SHE BROKE ALL HER FRAMES INTO PIECES AND FLED ACROSS THE OCEAN

SHE BROKE ALL HER FRAMES INTO PIECES AND FLED ACROSS THE OCEAN

“We were taught that the Macedonian language is leftover from the languages of the military troops that were passing through the region,” said Kita Sapurma

This is how Kita Sapurma from the village Kleshtina described her first day in Greek school, “The teacher grabbed me by my hair, which was twisted into a ball and held together with pins and a ribbon. He then grabbed my hand and twisted it backwards and dragged me to the side. His words were like poison and hurt as much as the pulling of my hair, which felt like it was being pulled out from the roots. ‘How dare you wear these tattered clothes and that garbage on your head, take if off immediately! You must wear a blue and white uniform and blue and white barrettes... Now go home and change your clothes, I never want to see you here again dressed like this, in village tatters’, he yelled…”

That morning Kita’s mother had made every effort to prepare Kita for her first day of school. She dressed her with the best clothes she had. She braided her hair, pinned it behind her head and tied it with a red ribbon. Formally dressed, Kita left for school hoping to impress the teacher and her school friends. Offended and humiliated little Kita came back home crying. When her mother and her grandmother found out what had happened, they picked out an old dress, slipped it over her existing dress and literally dragged her back to school against her will.

Kita was young but intelligent enough to understand that this old tattered dress was more acceptable to the teacher than her new clothes made with love by her mother and grandmother. This is what Kita Sapurma said remembering the days she spent in school when the Greek authorities endeavoured through education to Hellenize the Macedonian children, “After I started going to school I realized that the Greek language was the language of our colonizers. Although Macedonian was spoken in the village, and at home, and with relatives, the mandatory language for communicating in school and in church was Greek. We spoke Greek with a hard accent because we were bilingual and our mother tongue was Macedonian. Unfortunately the Greeks taught us that our Macedonian language wasn’t even a language; it had no name, no alphabet and therefore it could not be used for teaching. It was not a language for communicating at a high level, for making speeches, for giving lectures, etc. The Greeks told us it was a hybrid language without structure and unique words. The words were leftovers from the languages of the military troops that had passed through this region...”

We found little Kita’s story, now an eighty year old woman living in Australia, in her autobiography entitled “The Children of the Bird-Goddess” written by her daughter Pandora Petrovska.

This is what Kita Sapurma said, “This was Greek propaganda which in those days was used to fill our heads. The Greeks lied to us when they told us that the Macedonian language was worthless. I completely understood that later, after I arrived in Australia when I was 14 years old. My four daughters graduated from university. They were taught the Macedonian language there. The bitter irony is in the fact that I learned my grandmother’s language in Australia at age sixty… The lies that we were told and the feeling of worthlessness we carried with us disappeared thanks to the education we received outside of our homeland, including learning our Macedonian mother tongue. We were finally liberated from the lies we lived in Greece during our childhood…”

Kita Sapurma continued, “The Ottomans were our feudal masters for centuries, they didn’t destroy our language, or our culture; however the Greeks our masters were not satisfied with only getting our lands, they made it their mission to cleanse us from our ancestral lands. They referred to us not as Macedonians but as the “endopi” which in Greek means indigenous. Instead of caring for us, which was their obligation when the Great Powers handed us over to them,

they ruled over us ominously and more terrifying compared to the Ottomans, our former masters…”

The distressful story that Kita Sapurma told us from her childhood when she was living back home in Aegean Macedonia, reveals the unprecedented terror the Greeks employed in erasing all traces of Macedonian existence. They did this not only to fool the world that nothing Macedonian existed, but to fool the Macedonian people themselves by filling the heads of the Macedonian children with all kinds of lies. We heard many such stories from all the children who were forced to leave the Aegean part of Macedonia and were exiled all over the world. We also heard stories from those who had to remain home and very proudly stand up to the whip of the Greek authorities.

Kita was one of those children who were forced to leave home and go to Australia. Her separation from her grandmother was very emotional. This is what she said, “I will never forget my grandmother’s eyes that day. My grandmother Tsveta’s heart was broken because she was losing part of her family. It was one thing for the men to leave and to go to work overseas, but it was another thing to say goodbye to a grandchild and a daughter-in-law. From all the people in our village, we were the first women to leave in such a manner. This meant that this was the beginning of the end of our families and people…”

The same day that Kita left her home and her village her grandmother kissed the four corners of her family room and after that she kissed her fireplace and the chimney. Several years later, after her last grandson moved to Australia she was left all alone. It was then that she realized that there was no longer life for her at home. The only option left for her was to leave. This is what Kita Sapurma said about her grandmother, “Before she left she took her anger on the house. She broke all the frames into pieces with an axe and burned them. She destroyed the things that she valued the most, the things that gave her reflection of her life and of her being. She didn’t need those things anymore; they lost all meaning, the same as her life lost all meaning…”

It was not enough that the Greek authorities tormented, with intent to eradicate, the Macedonian people inside Greece, they did the same outside. When Kita’s father applied to bring Kita to Australia, his application was rejected. The Greek authorities would not accept the name “Kita” because that name was not Greek. As a result she had to wait five months before things were straightened out. Kita’s father had to use Kita’s Greek name in the application to get things moving. This is what Kita Sapurma said, “The Greek authorities didn’t want to accept the documents prepared in Australia where my name “Kita” was used. All Greek citizens had to have Hellenized names… We had to use the name Hrisanthi, imposed on me even though my parents had named me Kita. We went from place to place… we were mistreated and abused… but finally we left Greece. We also left my Hellenized name behind with a feeling of relief because we were going to a place where I could call myself whatever I wanted ”

Kita Sapurma opened her soul and said, “Those five months while we waited for the Greek bureaucracy to show mercy regarding my name, many Macedonians were leaving. When we arrived in Solun it felt like an entire column of Macedonians were leaving some going to Australia, some to Canada or America. What an irony, whispered a person belonging to the Asia Minor Christian Turkish community, deposited on our lands in the 1920’s that we, the indigenous people, had to leave and go to foreign lands to find a home. And this person was right. The Greeks cleansed our lands from us and I cannot describe with words how terrible that felt… To be driven out from everything that was familiar and dear to you…”

Kita Sapurma continued, “The struggle between communism and democracy during the Greek Civil war was only a mask. Hidden behind it was its real purpose, to make life so unbearable for the Macedonian people that they would have no other choice than to leave their homeland and become refugees across the border in the Republic of Macedonia, or as emigrants around the world. Around 28,000 Macedonian children were evacuated to the socialist countries in Europe. Even more tragic was the fact that these children, especially those who did not belong to Partisan families, were not allowed to go back home because they are still considered a threat to Greece’s security. This is one of the many injustices done

to my nation. The destruction of the family was the only secure way to destroy the Macedonian community and the future of our Macedonian nation. Most of these children never saw their families inside Greece, until those families left Greece and moved to other countries. Some never saw their families at all…”

This is what Pandora Petrovska, the author who told her mother’s terrifying story, said, “Instead of accepting the lies, fear and despair, a result of generations of being passive, the Macedonian people must start fighting back, individually or collectively, writing their own history. By doing that they will gain the feeling of creativity and start living in reality, as well as feeling their own worth because they still exist…”