly equal to the number of free inhabitants, or around 100,000. In Sparta there was an even greater proportion of slaves, and most of them, the helots, were Messenians. While the slaves of Athens were a wide racial mix and therefore less likely to unite on the basis of a common language, these Messenian helots of Sparta all spoke Greek, and had a kind of group self-consciousness. Thus they presented ‘special problems of security for their Spartan masters, whose numbers were constantly on the decline.’ Changes in the ethnic composition of Greek city-states are illustrated by the comments about the case of Piso. Piso, who had been the recipient of an unhelpful decision by a vote of the Athenian city assembly, ‘made a violent speech in which he said that the latter-day Athenians had no right to identify themselves with the great Athenians of the days of Pericles, Demosthenes, Aeschylus, and Plato.

The ancient Athenians had been extirpated by repeated wars and massacres and these were mere mongrels, degenerates, and the descendants of slaves. He said that any Roman who flattered them as if they were the legitimate heirs of those ancient heroes was lowering the dignity of the Roman name.’ Such historical ideas make it clear that even two thousand years ago the notion of ethnic purity amongst the so-called Greeks was difficult to sustain. The ethnic mix continued over the next two thousand years. As Nicol has observed, ‘The ancient Greeks were, after all, of very mixed ancestry; and there can be no doubt that the Byzantine Greeks, both before and after the Slav occupation, were even more heterogenous’.” [2] And there you have it!