Front Matter - Part 03

Ever since the Macedonian church was banned by the Sultan in 1767 and replaced with the so-called “Greek church” the Macedonian people who attended the “Greek church” were counted as “Greeks”.

And if I may add, this was also true of all Greeks in modern Greece and not just in Macedonia. Greece had many ethnicities living on its soil. It had many ethnicities even before it became a nation state for the first time in 1828. The only prerequisite for them to become Greeks was to be Orthodox Christian and speak Greek. Naturally those who did not speak Greek, such as the Vlachs, Albanians, Macedonians, Christian Orthodox Turks, and so on, were taught to speak Greek in the Greek state sponsored schools. Greek did not have to be their mother tongue in order for them to be counted as Greeks.

This was also true in Macedonia until the Bulgarian church and later the Serbian church were allowed to operate inside the Ottoman Empire. The Serbians felt they too had a chance of gaining Macedonian territories if they played this religious game, so they too established their own churches inside Macedonia.

So now we have Serbian, Bulgarian and Greek churches operating inside Macedonia and competing for the hearts and minds of the same Macedonian parishioners. But because the Macedonians could actually understand the Bulgarian language they preferred to join the Bulgarian church.

The Bulgarian church seemed to attract more Macedonian people than the other two churches. So the way things were progressing, both the Greeks and Serbians were losing out to the Bulgarians.

It was not difficult for them to see that Bulgaria would eventually win over Macedonia and there would be nothing left for Greece or Serbia.

As a result of this, the situation inside Macedonia began to turn violent. People were coerced and blackmailed to join opposing churches. The competing powers even resorted to killing priests. If a certain Bulgarian priest, for example, was good at his job he was eliminated… exterminated.

INTERVIEWER - And vice versa, right?

RISTO – And vice versa. The Bulgarians were no different and they too were not above killing priests. The unfortunate thing about all this was that most of these priests were Macedonians employed by the competing churches.

When peaceful coercion no longer worked, the competitors introduced armed gangs hired to kill priests, terrorize the people and force them to change churches. Extreme measures were used to force people to convert.

INTERVIEWER – These gangs were called ‘comitagees’ or something, right?

RISTO – Yes, they were called “comitagees’ in Bulgarian and “Andartes” in Greek. They were foreign sponsored armed bands operating illegally in Macedonia.

INTERVIEWER – They were enforcers… right?

RISTO – Yes, they were paid enforcers, gangsters, some were even Macedonian like Pavle from Rula who killed people for gold. Karavangelis, the Greek Bishop of Kostur, actually paid Pavle money to kill people and deliver their heads to him…

You paid them money and they did whatever you wanted. You eliminate this priest or you beat up this person and so on and so forth.

Macedonia became lawless and the Ottomans did not seem to care. So while the Macedonians were going through this violent evolution, the three competing states continued to publish demographic statistics…that were constantly fluid and fluctuated as more pressure was placed on the Macedonian people to change their church affiliation.

So it was a matter of time that church affiliation in Macedonia became synonymous with nationality, as evidenced by the published demographic statistics.

Now that the three powers had convinced the outside world that Macedonians did not exist in Macedonia and that the people living in Macedonia were actually Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians, Macedonia could be divided along national lines. That was the theory. But in reality it was not as simple as it appeared because every village on every part of Macedonia was shown to have all three, so-called Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians living in it.

So how was Macedonia to be divided along “national lines?” Also, what was to happen to the other ethnicities living in Macedonia such as the Albanians, Vlachs, Jews, etc?

All that did not seem to matter to anyone, especially when well made plans began to fall apart after Macedonia was invaded and occupied in 1912.

After the Ottomans were driven out, with Macedonian help, the majority of the Macedonian people believed this was liberation. They were told the foreign armies were there to liberate them… and they believed it. But by then it was too late.

After the foreign armies drove out the Ottomans they refused to leave Macedonia and began to settle in. That’s when the Macedonian people realized that this was not liberation but occupation.

But then this whole liberation-occupation business fell apart when the three competing states turned on each other and began to fight; Greece and Serbia fighting against Bulgaria for more Macedonian territory.

Yes, the Great Powers did step in; but stepped in to halt the fighting not to divide Macedonia “along national lines”.

By this time no one seemed to care about the Macedonians or about “national” lines. Macedonia’s territory was arbitrarily divided along the front lines where the occupying armies were fighting each other.

The 1913 Treaty of Bucharest, by which the 2nd Balkan war was concluded, was all about dividing territory. There was nothing in it about people, religion, nationality, or “national lines”. A lot of people don’t understand that in 1913 Macedonia was arbitrarily divided.

Many people, especially the Greeks, think that the Balkan Wars were about liberating the Christians of Macedonia from the Ottomans and that those Christians were Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians. But in reality, the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest was a culmination of everything that happened from 1878 to 1913.

So basically the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest finalized exactly who was going to get what, in terms of lands. The plan for eliminating the Macedonian identity and partitioning Macedonia had been hatched a long time before that, even before the 1878 Russian-Ottoman war when Bulgaria was granted autonomy and Macedonia was given back to the Sultan.

Macedonia too could have been granted autonomy in 1878. But it wasn’t! Why?

The fact that Macedonia was handed back to the Ottomans without a single guarantee that no harm would come to the Macedonian people, especially to those who took up arms to liberate themselves from the Ottomans, tells us that the Great Powers had no intention of helping Macedonia. All the Great Powers knew that the Ottomans would take retribution on the Macedonian population yet no a single one put any measures to ensure that that would not happen. Why?

The message delivered to the Macedonian people here was that no one is interested in your survival and no one is going to help you. Basically you are on your own…And it has been this way for the Macedonian people to this day. But were the Macedonian people paying attention?

After 1878, after the San Stefano Treaty was signed and a greater Bulgaria was created by Russia, the Bulgarians have been obsessed with Macedonia and, over the years, have done everything in their power to possess it. And because of this they have become a great danger to the Macedonian people.

Earlier you asked me what happened to the Macedonian people after 1878, after Bulgaria was granted autonomy and Macedonia was given back to the Ottomans. Outside of allowing the Ottomans to punish the Macedonians for their involvement in the Russian-Ottoman War, the Great Powers basically gave Greece, Bulgaria and later Serbia the signal that Macedonia was now ripe for the picking.

The Macedonian people, unfortunately, did not know that and still saw the Ottoman Empire as their primary enemy. They could not comprehend that the propaganda coming out of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria that the Macedonians were Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians was even real, never mind a danger to their sovereignty.

They figured that their future was safe… only if they could drive the Ottoman Empire out of Macedonia. Most Macedonians refused to believe that outside forces were actually working against them and that the strongest force among them was Bulgaria.

Some, like Gotse Delchev, believed that Macedonia had a future as an autonomous province inside the Ottoman Empire. Bulgaria knew that and did everything in its power to prevent such a scenario.

Bulgaria was anxious to possess Macedonia but knew it would be unable to obtain it from the Ottoman Empire alone. So even before it partnered with the Greeks and Serbians, in its various alliances, it had in mind to start an uprising inside Macedonia in order to weaken both the Macedonians and Ottomans and then finish the job itself.

And to do that it had to provoke a war. However, it could not afford to have the Macedonian people win this war. So to make sure that the Macedonian side did not win, every time the Macedonian people made headway the Bulgarians whacked them on the head.

The Bulgarians had infiltrated the Macedonian liberation organizations and basically knew everything that was going on in Macedonia. They knew who the Macedonian leaders were and how and where they operated. There was a huge Macedonian immigration in Sofia and it was easy to recruit Macedonians into these false organizations. In fact most of the recruits in the External or Supremacist Macedonian Revolutionary Organization were Macedonians.

INTERVIEWER – And they were based in Sofia?

RISTO – Yes, they were based in Sofia. Most of them were military officers in the Bulgarian army. Pretending to work for the Macedonian cause, this organization actually worked for Bulgarian interests and was responsible for starting the 1903 Ilinden uprising early, before the Macedonian people were ready.

So every time the Macedonians got a step ahead the Bulgarians did something to slow them down. In the end the Bulgarians instigated the start of the Ilinden uprising, which decimated Macedonia and brought it closer to its invasion, occupation and partition by Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria.

Ironically, despite its grand effort to possess Macedonia, in the end, Bulgaria only received 10% of Macedonia’s territory with 51% going to Greece and 39% to Serbia.

The British were well-aware of what was going on in Macedonia and while the Macedonian villages were burning, like bright stars in the night sky; they sat in their ships in the Aegean Sea watching and waiting.

What were they waiting for?

Obviously they were not waiting to help the Macedonians? They could and had the power to stop the Ottomans from burning down the Macedonian villages but obviously they did not. They were probably waiting to pre-empt a Bulgarian invasion in Macedonia.

I believe the reason the Bulgarians wanted to start the Ilinden uprising early was because they wanted it to fail. But in order for them to make sure it failed, they had to take it out of the hands of the Macedonian revolutionary leadership. But in order to do that they had to actually remove the top Macedonian leaders. And how does one do that?

As I mentioned earlier, the Bulgarians already knew who the Macedonian leaders where and where they were located. So all the Bulgarians had to do was betray the Macedonian revolutionary leaders to the Ottoman authorities.

In other words, the Bulgarians gave the Ottomans a list of names to arrest and after they were arrested Bulgaria sent the Supremacists to Macedonia to start an uprising. Almost every one of the leaders was arrested and put in jail except for Gotse Delchev. Delchev was really good at avoiding capture. But Gruev and the others leaders of the organization were not so lucky and they all ended up in jail.

After the Macedonian revolutionaries were betrayed to the Ottomans and arrested, the Supremacists began to take their place and declared, on their own, that an Uprising needed to take place and better sooner than later.

Right after the Macedonians leaders were arrested in February, 1903, the Supremacists arrived in Macedonia and coaxed the various district revolutionary leaders to prepare for an early uprising, even after almost every district reported that it was not ready for an uprising.

Gotse Delchev, the supreme commander of the Macedonian revolutionary forces, was against an early uprising and was determined to stop it. Unfortunately he was killed by Ottoman forces on his way to the meeting.

In order to prove my point that the Bulgarians were indeed involved in a conspiracy to start a war in Macedonia, I would like to raise the following questions:

1. How did it come about that almost all the Macedonian revolutionary leaders were captured and sent to jail at the same time?

2. Why was a massive general uprising raised in their absence?

3. Why was it called by the Supremacists, especially at a time when the people were not ready for a general uprising?

4. Why was Delchev, the supreme commander of the Macedonian forces, bypassed and ignored on this issue, and

5. How is it that the Ottomans could not find and catch Delchev in all those years he operated in Macedonia and yet they were able to find him and kill him on his way to a meeting to stop the early uprising from taking place?

These questions show a pattern. The Bulgarians created the Supremacist organization… why? There already was a Macedonian revolutionary organization working effectively … The Bulgarians betrayed the Macedonian leaders to the Ottomans… Why?

Something to think about…

INTERVIEWER – Did your great grandfather Filip take part in the Ilinden Uprising?

RISTO – Yes, my great grandfather Filip did take part in the revolution… I don’t know much about his involvement but one story my father told me is that one time he was stationed on Prevol, on top of the mountain overlooking Prespa. One story Filip told my father was that he was armed with a rifle and a single bullet. His job was to monitor movements of the Ottoman army and if the army took the road towards Prespa he was to fire that one warning shot… letting the revolutionaries in Prespa know that the Ottoman army was headed their way.

INTERVIEWER – Is that mountain in Oshchima?

RISTO – Yes, Prevol borders my village Oshchima with Prespa, at the top of the mountain. That day the revolutionaries were having a meeting in Prespa. Filip was left on top of the mountain to watch for Ottoman soldiers coming his way.

INTERVIEWER – In other words, he was a lookout?

RISTO – Yes, he was a lookout that day… It’s a shame I don’t know any more about his involvement in the revolution. My father said that Filip was like an encyclopedia, full of knowledge, but unfortunately his grandchildren hardly paid any attention to him. My father regrets not knowing more about him and his life.

INTERVIEWER – That’s a fascinating story. Please continue…

RISTO – So the Macedonian Internal Revolutionary Organization, without its own leaders and on the advice of the supremacists began to make preparations for an early uprising.

INTERVIEWER – So at this point the Bulgarians were running the whole show?

RISTO – Yes, the Bulgarians were running the whole show because they were behind the Supremacists. The Bulgarians reassured the Macedonian revolutionaries that Bulgaria was prepared to help them, even by declaring war on the Ottomans if necessary, all the Macedonians had to do was “fire the first volley of shots”.

The Ottomans at the time were aware that something was being prepared and were going from village to village looking for arms. Basically the Ottoman approach was to demoralize the people, punish them for what they were about to do in order to stop them from doing it. This put extra pressure on the Macedonian revolutionaries to get moving with the preparations for the uprising.

They had to make a decision: “Wait and get shot like a fish in a barrel or rise up and fight right now.”

A while latter most of the Macedonian leaders were released from prison under a general amnesty. The amnesty came as a result of

external pressure, mainly from the Western European Great Powers. The West was fed up with how the Ottomans treated the Christians in their empire and pressured them to empty their jails. So they opened the jails and let everyone go. But by now Delchev was dead and out of the picture, and he had not been replaced. In the meantime preparations for the uprising were gaining momentum.

After Damian Gruev was released from prison he took Delchev’s job and command of the Macedonian revolutionary forces. Unfortunately he had been in jail for about six months and was not up to speed with what was going on.

Gruev called for a Congress to take place, which unfortunately was completely dominated by Supremacists who again voted for an early rebellion. At the same time it was decided to start the rebellion on August 2nd. August 2nd is a religious holiday – Sveti Ilia, a day of celebration not of violence. The Ottomans would not expect violence during a Christian holiday so it was an ideal time to start the uprising.

The most unfortunate thing about this uprising, however, was not that the Ottomans would be surprised but that the Macedonians were not prepared for such a venture and for its aftermath. They had willing fighters but not the arms and ammunition. It was very difficult to get arms and ammunition. It had to be bought from someone, from somewhere.

The Bulgarians sold the Macedonians their old guns but without ammunition. The Greeks refused to sell them any arms. There was a company in Athens that made guns and some Macedonians who spoke Greek had to lie to them about their use in order to purchase some. But even after purchasing them, it was difficult to smuggle them inside Macedonia. The Ottomans were vigilant and kept their eyes open.

So even though the Macedonians were unable to find sufficient arms to fight an uprising, Gruev, the supreme leader at the time, decided to start the uprising anyway. The Macedonians were damned if they did and they were damned if they didn’t start the uprising so they decided to start it. The Ottomans were going from village to village

destroying every village looking for arms, so the villages were going to be destroyed any way; uprising or no uprising.

These were the conditions under which the August 2nd, 1903 Macedonian National Uprising took place, which ended in disaster.

The Russians had their ships patrolling the Aegean Sea and so did the British, watching Macedonia burn from the distance and they did nothing to stop it.

The brunt of the uprising lasted about 12 days. Parts of Kostur Region, Klisura and Neveska were liberated for a longer period of time but the town Krushevo, as I mentioned earlier, got most of the credit because its liberators declared it a republic, the first republic in the Balkans or maybe even in all of Europe.

INTERVIEWER – Where is Krushevo?

RISTO – Krushevo is located inside the Republic of Macedonia. The entire uprising lasted about 3 months. The revolution was over in just three months. This goes to show you how unprepared the Macedonian people were.

One of the worst things that happened to the Macedonian civilian population was that it lost its leaders and fighters who protected it. Most leaders were killed and now very few were left to protect the people. The Macedonian population was hit hard and scattered all over. Most of the villages were burned down. The Macedonian people were frightened, especially from Ottoman retribution and looked to anyone who offered to protect them, even to the Greeks who they despised.

After the failed uprising, to save themselves the Macedonian people were even willing to join the Greek churches.

The Macedonians were losing all hope, even in their own abilities to protect themselves.

And the Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian propaganda was right there behind them. “Christian brothers don’t worry we are here to save you.”

Where were they when the Macedonians were fighting to liberate themselves, especially the Bulgarians who openly promised to help them? Many volleys were fired and yet not a single Bulgarian soldier came to their rescue!

When will the Macedonians learn not to believe empty words?

Times were desperate for the next ten years from 1903 to 1913 for the Macedonian people, a decade of misery under the Ottoman yoke.

But times were about to get worse.

After the Macedonian people failed to liberate themselves, Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria began preparations to invade Macedonia and kick the ailing Ottoman Empire out. They each could not do it alone so they were convinced by Russia, I believe, to form an alliance or a Balkan League, as it was later called. And so in 1912 they invaded and took Macedonia, driving out the Ottomans.

INTERVIEWER – So, at some point the Macedonians of IMRO decided they could not do it by themselves, so in future they looked to the Bulgarians for help… thinking… no?

RISTO – No, that is not correct. The top Macedonian IMRO leaders, including Iane Sandanski, who survived the 1903 Ilinden Uprising and later fought against the Bulgarians, were well aware of Bulgarian plans to annex Macedonia. Sandanski was of the opinion that Macedonia should fight for autonomy, following Delchev’s philosophy. Macedonia could only gain its independence by first becoming an autonomous province inside the Ottoman Empire. Delchev and Sandanski were well aware of the Great Powers and their meddling in Macedonian affairs through their proxies Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria and that Macedonia would eventually be swallowed up by one or all of them.

Delchev had seen what Russia had done with the San Stefano Treaty when Russia gave Macedonian to Bulgaria. He has also seen what the Western European Powers had done with the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 when, instead of giving Macedonian autonomy, they gave it back to the Ottomans with absolutely no safeguards for the Macedonian people. So, if anyone was to protect Macedonia from being “swallowed up” by the Great Power proxies, it would have to be the Ottoman Empire. But first Macedonia had to gain its autonomy.

As I mentioned earlier, Bulgaria did not want Macedonia to gain its autonomy and become an Ottoman protectorate and that is precisely why the Supremacists started the Ilinden Uprising.

Let us not get confused here by the Greek and Bulgarian propaganda that “somehow” IMRO trusted Bulgaria to “liberate” Macedonia and create an independent Macedonian state. Bulgaria wanted Macedonia for itself. IMRO wanted an independent Macedonia. Delchev believed that that but could only be achieved through an autonomous Macedonia under the protection of the Ottoman Empire.

There were however Macedonian individuals who looked to the Bulgarians as saviours. You have to understand that the Bulgarian propaganda sounded very attractive to some. The Bulgarians were not saying “We are here to occupy your country and turn you into Bulgarians”, they were saying “Christian brothers we are here to help you…”

We have to remember that Bulgaria too was under the Ottoman yoke until 1878 and because of that some Macedonian people felt that the Bulgarians had sympathy for them and wanted to help.

There is also the fact that IMRO was infiltrated by Macedonians who worked for Bulgarian interests, knowingly or unknowingly. They too were convinced that Bulgaria could be their saviour.

Let us not forget that Bulgaria also promised the Macedonian people that it would intervene on their behalf and help them liberate themselves. All the Macedonians had to do is start the Uprising.

“Just fire one shot and the Bulgarian army will come in and save you” was the message they were getting from Bulgaria.

And why wouldn’t the Macedonian people take advantage of such a generous offer?

Well the Macedonians fired many shots and no Bulgarian army showed up. So this proves that Bulgaria’s aim was to get the Macedonians into a confrontation with the Ottomans and when the two sides destroyed each other, to walk in and invade Macedonia.

But in the end the Bulgarians did not invade. The Russian King warned them that there would be severe consequences from the Western European Great Powers if they invaded Macedonia. He reminded them of what happened in Berlin in 1878… He also advised them that this time Russia would not be there to save them.

But the Bulgarians kept making empty promises.

The British were probably there, in the Aegean Sea, watching the rebellion play out, to make sure the Bulgarians did not invade.

Ten years later, the same Great Powers, including the British, authorized Bulgaria along with Greece and Serbia, to invade, occupy and partition Macedonia.

Later we find out the decision on “how to divide Macedonia” was left up to the Russian King.

What surprised me the most is that the Russian King, who obviously was biased towards Bulgaria, was put in charge of deciding how to divide Macedonia.

And what did he decide? Did he decide to divide Macedonia along “national lines” as planned? No! When he was asked “How should we divide Macedonia”, the Russian King replied: “No one knows how to divide Macedonia. So go, drive the Ottomans out and wherever your armies stop, that’s where you put your dividing lines.”

And that, more or less, is what happened until the Austro-Hungarians (Hapsburgs) decided they were not going to allow Serbia to have access to the Adriatic Sea.

So what happened after that?

Well, hell broke loose and the Second Balkan War started.

Italy and Austro-Hungary called for an Albanian state to be created in the lands that Serbia had occupied. Serbia was not happy about losing those lands and asked Bulgaria for more land because at that time Bulgaria had occupied the largest part of Macedonia.

Bulgaria did not answer the Serbian pleas and kept ignoring Serbia. Serbia was not strong enough to take those lands by force by itself so it asked Greece for help. A secret pact was made to strike Bulgaria. Bulgaria found out about the secret pact and preemptively struck back at both Serbia and Greece and started to drive them out of Macedonia.

Romania from the north sought this opportunity to regain some territories it had lost to Bulgaria and attacked Bulgaria from the north. The Ottomans, having just lost Macedonia, decide to take a chance on getting some of it back and struck Bulgaria from the east.

The Great Powers decided to intervene and stop this from becoming a World War. The Second Balkan War, as I mentioned earlier, ended with the signing of the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest. Again, the division was determined by where the armies stood when the war ended. And that’s how Macedonia was divided.

So after their country was invaded and occupied, the Macedonian people faced another prospect; their country was partitioned in three pieces. And as I mentioned earlier, Greece was given 51%, Serbia 39% and Bulgaria was lucky to even receive 10%. But Bulgaria was not happy about that and every time there was a conflict, it tried to take more of Macedonia.

In addition to having their country portioned into three pieces, the Macedonian people were now faced with three new occupiers who were not satisfied with just occupying Macedonian lands but wanted to assimilate the Macedonian people, by force if necessary.

After the Second Balkan War ended in 1913, the Greeks administratively took over the Macedonian territory they occupied and informed the Macedonian people that this was Greece now. They established their military administration and, through parliamentary approval, extended the Greek border to the north to where it is today. After that they sent a ministry, judges, guards, policemen and so on. After they established their various administrations they began to assimilate the Macedonian lands along with the Macedonian people.

INTERVIEWER – Can I just go back one step? There was, I was saying in the village Rabi, a statue of a man called Baskavievus. Now I know from my research that he did not speak Greek, yet he fought with Capitan Kourtas, who your Dad showed me a picture of.

RISTO – I don’t recognize the name but like I said before these hired thugs, who worked for Bishop Karavangelis of Kostur and other such bishops, were mostly local Macedonians with very few so called Greeks imported from Crete. These people were criminals and opportunists who would do anything for anyone for money. It is most unfortunate that Greece made them into heroes.

Naturally Greece needs to show the world that it has heroes who fought for its cause but the Macedonian people know exactly what kind of animals these thugs were. Every society has them and they seem to rise and flourish during desperate times.

Karavangelis had these thugs killing people and forcing Macedonians to become Greeks. They did a lot of raping and plundering too. They did that to terrorize the people and turn them into easy prey.

The reason Greece, Serbia and Bulgarian hired local Macedonians is because Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria did not want to get caught conducting criminal activities and interfering in the affairs of the

Ottoman Empire, so they paid local Macedonians to do the dirty work for them.

Later Greece sent Cretins because they were more vicious and therefore more reliable workers.

Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia could not afford to get implicated in embarrassing situations and neither could they sent their own military…so the way they did business was by sending agents or spies inside Macedonia to basically put together armed gangs that were willing to do dirty deeds to their own people for money.

And this is how they established Kourtas’s gang, as you call him, and the other armed groups. The agents were good at establishing the groups but they couldn’t manage them so they used religious figures like Karavangelis to give them their assignments and to pay them for their work.

INTERVIEWER – Was Kourtas in any way ethnically Greek?

RISTO – I don’t know what ethnicity he was but I can tell you that he was not an “ethnic Greek” because, as I said earlier, there were and there are no “ethnic Greeks”. Greece itself does not recognize the word “ethnicity” because it claims that “ethnicities” do not exist in Greece. And I don’t mean minorities, I mean ethnicities. Do you know why? Because, as I explained earlier, all the people in Greece, the people who live inside Greece’s borders today, with the exception of the Christian Turkish settlers and colonists who were brought to Greece from Asia Minor in the 1920’s, are indigenous to Greece and none of them are Greeks. And neither are the Christian Turkish settlers and colonists.

If Greece were to recognize that ethnicities exist it would have to recognize that Greece is a multi-ethnic state. But Greece has declared itself a homogenous state populated by pure Greeks only.

I have already explained that Greece is an artificial creation and became a nation state for the first time in the 1820’s. The larger ethnic groups that lived in the territory where Greece is today before it was called Greece were ethnic Albanians, Vlachs, Macedonians

and Turks. In other words, the original people who lived in the region now called Greece were Albanians, Vlachs, Macedonians, Turks and a variety of other smaller groups of ethnicities.

The largest of these ethnic groups was the Albanian group which spoke Albanian. The Vlachs, today’s staunchest Greeks, were the next largest group. They lived mostly in Thessaly and spoke Vlach, a Latin language. The entire Peloponnesus was occupied by Slav speakers who were either indigenous to the region or were deposited there by the Byzantine emperors.

When Greece was first created Nauplion was its capital. History tells us that when the first Greek parliamentary assembly was called to session it had to use translators because the majority of its members did not speak Greek or even one language.

Athens at the time was just a village populated by Albanians, about five thousand of them. Even the first language considered for use in the newly created Greek state was Albanian. Yes, Albanian and not Greek. This is Greece’s true history, not the manufactured history they teach in their schools today.

To put it simply, Greece is a modern creation that came out of the ashes of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Greece was artificially created by the Western Philhellenes who were infatuated with the so-called “Ancient Greeks”, another group of Greeks that did not exist, not like the way they are portrayed. But we will leave that story for another time.

Modern Greece was artificially designed to mimic the so-called Ancient Greece, a mythical Greece, in order to give Europe credence and to prove to the world that today’s modern civilization has roots in Europe, and not somewhere else.

When Greece was first created it was ruled by a foreigner. King Otto, a German prince, a child who was sent to Greece along with a German administration of over six hundred people.

Why was a foreigner and a foreign administration sent to Greece to rule it? Was Greece incapable of ruling itself, of finding leaders in

its own people? Or was Otto sent to Greece to shape it the way the Germans wanted it shaped?

We know that Otto’s father, the King of Germany, was a Philhellene and Otto, being a child, relied on his father for guidance. Otto was helped to create the Greece of today, an artificial Greece, to serve the interests of the Western European Great Powers and not the interests of the people who lived in Greece. And ever since then Greece has been a protectorate of the Western European Great Powers. Why? To protect it from who? To protect it from itself?

Yes, to protect it from itself! The people living in Greece were never asked who and what they were and what kind of state they wanted for themselves, they were told that they were Greeks and nothing more. They were told they were Greeks, descendents of the Ancient Greeks and to forget the rest, including their own real identities.

This was forced upon them and the people were turned into nationalists, fanatics and xenophobes, refusing to face the truth even about their own past.

The Greeks today passionately despise people who live in Greece and claim not to be Greeks and that they belong to ethnicities, especially to the Macedonian ethnicity.

The Greeks refuse to recognize that such an ethnicity exists and discriminate extremely against anyone who claims to be Macedonian.

People have been exiles, beaten, fined, sent to jail and even executed for claiming to be Macedonian.

After the Greeks got their hands on Macedonia they erased everything that was Macedonian including the Macedonian toponyms, people’s names, Macedonian inscriptions even the Macedonian saint names from church icons and people’s Macedonian names from tombstones.

When Greece established itself as a state and took control of the people who lived within its borders, it published demographic

statistics. Before 1926 it published demographic statistics claiming that modern Greece was populated by 98% pure Greeks and 2% Muslim Greeks.

First, Muslim is not an ethnicity, it’s a religion. So your first hint here is that the demographic was based on religion. But how can that be? Did they accidentally omit the word “Christian” in between the words “pure” and “Greeks”? They didn’t exactly say “Greece was populated by 98% pure Christian Greeks and 2% Muslim Greeks”?

What are we to assume they meant by that, that Greece is populated by 100% pure Greeks of whom 98% are Christians and 2% are Muslims?

Or are we to assume Greece is populated by 98% pure “ethnic” Greeks and 2% “ethnic” Greeks who happen to be Muslims?

Why create such confusion?

I asked many people what they thought this meant, including my own parents. They all, without exception, said they thought it meant that Greece was populated by 98% ethnic Greeks.

“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.” (Page 121, Richard Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece)

According to this new demographic, 89% of Greece was still populated by pure Greeks. This trend continued through the 1920’s even though Greece brought over one million Turkish Christian colonists and settlers from Asia Minor and settled them on Greek soil. But we Macedonians knew that these people were not Greeks because many, about 600,000 of them, were settled in Macedonia. They became our neighbours and when we got to know them we found out that they were Christian Turks and not Greeks!

So the question now was where and who were the Greeks in Macedonia that Greece referred to as “pure” Greeks in the Greek demographic?

I decided to look into this a little deeper. I started with my own parents. I said Greece claims that 89% of the population living inside its borders is Greek. I know all the people in our village and no one claims to be Greek, so who are the Greeks in our village?

There were no Greeks in my village, none in neighbouring villages and none in the region where I lived in Macedonia.

In places where everyone seemed to know everyone, people pointed out the non-Macedonians who they thought might be Greeks. They pointed to the grocers the shepherds, the bakers the handymen and so on; who they thought might be Greeks.

But, as it turned out the grocers were Vlachs, the shepherds were Vlachs, the baker was a Jew and the construction crews were Albanians… and so far no Greeks.

The only other people that the villagers assumed were Greeks were the police chiefs, the politicians, some of the teachers, and the settlers and colonists… but all of them turned out to be newcomers to Macedonia who came from south of Olympus and from Asia Minor. In other words they all came outside of Macedonia and we could not identify their ethnicity.

Therefore I had to conclude that there were no “Greeks” who were indigenous to Macedonia. And as I mentioned earlier, the newcomers, the Christian Turkish settlers and colonists from Asia Minor who were deposited in various Macedonian villages, were not Greeks either.

So one has to wonder, “What’s going on here?” Where are the Greeks? Well, there have to be some Greeks further south in Greece?!

To make a long story short, I decided to look deeper into the history of Greece but not through Greek sources.

After going through about 150 books written by such authors as David Holden, Fallmerayer, Edward Blaquiere, William St. Clair, T. J. Winifrith, J. McKeen Cattell, Lucy M. J. Garnett, James Bourchier, La Pouge, Schultz, Rennell Rodd, Michael Herzfeld, Clogg, Nigel Wilson, G. Droysen (the man who actually created Hellenism), Thomas Keightley, G. Bowersock, Nicholas G. L. Hammond *, Keith R. Legg, Richard Gleason Greene, William Z. Ripley, Colin Wells, Alexandra Halkias, Charles Eliot, G. P. Gooch, Rennell Rodd, G. A. Henty, Balasz Trencsenyi, Michal Kopecek, F.W. Walbank, Peter Green, Neni Panourgia, Vamik Volkan, Karakasidou, to name a few… I could find no “ethnic Greeks” in Greece.

* [Surprisingly even Nicholas G. L. Hammond, the greatest Philhellene historian and author, has admitted that the Modern Greeks are not what they seem. Nicholas G. L. Hammond in his book “Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas” on page 57 writes, “It was during this period [1206 to 1260] that the flow of immigrants from the western area began. It became a flood in the fourteenth century. They went as mercenaries, raiders and migrants. The great majority of them were speakers of Albanian, but others joined the movement. Whatever their language they were described by the Greek and Latin writers as ‘Albanoi’ or ‘Albanitai’ or ‘Albanenses’ and the reason of this collective term can only be that they entered the Byzantine world through the district which the Byzantines knew as ‘Albanon’. Thus the Vlach speaking Malakasii who invaded Thessaly in 1334 were described as ‘Albanoi’ by Cantacuzenus 1.474 no less than the evidently Albanian-speaking ‘Albanensium gens’ which raided Thessaly in 1325.]

All these authors said that Greece was a modern creation, created from the raw materials that existed on the Ottoman lands that are now called Greece. There never was a Greece and there never were any Greeks… not until they were created as recently as the first half of the 19th century. So how can there be “ethnic Greeks”?

So once again, Kourtas could not have been an “ethnic Greek”.

The bishop Karavangelis did not work for Athens, he worked for the Patriarchy in Istanbul but cooperated with Athens which supplied him with the necessary gold to commit various crimes in the name of “Hellenism”.

Karavangelis hated IMRO more than the Ottomans did because the IMRO leadership was onto him and got in his way of exercising Hellenism on Macedonia, so he paid these thugs to kill IMRO leaders.

One of those leaders killed in our region was Lazo Poptraikov. Karavangelis hired Kote from Rula to kill Poptraikov. Kote from Rula was a greedy individual and his greed was stronger than his loyalty to his friends. Lazo Poptraikov was an usher in Kote’s wedding and a man who twice saved Kote’s life. But Poptraikov was also on Karavangelis’s hit list.

After a skirmish with the Ottomans in Mariovo, word was out that Lazo Poptraikov had received a wound on the head and was on the run. Kote caught up with him at Turtska Polena in Oshchima and after a long chat the two men said their good byes and Kote left.

On his way to Zhelevo, Kote sent some hood from Zhelevo to kill and decapitate Lazo. Lazo’s head was then taken to Karavangelis to collect the reward. Lazo’s headless body, according to my father, was buried behind the altar in the Sveti Nikola Church in Oshchima.

I just want to add here that the ultimate disgrace for Karavangelis came after the massacre of the village Zagoricheni. Refusing to bend to Hellenism, Zagoricheni, on direct orders from Karavangelis, was massacred to the last person, including the unborn children inside the wombs of pregnant women. Witnesses reported finding bodies of pregnant women with their abdomens cut open. The survivors who escaped refused to bury the dead and waited for days for the European consuls from Bitola to arrive and witness the atrocities the Greeks had committed first hand. And what did these consuls do? Nothing!

The people from the surrounding villages knew Kote from Rula. He was an idiot, a simpleton, a perfect patsy to be used by the

Macedonian people’s enemies. Today Kote is a Greek hero. Why shouldn’t he be? He helped Greece make Macedonia Greek.

Today there is a statue of him in his native Rula, standing there at the entrance of the village, reminding the local Macedonian population, who knew him, of what an idiot he was and of how he helped the Greeks enslave Macedonia.

For those who didn’t know him, Kote is a Greek hero and there is a statue of him to prove it. What idiots, those who admire Kote’s statue have no clue how that greatness was achieved and if you tell them they will ridicule you and tell you “You are the idiot!”