Chapter eleven – “Chair” a Shelter for the Aegeans

Chapter eleven – “Chair” a Shelter for the Aegeans

May 1963

One Hundred Years of Silence – Remarks made by open-minded people

“Evildoers will never be revolutionaries, they will always be reactionaries.” (Vladimir Nobakov)

“Born in me is the need to say: Why I love the world, why I admire it and why I am grateful...” (Nikiforos Vretakos)

Who brought the evil that made brother fight against brother? How and why did we lose Kostur between 1940 and 1950? Whoever did this they brought death not only to the people of Kostur but to a part of our nation. We the persecuted have been waiting for answers for more than half a century now and we want to know whose is at fault and who is to be blamed for this catastrophe!

Studies have shown that the ideology brought to Greek occupied Macedonia and introduced to the Macedonian people in the period between 1940 and 1949 resulted in many sacrifices, including loss of lives and expulsions, sacrifices made not for the Macedonian cause but for foreign political gains. This is a great tragedy for our people and for our homeland… A great history written in Macedonian blood…

Research conducted for this book, from a literary and historical point of view, aims to answer several questions:

How and why was the “Macedonian syndrome” (brother fighting against brother) activated by this ideological activism conducted over the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia during the Second World War and during the Greek Civil War periods?

With what kind of strategic objective was NOF organized and what actually drove us to pick a military option? Was this our strategic objective or did strangers organize it through the ideological activism (operatives of strategic tasks) conducted over our people?

Why have we remained silent on this subject for over half a century knowing full well that we were obliged to comfortably guide policies in favour of Greece?

Were we, the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia, through the strategic option we picked, intellectually and politically capable of militarily preserving the territorial integrity of Greek occupied Macedonia and the compactness of the Macedonian population after the Second World War when the international state borders in Greece and Yugoslavia also became military boundaries between the two camps (east and west)?

Why did we reject the alternative of not “winning” against our enemy and not leaving our ancestral Macedonian home?

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It seems that history is not as accurate in recording past events as they happened. It is more like an account of cataloging certain preferred beliefs. And as George Orwell (13) once said in his novel “1984”, history is always written by the winners and those who have control over writing history books.

It is undisputed that the creation of the “Kostur freedom fighting units” was a bold move in the creation of a national resistance program for the protection of the Macedonian people in the region from the cruelty and inhuman terror perpetrated by the Greek government. Very little is known, to this day, about the Greek aims in persecuting the indigenous Macedonian population in its ancestral home.

Many significant events remain unknown and those which are known have not been sufficiently communicated. Many stories have shortcomings and are full of mistakes, also the storytellers are getting very old and passing on and those who are still alive… their memories are fading. There is still a lot to be written… more light needs to be shed in order to preserve and safeguard our story for our precious future generations so that the mistakes we made are not repeated.

The story of the “Fratricidal Cemetery” is a real case which I carried with me for more than 65 years. If I did not tell it now I would have had to keep it to myself forever.

We the people from this part of (Greek occupied) Macedonia, who have survived the genocide (punished for not being guilty), bear the many scars the occupiers and perpetrators have inflicted on us. Our scars may be old but they are permanent and have lasted to this day.

We Macedonians, when we write our history about the Macedonian activists, must not refer to them as heroes and traitors… we need to realize that they were all persons who performed certain activities at a certain time. History is not destiny. We need to start changing our people’s consciousness so that they can be more open minded and have a greater tolerance. We the Macedonians from Kostur Region, from 1940 (internally Macedonian freedom fighters and externally Macedonian communists and ELAS fighters) to this day have remained divided and have lost our homes in Kostur.

The dirty politics spread by the communists and by the ELAS fighters against the Macedonian freedom fighters in Kostur Region reached such a high level of evil that it caused brother to fight against brother!

This kind of dirty politics was spread by CPG and CPY politicians who aimed to increase their political power by bending the will of the people. This kind of politics regularly chose easier solutions and always relied on the care of someone in authority and in a powerful position, which operated through directives. This is what happened to us Macedonians, especially during the Greek Civil War (1945 -1949), when we operated under CPG, CPY and CPM directives.

As a result of this kind of dirty politics and from not having a Macedonian strategy, the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia not only lost many lives fighting an alien war but, in the end, lost their native hearth forever. The Kostur freedom fighters were exterminated and towards the end of the Greek Civil War, both Macedonian communists and Macedonian ELAS fighters took the role of being more fighters for Yugoslavia and communism than for Macedonia.

And things turned out just like my grandfather predicted: “Sometimes you need to learn to be quiet… time will tell all”.

We saw that, after a century of silence, the strangers had inflicted so much pain and suffering on us that even a century was not enough time for us to forget everything and to heal from it.

As we have shown in this book, the Greeks have been meddling in our fate for a long time. This we have failed to understand and thus we continue to succumb to their will.

About what happened in Kostur Region, in the land of heroes and tombs, the story of the “Fratricidal Cemetery” has revealed deep secrets of brother fighting against brother, a drama of the destruction of the Macedonian seed. This story was written in order to record the atrocities committed and the many victims left behind. This story is for those Macedonians who are not aware of what happened to their ancestors.

The “Fratricidal Cemetery” is a new factual novel, written in order to deal with our past and with our ancestors. This is perhaps the right time to deal with it. There comes a special moment in life when a person finds the need to tell his or her story, good or bad, of his or her ancestors and what happened to them. A person has the need to set aside all misunderstandings, ideological differences, political biases… and tell the truth. Our record of our past is the legacy for our future. That which was important to remember must be written down, as a permanent record, so that it will not be forgotten. This was a time when a large part of the Macedonian nation experienced much death.

The stories told in this book are real and have been written to serve as historical facts obtained from original and numerous sources. They come from my personal experience, from military archival materials, from monographs and from other sources including studies conducted about the Kostur freedom fighting national movement and from the book: “Kazna bez vina” (Punishment without guilt).

And once again, as George Orwell once said: “History is always written by the victors!” and “Those who control the past, control the future! Those who control the present control the past!”

I returned to Kostur sixty five years after I was exiled in order to experience what it would be like to come back to my place of birth and to tell my story. I had some expectations, which I shared with you, including a picture of my experience from 1940 to 1949. And as I have said before, after visiting my house, the house where I was born, I felt like a stranger, like I did not belong there, that I don’t belong to the ruins left behind. I stood by the ruins and tried to remember things, things that my grandfather had told me… a man who had fought in the Ilinden Uprising… whose grave I now could not find...

I am grateful for recently having the opportunity to hear the story of a true Macedonian freedom fighter, leader and patriot whose seed was destroyed. It was like I knew it; emotional, spiritual, serious, diverse… like the sad life story of a Kostur resident who lost everything including his inheritance… of belonging to the human race.

The man whose seed was destroyed, confirmed for me the reasons why the Greeks hated the Kostur freedom fighters so much. Like my grandfather used to say: “The happiest man is the man who makes everyone else happy.” The Greek occupier has proven that he wanted to make us Macedonians unhappy by turning us into wanderers of the world. The Greeks always wanted a Macedonia without Macedonians. And this we must never forget!

Krapov’s view and judgment of key events that shook Kostur and the people of Kostur in the 20th century have exposed much of the Greek toughness and many of the details regarding the fate of our friends and enemies for the period from 1940 to 1949… and why we lost our native homes.

During the 20th century Kostur and Lerin Regions experienced a number of traumatic events which resulted in the Macedonian people losing their ancestral hearth and becoming world wanderers, alienated by their destiny.

We the people of Kostur spoke our Macedonian language for centuries, including the time when we were under Ottoman (Muslim) occupation. But the moment the Greeks appeared in Macedonia our language was banned, prohibited from being spoken… But we managed to safeguard it by speaking to our children in secret.

Smiling, Krapov said: “That’s the way it was… But we and our people made many mistakes… In place of tying ourselves to our lands, we chose to trust the ideological strongman who led us into oblivion!”

But we also saw that we were incapable of defending ourselves from the powerful. The CPY/CPM began to make a military dumping ground in Greek occupied Macedonia (see reports prepared by Yugoslav General Kapikjich) and the CPG converted Greek occupied Macedonia into a military training area, a military base was created exactly where we lived, where the majority of the Macedonian population lived.

Listening to the man with the destroyed seed telling me stories about Kostur and Macedonia, where I was born and grew up, made me think of the many other untold stories and the many secrets hidden here.

Is it possible that God is playing games with man? One moment he opens the door of happiness and the next he immediately slams it shut and locks it!

In the end I want to say: “We the victims who have experienced atrocities here have been silent for too long…”

The book “A century of silence (1913 - 2013)” has opened the theme of the fate of the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia and has left it open, not just for the Macedonian people but for all the people in the Balkans.

We from the older generation of Macedonians from Greek occupied Macedonia, who have survived the mass ethnic cleansings, have a

duty to document everything that we have experienced and leave it for our future generations...

From the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank all my comrades and brothers from my native Kostur and Kostur Region who have been through hell and some who are still going through it and as Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) once said: “As long as you are going through hell, keep going!”

One day: whatever was ours will be ours!

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This is not the end, next comes part two when Kiratsa and Krsto Krapov’s son, renamed from Doncho Krapov to Andonios Psaras, returned to Kostur to look for his roots and for the graves of his parents.