Introduction - Part 02

"Greece with one-fifth Turkey's area has 1,500,000 more people. Turkey with a population of 5,000,000 and naturally rich territory contains only 15 people to the square mile...Greece, with less than one fifth of Turkey's area, emerges with a population exceeding the latter's for the fist time by 1,500,000 people averaging 123 to the square mile." (National Geographic, November 1925. Page 584) "History's Greatest Trek has cost 300,000 lives. Conservative estimates place it at 300,000 lives lost by disease and exposure." (National Geographic, November 1925. Page 584) "The actual exchange was weighted very heavily in Turkey's favour, for some 380,000 Muslims were exchanged for something like 1,100,000 Christians." "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." (Richard Clogg. “A Short History of Modern Greece”. Page 121) After all this, surprisingly (and shamefully) Greece still claims that its population is homogeneous; direct descendents of the peoples of the ancient City States. "If Greece exists today as a homogeneous ethnos, she owes this to [the Asia Minor Catastrophe]. If the hundreds of thousands of refugees had not come to Greece, Greek Macedonia would not exist today. The refugees created the national homogeneity of our country. (Antonios Kandiotis, Metrpolite of Florina, in Anastasia Karakasidou’s book “Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood”. Page 141) According to Karakasidou, almost half of the refugees were settled in urban centers and rural areas in Macedonia. "Searching for locations in which to settle this mass of humanity, the Greek government looked north to the newly incorporated land in Macedonia..." "...by 1930, 90 percent of the 578,844 refugees settled in rural Greece were concentrated in the regions of Macedonia and western Thrace. Thus Macedonia, Greece's newly acquired second 'breadbasket' (after Thessaly), became the depository for East Thracian, Pontic, and Asia Minor refugees." (Anastasia Karakasidou. “Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood”. Page 145) By the 1923 Lausanne Agreement Greece expelled 394,108 Turkish Moslems to Turkey. Included in this number were more than 40,000 Moslem Macedonians. Turkey on the other hand transferred 1,221,849 Christian refugees to Greece of which 538,595 were settled in Greek occupied Macedonia. When we speak of “confiscated Macedonian lands” by the Greek state we often speak of the lands of those Macedonians who were killed, evicted or fled their homeland but rarely do we speak of the land confiscations due to the Land Redistribution Program that the Greek state introduced in 1928-1929 in Greek occupied Macedonia. Faced with a huge influx of settlers during the early 1920’s Greece was running out of space and as Karakasidou rightly pointed out, a large number of these settlers were concentrated in Macedonia. In addition to taking the vacant lands of those Macedonians who had been driven out, the Greek state used the Land Redistribution Program to also take the lands of those Macedonians who were still living in Greek occupied Macedonia. Families suffered land expropriations despite their claims to legal titles of ownership. Even before the Land Redistribution Program was put into place, many Macedonian families were experiencing economic hardships and male family members were forced to seek work outside of their communities as far away as Canada, the USA and Australia. The following is an excerpt from the book “Children of the Bird Goddess” by Kita Sapurma & Pandora Petrovska which eloquently illustrates the Macedonian peoples’ plight both at home and abroad. “Pechalba [migrant work] was definitely not for the weak at heart. It was the ultimate test for the Macedonian man. These are the unsung heroes, without whose toil this great country [Australia] would not have prospered so.

They gave their youth, their energy, bloodied sweat and lives in the development of Australia's fledgling heavy industries and pastoral wealth, only to be called ‘dagos’ and treated like second class citizens by the Anglo- Australians who had little tolerance for these newcomers. The work in the bush camp ground to a halt and my father had to find other forms of employment, however by now this was the time of increasing depression in Australia and work was not always so easy to come by. Even though work in the bush camps was very hard, the workers were paid a mere pittance and it was so difficult to save enough to pay for one's fare back home, much less save enough to send to family back home. The 1920s were a period of economic growth for Australia with incentives for immigration. The Wall Street crash in 1929 and the Great Depression had its effect in Australia with the basic wage being more severely cut. At one stage Spase managed to find some work on a sheep station where he did all sorts of manual labour including making fences and handling the sheep. The boss was a cruel man who treated his workers, particularly the Aborigines, with contempt. My father used to recount the time when he was verbally abused and forbidden to even fill his billy with water from the garden tap. And he would say that you would not even contemplate knocking on the back door, much less entering the homestead. He was abused by the boss and told to get water from the sheep's trough, as that water was good enough. This reflected the horrendous attitude towards the newcomers who were considered to be little better than animals. Spase used to say that the boss' dog lived better than he did. ‘I wish I was born a dog in Australia, like Rusty. He ate more meat than I did and was certainly treated a lot better.’ This was the way they treated itinerant ‘dago’ workers like Spase, which was nothing compared to the treatment received by the indigenous people whose land they possessed. After unsuccessfully searching for work, Spase decided to become a fruit vendor. He bought a basket and some oranges and began selling them from house to house in Perth, in order to survive. By now he had managed to pick up some English. When he had a good day selling, he could afford to buy himself a loaf of bread and milk for a meal, on a poor day with few sales he would eat his oranges for breakfast, lunch and dinner and think about the smell of the cooked meat given to Rusty. After this unsuccessful venture he went into business with a friend from Rakovo from the Panovski clan. This man had enough money to open a small fish and chips shop, but because of the depression their venture was not successful. At the same time the banks crashed and many wealthy people went broke. This is why Spase's advice to us and our children was to be wary of debt, because he had known only too well what Australia was like in economic crisis. There were no unemployment benefits and welfare services for immigrants or workers. The lower echelons of society were very much on their own in terms of day to day survival. He would speak vividly of the soup kitchens and the lines of destitute people queuing for their daily meal. Because of the very bad economic situation, it was clear that Spase could not make a living much less a fortune and his father sent him money to pay for his fare back to [Greek occupied] Macedonia. This was a very demoralizing situation as it was shameful for a man to return home without any money. This is why some pechalbari failed to return home even after ten, fifteen or even twenty years. It took them such a long time to save any real amount of money because of their very small wages. It was thought to be proof of their laziness or ineptitude as a provider or ‘domakin’. As a man of integrity and a very hard worker, this shame was very difficult for Spase to bear, but upon returning to the village, when he learnt that all their property had been confiscated by the Greek government and reallocated to incoming refugees, this was a doubled edged grief that was almost intolerable for Spase.

Upon his return, he found all the women about the house. Nobody was out in the fields. This he found to be quite strange, especially in the middle of summer when there were any number of jobs that needed to be done in the fields. But when his mother could no longer evade his questions and told him that the family no longer had any land, he screamed in a furious rage, asking them why they had not told him as it would have been better for him to stay in Australia. One would have to wonder why it would have been better to stay in depression ridden Australia, eating oranges and drinking water from sheep troughs, rather than coming home. Could this have been more appealing or tolerable for Spase than a life as a dispossessed landholder and second class citizen in his own land? It is difficult to understand the effect of the repressive environment on the men. Their inability to provide for their families as they watched helplessly whilst strangers worked their land was absolutely intolerable for them. The dispossession left its mark on all of us especially as the men folk became increasingly angry and frustrated. Because they did not wail, their grief for the land did not become fossilized in the folklore. Rather they tried to lose themselves in another world created with the help of the strong spirit drink, ‘rakija’. The only way to appease their own inner turmoil and sense of failure was to leave. This is what my father did. When my father left [again for Australia] in 1936, my grandmother asked him to complete the ritual for a safe journey and safe return as he was leaving. This entailed knocking over an earthen pot of water at the threshold of the house. This signified an easy journey and easy trip. My grandmother asked him to knock over the water and he refused, saying ‘When that rock is able to roll uphill, that is when I will return to this land.’ My grandmother was devastated by this reaction and took this event as a premonition that her son would not return to this threshold again, which was correct. My father and mother spent a further ten years apart. My father doing an assortment of labouring jobs in Australia and my mother trying to raise a family by herself. I don't fully understand why my father insisted on coming to Australia the second time. Life was difficult but it was more than that. The dispossession of land affected the men folk in a different way. The untold devastation as they would walk past their fields being worked by others took its toll in the form of blind anger and sheer frustration which was often then vented on the womenfolk. My grandfather became a recluse away from the village and my father left. Family life was changed forever. They were no longer proud landholders and their standing in the village as well as standard of living fell. They could no longer farm their land and feed their families from the produce, rather they had to do jobs for others as well as shepherding, which was considered the lowliest job. By going on work migration my father thought he could salvage his self esteem and bring better life chances for his family.” (Kita Sapurma & Pandora Petrovska. “Children of the Bird Goddess”. Pollitecon Publications. 1997. Pages 67-69 and 74-75) The following segment was taken from John S. Koliopouls’s book “Plundered Loyalties” and represents the Greek point of view on the situation. “In Eordaea, where large numbers of refugees had been settled in the houses and lands abandoned by the Muslims, officials struggled to squeeze out more land, especially in or around Slav-speaking villages like Emporion and Komanos. In the village of Karyochori in the same district more than 200 families were given the land which had previously sustained less than half that number of Muslim families. About 3.25 hectares for each family were allotted, of which only one-third was fertile; or so they maintained ten years later, when 122 inhabitants petitioned the authorities to resettle them elsewhere, preferably in the plain of Central Macedonia.

It should finally be mentioned that ever since 1913 a steady trickle of Christian families from the newly-founded independent Albanian state settled mostly in villages in the districts of Kastoria and Kozani and, almost as a rule, with relatives. This kind of settlement went on more or less unnoticed by the authorities, but by contrast everyone appeared to take an interest in the refugees from European and Asiatic Turkey, who became an instrument of national policy. The opposite would have been surprising. A few hundred Anatolian refugee families were even settled in the brigand preserve of Servia to strengthen communities against the swift-footed and predatory pastoralists of Mt Chassia. Above all, refugees were sent north to settle around and amidst Slav Macedonians in the hope that such settlement would facilitate their 'Hellenisation', in speech no less than in sentiment. However, the need to unburden the country's port cities of several hundred thousand destitute refugees as quickly as possible did not allow time to send north 'suitable' refugees or take proper account of the capacity of the receiving places to secure a tolerable existence for the newcomers. Thus almost half the refugees settled in the district of Florina spoke Turkish and little or no Greek. Many Pontians spoke Turkish, and the Caucasians spoke a form of Greek unintelligible to most Greek-speakers, let alone to the Slav Macedonians whom the refugees were expected to Hellenize in speech. Hordes of destitute humanity went north determined to take root in lands claimed or already occupied by the indigenous peasants. The newcomers brought with them, along with the determination of the survivors of a great disaster, the support of the authorities who were eager to secure the contested region in the way their counterparts across the border were trying to secure their own lands, namely by strengthening the dominant linguistic and cultural element of the national state against all other groups. The influx of refugees in villages where the available land was insufficient to satisfy their needs created unbearable pressures on the Slav Macedonians to leave their homes for less inhospitable lands than those they were obliged to share with newcomers whom they despised. Those who chose to remain did so for all the reasons why peasants everywhere have always chosen to live next to unwelcome newcomers and under unfriendly rulers. As a result of this type of settlement, old cleavages and conflicts, dating from the Greek-Bulgarian conflict at the beginning of the century, already described, were intensified, especially in mixed villages and towns. One reason for the intensification of conflict concerned land. Indigenous peasants, Greek- and Slav-speaking, resented the distribution of Muslim and communal land to the refugees. Cultural differences between these people and the refugees kept the two communities further apart. And administrators from southern Greece, bearers of an ideology and policy aiming to obliterate linguistic traces other than Greek, put Slav Macedonians at a disadvantage compared to other Greeks and turned the existing gap into a dangerous chasm. Many villages, particularly mixed ones, quarreled over disputed land, and were torn apart and bled white as the result of costly lawsuits. It took more than ten years to draw village boundaries on pastureland, while many disputes over arable land were settled only after the Second World War. Officials of the Commission for the Settlement of Refugees, who were themselves refugees or associated with refugee interests, were expected to favour the newcomers in their disputes with the indigenous peasants over lands.” (John S. Koliopouls. “Plundered Loyalties”. Pages 42-43) Besides colonizing Macedonia with foreign refugees and usurping Macedonian lands the Greek state in the 1920’s also initiated a Helenization program to turn Macedonians into Greeks.

Hellenizing Greek occupied Macedonia

Hellenization of the Macedonian people began way before Macedonia’s invasion, occupation and partition by Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria. It began with the introduction of the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian Churches in Macedonia. When in 1878 Macedonia was given back to the Ottomans by the Western Powers, its status became “undetermined” with implications that Macedonian territories were now up for grabs. There were no Greeks, Serbians or Bulgarians living in Macedonia prior to the introduction of the foreign Churches there because these nations never existed before. Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria are 19th century artificially created nation-states, created from the same ethnic Christian composition but each nation was artificially designed to support the aims of the Great Power which created it. Using the same principles of artificiality with which they themselves were created, Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria through their respective churches began to spread propaganda in an attempt to convince the Macedonian population that only Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians existed in Macedonia. Their aims were designed not only to convince Macedonians but also to convince the outside world and pave the way for Macedonia’s occupation. The population exchanges that subsequently followed were nothing more than expelling those people who the three states felt would be a threat to their objectives. Macedonians were not Greek, Serbian or Bulgarian that is why these states, particularly Greece, had to apply extreme measures to suppress them. Soon after the Greek government established rule in Greek occupied Macedonia it opened Greek language schools to teach the entire Macedonian population to speak Greek. While children attended regular school, adults were expected to attend night school. Besides Hellenizing the Macedonian population by teaching it to speak Greek, the Greek state also took measures to eliminate everything that was Macedonian. By law promulgated on November 21, 1926, all place names (toponymia) in Greek occupied Macedonia were Hellenized. All Macedonian names of cities, towns, villages, rivers, lakes, mountains, etc., were changed to Greek ones. In a similar manner, Macedonian families were forced to change their Macedonian last names to Greek ones. Even individual given names were changed forcing alien names upon the Macedonian population. Since then to this day families lost continuity with their relatives especially those who had fled Greece before Hellenization policies were put in place. For those who don’t know what “Hellenization” is, it is a process of assimilating people from various ethnic groups such as Macedonians, Vlachs, Albanians, Turks, etc., and turning them into Greeks. To an outsider this may seem strange and even comical but to Macedonians who were born in Greek occupied Macedonia and who had lived through this process, it was a living nightmare. Many Macedonians have relatives; brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, etc., who have been Hellenized by Greek propaganda and today are the staunchest Greeks. The so called Greeks who are indigenous to Greek occupied Macedonia are no more than an artificial construct of Greek propaganda. They say they are Greek because since the occupation of Greek occupied Macedonia the Greek educational system has been telling them that they are Greeks and punishing them for feeling Macedonian. What follows is a true story exactly as told by Peter Minas who attended Greek school in 1950, the only schooling available to Macedonians: “A Young Boy that was I no more than 10 years old, playing with friends in the neighbourhood yard, not aware that we had been watched by none other than the teacher of our class. Unaware of the political situation, feeling joy in my heart I called out to my friend Done in my native Macedonian tongue to, ‘Come and play with us’. Next morning in class, I hear the loud voice of my teacher asking to know ‘Who is the one who still speaks in his native tongue?’ All around fear I see, I'm told to get up and stand in front of the class.

I find the courage to rise up. ‘You are a traitor, he said to me. ‘You don't belong here. Take your books and go. Bulgaria is the place for you.’ He takes me by my arms throws me on the floor, attacking me with his feet and the long stick that he holds. I look up with tears streaming down my face and with courage that I had never felt before I say in a choking voice “Teacher I don't know what traitor means I haven't done anything Wrong. That's the language we speak at home.’ I'm humiliated; my knees are weak. O Lord why is this happening to me. I want to go home and hide from the world. In the days and months that follow I am isolated by all. They are told not to play with me or else... I am so alone. I could not have known then that the Greeks would use such tactics on old and young to achieve their goal. First they destroy your soul then take away your identity. That black autumn day in 1950 I was not alone Our Lord Jesus Christ was there. He raised me up and restored my soul. I have been living in this wonderful country that is called Canada for the last 55 years. I had a successful career; I have a loving family and many close relatives and friends.” (Peter Minas). Here is another story from a young girl who was punished by her teacher for being Macedonian: “My first visit to school did not last very long. No sooner had I been shown to my classroom, I was greeted by my teacher, who instead of showing me to my place proceeded to sarcastically ridicule me in front of the other students. I did not understand all that he was saying, but his problem was the fact that I was wearing traditional Macedonian clothes, those my mother had made for me, instead of the correct school uniform. He grabbed my braided hair with the ribbons and coins, whilst facing me, pulling my head backwards. I winced. The venom in his words stung as much as my hair which felt as if it was being ripped out by the roots. ‘How dare you come dressed in these rags and get that rubbish out of your hair! You need a blue and white tunic and blue and white ribbons,’ explained the other children who translated for me. ‘Go home and change, I never want to see you dressed in village rags like this again!’ I remember stumbling out of the school grounds, tears streaming down my cheeks; by the time I ran home, I was sobbing incessantly and hyperventilating. My grandmother took fright when she saw me and grabbed me wanting to know what had happened. My mother came running out of the house when she heard my grandmother's commotion and became distressed herself when I could not stop sobbing long enough to tell them what my first five minutes of school had been like. At that moment I wanted my father to be home, more than anything else. I knew that had he been there he would have dealt with the teacher in no uncertain terms, as only a father could handle the situation. They made me sit down and gave me a spoon full of sugar to settle me down and finally I could get the words out. I told them that my finest clothes were not good enough to wear to school, the teacher called them rags and my traditionally braided hair with red ribbons and coins was inappropriate for school also. I needed to wear the colours of Greece. When I had finally explained what had happened, I thought my grandmother would explode, she began cursing incessantly that the teacher and the Greek regime be struck down with a paralytic disease, that they burn in the devil's own domain, that pestilence and disaster mark their day and so forth. Once she had regained her composure the question ‘Where am I going to find you a blue and white tunic?’ arose. I could hear my mother and grandmother talking and yelling and cursing as they rummaged through the chests and cupboards where they kept cloth and garments. They managed to find part of an old dress and put it over my finest clothes and I was forced, practically pulling and screaming back to school, though I never wanted to return. The old raggy dress over my clothes was a signal to the teacher that my grandmother and mother believed that the raggiest dress was good enough for their school uniform.

When my grandfather and uncle returned home, they were furious and in no uncertain terms had their bit to say to the ‘educators’. To say that I hated school would be an understatement, not because I hated learning, on the contrary, I was intelligent and wanted to achieve. The fact that today I have four university educated daughters is indicative of that intelligence. But I hated the way the teachers made me feel. Early on in the process, my first five minutes at school taught me that my mother's and grandmother's handiwork, culture and traditions were worthless, and inherent in that negative reinforcement was a feeling of my own worthlessness. I suppose it wasn't until I went to school that I realized that the Greek language was the language of the colonizing power. Even though Macedonian was spoken in the village, at home and with relatives, the necessary form of communication at school and church was Greek. We spoke it with a thick accent because we were Macedonian bilinguals. We were taught that our Macedonian language was inconsequential, that it had no name, alphabet and could not be taught. That it was not a language of ‘high’ communication, that is, one could not stand up and present a lecture or a speech in Macedonian because it was just a nothing or mongrel language with no structure or words, just remnants of the languages of the passing warlords. It wasn't until I was in Australia that I realized that this was totally incorrect. I learned that there was an education system, literature and newspapers. I attended meetings, concerts and church services and spoke with educated relatives from the Republic of Macedonia. My father learned the script in the intoxicating eucalyptus bush of Western Australia to the sounds of the lonely rain birds' song and many years later taught my husband. My children became literate in Macedonian in Australia, completing University qualifications in the language. There is a certain bitter irony that it was in Australia that I too, at the age of sixty, became literate in my grandmother's language. And the lies I had been taught, and the worthlessness I had felt, dissipated with the empowerment that comes with mother tongue literacy, especially for those who have been forced to live a lie during their childhood. It was not enough that we were stripped of our land, but they tried to take our dignity as people. We were taught we did not exist, that there were no Macedonian people and if they really wanted to denigrate us they would call us Gypsies or Bulgaros, because they hated these peoples almost as much as they hated Macedonians. We were second class citizens in our own homeland and because we clearly did not have a Hellenic background, ensuring that we acquired one via the education system meant imbuing students with a feeling of self-hated towards their own background. Our humiliation continued as in the course of the lessons the teacher made sure that the negative reinforcement was given to the Macedonian children. I remember knowing the answers to questions and putting up my hand constantly, only to be told to sit down and shut up. I was never praised for knowing anything. It would not do to develop the intelligence and self-confidence of a Macedonian child, she might one day work out what was really going on, and have the strength of character to oppose it! All this had the effect of making me become quite disinterested in school. This and the persecution for speaking Macedonian. I've neglected to say that at school speaking Macedonian was absolutely forbidden, but my friends and I ignored this and in the play ground would use the language that rolled naturally off our tongues. One day as we were playing "pupana", a game like knuckles, with my friend Vasilka, I caught a glimpse of the teacher talking to an older prosfigi [Pontic settler] student. Almost instantly, the boy came over to where we were playing and started to belt us, me in particular because I was by far the most vocal and rebellious.

The teacher watched on as the boy boxed me about the head and ears, so hard that I became dizzy and had to sit down. We begged him to stop; when he finished he raised his head towards the teacher. I gathered this was punishment for breaking the rule and speaking Macedonian. When I went home, whimpering and sobbing yet again, as was a seemingly regular occurrence, my grandmother would lose her electric temper and toss all the Greek text books in the fire. Her words still ring in my head ‘Its not enough, they have taken our land, but now to mistreat our young, to take our language, this is too much!’ She would curse and yell and I understand where the rebellious streak in me came from. This served to neutralize the effect of the Greek schooling process, as she reinforced our self-worth by rejecting any system that denigrated us for being ourselves. To be dispossessed in one's own land poses all types of problems. It became all too obvious to my grandmother that our dispossession would not be only of the materially visible things. As well as the land, our language and culture could also be confiscated, leaving us with nothing but an empty shell of the people we once were. This was how the Greek national neurosis about the ‘endopi’ [indigenous] was incubated and perpetuated to oncoming generations. Intolerance for non- Hellenes was the stepping stone towards hatred for a people whose only fault was to live on land which now fell under Greek domination. This was how I learned first hand that my grandmother's words made sense ‘Kaj shto ima sila nema pravina’ -where there is power there is no justice. It seems that all songs sung and now words written are about challenging injustice of one form or another. Injustice provides the necessary ingredient for human tragedy. I suppose one of the final insults to our family was a school performance which promoted the sense of ‘mother Greece's’ embracing power. The different traditional outfits of the prosfigi [Pontic settlers], Macedonian and Vlach students were swapped. I was dressed in a Prosfigi outfit and my Prosfigi friend in a Macedonian outfit. This was so hard for my family to bear seeing their child dressed in the traditional dress of those who had been allocated our land, those who had fought with my father and uncle. And the teachers knew this. This was a deliberate act to rub salt in the old wounds and to assert their power. I will never forget the disgust in my grandfather's eyes the night of that concert. Thankfully, during the war years this type of schooling was interrupted.” (Kita Sapurma & Pandora Petrovska. “Children of the Bird Goddess”. Pollitecon Publications. 1997. Pages 84-88) There is no Macedonian born in Greek occupied Macedonia that hasn’t got a similar story or that has been spared from such a tragic experience. News of the Greek acts promulgated on November 21, 1926 and the new, official Greek names were published in the Greek government daily newspaper “Efimeris tis Kiverniseos” numbers 322 and 324 published on November 21st and 23rd, 1926. These acts are binding to this day. Following these acts the Greek government implemented a compulsory policy of removing all evidence of the Macedonian language from Churches, icons, monuments, tomb stones, cemeteries, archeological finds, etc. All Slavonic Church or secular literature was seized and burned. The use of the Macedonian language was forbidden also in personal communications between parents and children, among villagers, at weddings and work parties, and in burial rituals. (John Shea. “Macedonia and Greece The Struggle to define a new Balkan Nation”. Page 109) Failing to completely Hellenize the Macedonian population subsequent Greeks government introduced pre-kindergarten schools. The pretext for these schools was to free the parents so that they could go to work but their motive became clear when such schools became available only in Greek occupied Macedonia and nowhere else in Greece. The idea here was to separate young children not from their parents but from their grandparents who traditionally looked after them and taught them values and the Macedonian language while parents were out in the fields working.

The act of forbidding the use of the Macedonian language in Greece is best illustrated by an example of how it was implemented in the Township of Assarios (Giuvezna). Here is a quote from Karakasidou's book Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood. "[We] listened to the president articulate to the council that in accordance with the decision [#122770] of Mr. Minister, General Governor of Macedonia, all municipal and township councils would forbid, through [administrative] decisions, the speaking of other idioms of obsolete languages within the area of their jurisdiction for the reconstitution of a universal language and our national glory. [The president] suggested that [the] speaking of different idioms, foreign [languages] and our language in an impure or obsolete manner in the area of the township of Assirios would be forbidden. Assirios Township Decision No. 134, 13 December 1936." (Page 162, Anastasia Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood) By 1928 1,497 Macedonian place-names in the Greek occupied Macedonia were Hellenized (LAW 4096) and all Cyrillic inscriptions found in churches, on tombstones and icons were destroyed (or overwritten) prompting English Journalist V. Hild to say, "The Greeks do not only persecute living Slavs (Macedonians)..., but they even persecute dead ones. They do not leave them in peace even in the graves. They erase the Slavonic inscriptions on the headstones, remove the bones and burn them." In the years following World War I, the Macedonian people underwent extensive measures of systematic denationalization. The applications of these "denationalization schemes" were so extensive and aggressively pursued that in the long term they eroded the will of the Macedonian people to resist. In Greece, in 1929 during the rule of Elepterios Venizelos, a legal act was issued 'On the protection of public order'. In line with this Act each demand for nationality rights is regarded as high treason. This law is still in force.

The Metaxa Dictatorship

When the Macedonian people felt things couldn’t get any worse in Greek occupied Macedonia, they did. “Metaxas, having removed the last constraints on his authority, enjoying the active support of King George II, and able through him to count on the loyalty of the armed forces, now set about his long-cherished ambition of reshaping the Greek character and remoulding Greek society. Since his days as a young army officer at the Prussian military academy he had nurtured an admiration for ernst, 'the serious German spirit', which he contrasted with the Greeks' excessive individualism and lack of a sense of corporate loyalty. In pursuit of this basic objective of 'disciplining' the Greek people he aped many of the trappings of German Nazism and Italian Fascism. In conscious imitation of Hitler's Third Reich he evolved the concept of the Third Hellenic Civilization. The first was the pagan civilization of ancient Greece, the second the Christian civilization of Byzantium. The third, which would be fashioned under his aegis, would combine the virtues of both. In pursuit of his essentially paternalistic, authoritarian style of government he had himself proclaimed in 1937 'First Peasant' and 'First Worker', and also liked to be known as 'leader' or 'National Father'. He declared a moratorium on peasant debts and introduced labour legislation that sounded progressive on paper, but much of his populist, anti-plutocratic rhetoric was belied by his practice. Workers particularly resented his introduction of compulsory arbitration of labour disputes.” (Richard Clogg. “A Short History of Modern Greece”. Page 133) What Clogg is calling the “reshaping of Greek character and remoulding Greek society” which by the way he makes sound like it is a progressive thing, many today would call “cultural genocide”. What Metaxas did in fact is enforce existing anti-Macedonian policies to the extreme and then enacted some more of his own. The dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936-1940) was especially brutal in its treatment of the Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia, who by this time had increasingly begun to identify themselves as Macedonians. “On December 18, 1936, the Metaxas dictatorship issued a legal act concerning ‘Activity Against State Security.’ This law punished claims of minority rights. On the basis of this act, thousands of Macedonians were arrested, imprisoned, or expelled from Greece. On September 7, 1938, the legal act 2366 was issued. This banned the use of the Macedonian language even in the domestic sphere. All Macedonian localities were flooded with posters that read, ‘Speak Greek.’ Evening schools were opened in which adult Macedonians were taught Greek. No Macedonian schools of any kind were permitted. Any public manifestation of Macedonian national feeling and its outward expression through language, song, or dance was forbidden and severely punished by the Metaxas regime. People who spoke Macedonian were beaten, fined and imprisoned. Punishments in some areas included piercing of the tongue with a needle and cutting off a part of the ear for every Macedonian word spoken. Almost 5,000 Macedonians were sent to jails and prison camps for violating this prohibition against the use of the Macedonian language. Mass exile of sections of Macedonians and other ‘difficult’ minorities took place. The trauma of persecution has left deep scars on the consciousness of the Macedonians in Greece, many of whom are even today convinced that their language ‘cannot’ be committed to writing. Writing in 1938, Australian author Bert Birtles in his book Exiles in the Aegean said, ‘If Greece has no Jewish problem, she has the Macedonians. In the name of 'Hellenization' these people are being persecuted continually and arrested for the most fantastic reasons. Metaxas's way of inculcating the proper nationalist spirit among them has been to change all the native place-names into Greek and to forbid use of the native language. For displaying the slightest resistance to this edict- for this too is a danger to the security of the State - peasants and villagers have been exiled without trial.’” (John Shea.

“Macedonia and Greece The Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation”. Pages 111 and 112) “The racism which envelops the Macedonian people in Aegean Macedonia has primarily focused on the suppression of language and identity in order to maintain territorial acquisition. It has become an ideological means to assist exploitation and denationalization. This policy results in systemic discrimination and denial of basic human rights such as self- identification. The dehumanization is validated by the argument that: you are not Macedonian, you do not have a culture, language or a name, so in fact you do not exist and therefore there is no oppression. There is sad irony in the fact that by claiming a Macedonian heritage, language and name, the Macedonians are seen as the villains whose actions are somehow threatening to Greece. This is a classic condition of oppression culture, in that the oppressor claims to feel violated by the oppressed. By claiming the process is actually occurring to themselves, Greek Governments aim to validate the need for continuing the oppression. This type of mind-set or social outlook is unfortunately reinforced within the school system and a social system which does not promote a sense of multiculturalism. The social system which evolved after the 1913 acquisition of Macedonian territory found it necessary to create a modern Greek identity for the masses who spoke other languages within the new borders. Hellenism is the absolute antithesis of multiculturalism, which presupposes the right to self-identification and self expression.” (Kita Sapurma & Pandora Petrovska. “Children of the Bird Goddess”. Pollitecon Publications. 1997. Pages 162 and 163)