THE ALBANIAN LANGUAGE ALMOST BECAME OFFICIAL IN GREECE - Part 03

Greek identity, it has also been a source of much Greek division in modern times. …the official language of the state, called Katharevousa, or ‘pure’, is an artificially imposed adaptation of the classical tongue…” (p 23) The Catharevousa was the Greek official language of the Greek state from 1901 until I believe 1975 when it was abandoned by the Papandreou regime in favour of the colloquial language known as the Dimotiki resembling the Koine. “When Greece was reborn in 1832 in the form of a modern nation-state there was, in consequence, a fundamental ambiguity about her entire national character. The Greek nation-state was a product of western political intervention-‘the fatal idea’ as Arnold Toyanbee once called it, of exclusive nationalism impinging upon the multi-national traditions of the eastern world.” (p 28) When Greece became a state for the first time in 1829 the vast majority of people living on its territory were Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Macedonians, Roma and a variety of other ethnic minorities. There never was a state called “Greece” before 1821. “By extension, therefore, at any rate in theory, it [Greece] was a child of the renaissance and of western rationalism, some of whose inspiration was derived from classical Greece; and its western sponsors naturally saw the moment of its creation as a rebirth of ‘true’ or classical Greek-ness in the land to which that heritage rightfully belonged. But the Greeks themselves had few such thoughts. They had known no renaissance; and the thread of their classical past had long been woven into the oriental web of Byzantium. Their recovery of political independence was to most of them far more a matter of restoring the power of the Greek Christian empire than of rebuilding ancient Hellas.” (p 29) Before the Greek state was created by the Great Powers the people living in that region did not see themselves as the kind of Greeks they became afterwards. That Greece was not familiar to them. The vast majority of the people involved from 1821 when the uprising against the Ottomans began to the time Greece became a state for the first time in 1829 saw themselves as Christians fighting to restore the Byzantine state. “Officially, Greeks call their modern state Hellas, after the classical world of 2,000 years ago, and by the same token they are officially known as Hellenes, which implies descent from their illustrious classical forefathers. But at the same time, colloquially, they call themselves Romios, derived from Rum, or Rome, and signifying that they are citizens of the eastern Roman Empire whose capital was Constantinople-in short, that they are really the children of Byzantine

‘Greece’, on the other hand, is derived from the Latin Graecia, the province of the western Roman Empire which stretched south of Mount Olympus through the peninsula of Attica and the Peloponnese. Its International use to describe the sovereign state that currently occupies that territory is merely a reflection of the fact that ‘Greece’ in this modern sense is literally a western invention.” (p 29) I believe the above quote is self explanatory. “Thus, in Greece today, we have the fragmented and purely local traditions of the classical city states compressed together with the wide-ranging and multi-national pattern of the eastern Roman Empire into the mould of a modern nation-state which has nothing structurally in common with either and whose only internationally recognized name is equally foreign to both.” (p 29) In other words, Modern Greeks received their classical ancient heritage through education and not through continuity; it being passed on from generation to generation. And by accepting this artificial heritage, Greeks have rejecting their real one, leaving them in a cultural limbo. “The reality of Greece today, indeed, is that she is an immature, insecure and poor nation with an unmanageable and bitterly divided legacy of historical glory. Socially and economically she remains largely under-developed, but historically she is, so to speak, over-developed and unable, therefore, to treat herself, or to be treated by others, on her preset merits. So national pride becomes a substitute for performance and every step forward has to be taken with a confused and confusing backward glance.” (p 36) If you want to learn more about “another side of Greece” I highly recommend you read David Holden’s book “Greece Without Columns”. In spite of Greece’s artificiality today one can call him or herself a “proud Greek” with a 4,000 year old heritage and with roots extending back to the classical Greeks of 2,000 years ago but a real and genuine Macedonian accord to Greek logic cannot call him or herself a Macedonian because again according to modern Greek logic “Macedonia is Greek” and “there is no such thing as a Macedonia”!

Essay 13 - G. A. Henty on 19th century Greece and the Modern Greeks

Modern Greeks for the last century or so have been spreading untruths about themselves and now generations later have forgotten who they really are.

This essay is another means of letting the Greeks know who they really are. And for those who ask, “Why am I doing this?” I am doing this because nowadays Greeks have forgotten who they are and where they come from and have become so brazen that they dare to attack others like the Macedonians, Albanians and Turks and question their identity without giving it a second thought as to their own and the damage they are doing. When people deny other peoples’ ethnic identity they deny their right to exist and as such those people have no choice but to fight back. But unlike the Greeks who fight back with half-truths and untruths Macedonians have the truth on their side. What follows are excerpts from G. A. Henty’s book “In the Greek Waters: A Story of the Grecian War of Independence (1821-1827)” who speaks the truth about 19th century Greece and about the Modern Greeks. On page 40 Henty said: “Greece will rise one of these days,” Mr. Beveridge went on, “and when she does she will astonish Europe. The old spirit still lives among the descendants of Leonidas and Milatiades.” “I should be sorry to be one of the Turks who fell into their hands,” William Martyn said gravely as he thought of the many instances in his own experiences of the murders of sailors on leave ashore. “It is probable that there will be sad scenes of bloodshed,” Mr. Beveridge agreed; “that is only to be expected when you have a race of men of a naturally impetuous and passionate character enslaved by a people alien in race and in religion. Yes, I fear it will be so at the commencement, but that will be all altered when they become disciplined soldiers. Do you not think so?” he asked, as the sailor remained silent. “I have great doubts whether they will ever submit to discipline,” he said bluntly. “Their idea of fighting for centuries has been simply to shoot down an enemy from behind the shelter of rocks. I would as life undertake to discipline an army of Malays, who, in a good many respects, especially in the handiness with which they use their knives, are a good deal like the Greeks.”

“There is one broad distinction,” Mr. Beveridge said: “the Malays have no past, the Greeks have never lost the remembrance of their ancient glory. They have a high standard to act up to; they reverence the names of the great men of old as if they had died but yesterday. With them it would be a resurrection, accomplished, no doubt, after vast pains and many troubles, the more so since the Greeks are a composite people among whom the descendants of the veritable Greek of old are in a great minority. The majority are of Albanian and Suliot blood, races which even the Romans found untamable. When the struggle begins I fear that this section of the race will display the savagery of their nature; but the fighting over, the intellectual portion will, I doubt not, regain their proper ascendancy, and Greece will become the Greece of old.” William Martyn was wise enough not to pursue the subject. On pages 139 and 140 Henty said: “Brutes!” Martyn exclaimed with great emphasis. “How these fellows can be descendants of the Greeks beats me altogether.” “The old Greeks were pretty cruel,” Horace, who had just joined them, said. “They used to slaughter their captives wholesale, and mercy wasn’t among their virtues. Besides, my father says that except in the Morea very few indeed are descendents of the Greeks; the rest are Bulgarian or Albanian, neither of whom are Greeks of old would have recognized as kinsmen.” “It is case of distance lending enhancements to the view,” Miller laughed; “our illusions are gone.” “Never mind, we must make the best of them, Miller; they are not Greeks, but at any rate they are all that is left of the Greeks. Their actions show that their Christianity is a sham, but at the same time they are an intelligent race capable of someday becoming a great people again, and they are struggling to throw off the yoke of a race intellectually their inferiors and incapable of progress in any sort of way. That is what my father said to me as we were walking up and down the deck this morning. That is the light I mean to look at it in the future. It is a capable people struggling with an incapable one, and if they are savage and vindictive and debased it is the faults not of themselves but of those who have so long been their masters.” “Good,” Martyn said; “that is the most satisfactory view of the thing, and we will stick to it and shut our years as much as possible in future against all stories to the Greeks’ disadvantage.” In spite of Greece’s artificiality today one can proudly call him or herself a “Hellene” with a 4,000 year old heritage, with roots extending back to the classical Greeks of 2,500 years ago but a real and genuine Macedonian cannot call him or herself a Macedonian because

according to modern Greek logic “Macedonia is Greek” and “there is no such thing as a Macedonian”!

Essay 14 - Connecting the Past with the Present

When the crazy idea of creating “Hellenes” out of the Modern Barbarian ethnic groups, who during the late 18th and early 19th centuries were living on the same lands as the people from the Ancient City States of 2,500 years ago, was starting to take root a history had to be written for them. This would be no ordinary history but a history that would extend their lineage connecting their modern existence with that of their ancient. But didn’t I tell you all along that the Modern Greeks are not at all connected with the ancient ones? Didn’t I tell you that the Modern Greeks are not Greeks at all but Slavs, Albanians, Vlachs and an assortment other smaller ethnic groups? Yes I did! How then can a group of Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs be connected to a people that ceased to exist more than 2,000 years ago? All I can say at this point is that “it’s by Magic”! In this essay we will explore the magic processes used by the Philhellenes to transform mere barbarians of the Slav, Albanian and Vlach kind into sophisticated Modern Greeks, perfect replicas of the Ancient Greeks, as envisioned by their Philhellene creators. If I can refer to Lord Byron as the “Father of Modern Greece” because of his involvement in the creation of the “Modern Greek” then I would have to refer to Johann Gustav Droysen as the “wizard of Modern Greek History” for his magical performance in making the connection between the Modern Greeks and the “Ancient” ones. Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) was a German historian and a member of the Frankfurt Parliament. (Page 597, “The Columbia Encyclopedia” 3rd Edition, 1963) In “The Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece”, edited by Nigel Wilson, on page 345 we read “The first modern appearance of the concept of Hellenism and Hellenization occurs in Geschichte des Hellenismus G. Droysen’s great three volume work published between 1833 and 1843. He viewed the Hellenistic period as the time in which, in the territories conquered by Alexander the Great, Greek and Near Eastern cultures were intertwined to create the cultural background from which Christianity emerged.” The great Philhellene masterminds, it appears, were not too concerned about the Ancient to Modern Greek connection when they were concocting the idea of creating Greeks from Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs because they probably did not believe that the concept would catch on, but once it did, that job fell upon Johann Gustav Droysen to connect them to a fabled but glorious past.

“In his first edition of [his book History of Hellenism] 1883 Droysen set out to bridge the gap between classical Greece and the coming of Christianity, and he found his link in what he called the Hellenistic age. ‘My enthusiasm’, he wrote ‘is for Caesar, not Cato, for Alexander, not Demosthenes’, small wonder that such a man living in the Germany of Bismarck should conceive a devotion to the rising state of Prussia, with its manifest destiny to unite the Fatherland; and Droysen’s second edition, published in 1877, under the spell of Prussian success, laid special stress on the forces making for panhellenism and the unity of Greece – above all Isocrates and the kings of Macedon. It was Droysen who really raised the national issue in Greek history.” (Page 235, “The Problem of Greek Nationality”, F.W. Walbank) Droysen, it appears, had quickly discovered that the Ancient so-called Greeks had disappeared from the face of the earth and he could not make a connection so he decided to borrow or perhaps steal from the Macedonians. Even though the Macedonians ethnically had nothing to do with the Ancient City States, Droysen made it his mission to make the connection, making it appear as if they did. Instead of appropriately calling the Period subsequent to Alexander the Greats’ time “the Macedonistic Period”, he opted for calling it “Hellenistic”, which in effect robbed the Macedonian people of their heritage and handed it to the artificial newly created Greeks. Further down in “The Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece”, edited by Nigel Wilson, on page 345 we read “The creation in the 19th and 20th centuries of modern European Empires in regions once dominated by Hellenistic kingdoms was a further spur to reassessing the Hellenistic period. Those developments encouraged scholars to see Alexander and his Macedonian successors as precursors of contemporary events. In parallel, scholarship was adding new evidence to Droysen’s view of Hellenistic civilization as a mixed culture which, although Greek in character, had been enriched by the incorporation of features derived from ancient Near Eastern cultures.” In Peter Green’s book “Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B.C. a Historical Biography” on pages 482 and 483 we read “Committed liberalism, however, was not a universal feature of nineteenth-century scholarship. European history moved in various channels, some more authoritarian than others: as usual, Alexander's reputation varied according to context. One milestone in Alexander studies was the publication of Johann Gustav Droysen's still immensely influential biography, Alexander der Grosse (1833). It has often been said, with justice, that this is the first work of modern historical scholarship on Alexander: Droysen was, undoubtedly, the first student to employ

serious critical methods in evaluating our sources, and the result was a fundamental study. Once again, however, Droysen's own position largely dictated the view he took of his subject. Far from being a liberal, he was an ardent advocate of the reunification of Germany under strong Prussian leadership and after 1848 served for a while as a member of the Prussian parliament. Thus we have a biographer of Alexander imbued with a belief in monarchy and a passionate devotion to Prussian nationalism: how the one aspect of his career influenced the other is, unfortunately, all too predictable. For the aspirations of independent small Greek states (as for their German counterparts) he had little but impatient contempt. In his view it is Philip of Macedon who emerges as the true leader of Greece, the man destined to unify the country and set it upon its historical mission; while Alexander carried the process one step farther by spreading the blessings of Greek culture throughout the known (and large tracts of the unknown) world. Plutarch's early essay on Alexander had made much the same point, contrasting the untutored savage who had not benefited from the king's civilizing attentions with those happy lesser breeds who had, the result of their encounter being that blend of Greek and oriental culture which Droysen, perhaps rather misleadingly, christened Hellenism. As one contemporary scholar says, ‘Droysen's conceptions were propounded so forcefully that they have conditioned virtually all subsequent scholarship on the subject.’ Whatever their views on the nature of his achievement, most subsequent biographers tended to see Alexander as, in some guise or other, the great world-mover. This view held up surprisingly well until after the Second World War. The late nineteenth century, after all, saw the apogee of the British Empire, and scholars who got misty-eyed over Kipling in their spare time were not liable to argue with Droysen's view of Alexander. But this was also the heyday of the English gentleman, and much of that fascinating if often legendary figure's characteristics also now began to figure in their portraits – Alexander's becoming lack of interest in sex, his chivalrous conduct to women, his supposed ideals and aspirations towards the wider and mistier glories of imperialism.” Droysen again sets the stage for Macedonians not only to be viewed as “Greeks” but as “Greek unifiers” missing the point altogether that Philip II of Macedonia subjugated the City States after defeating their armies in Charonea in 383 BC. But some people just see what they want to see completely ignoring reality! In the book “The Body Impolitic” by Michael Herzfeld on page 9 we read “Here is the ultimate Greek tragedy: that of a country forced to treat everything familiar at the time of the nation-state’s foundation as

‘foreign’ while importing a culture largely invented – or at least redesigned – by German classicists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For many decades, and almost without interruption, Greeks were forced to put aside music, art and language that were deemed too tainted by the ‘oriental’ influences of the Ottoman, Arab, Slavic and Albanian culture; to forget the partially Albanian roots of modern Athens and its environs; to use in elite-controlled contexts such as schools, the media and the law courts an artificial language syntactically modeled to a surprising extent on French and German but claimed as a revival of a ‘pure’ ancient Greek that supposedly had been preserved in these quintessentially Western languages; and to contemplate the architecture of Bavarian neoclassicists as more genuinely Greek than the homes and churches that had been their cultural settings for many centuries.” Then on page 6 of the same book we read “The Greeks’ marginal status in the ‘Western Civilization’ of which they are supposedly founders, and yet in important respects also the victims, rudely batters their everyday lives at every turn: internationally embarrassed by their successive governments scandals and acutely aware of their dependency on the European Union of which Greece is a member state enjoying nominally full equality with the others, they find themselves derided for an obsession with whether or not they are ‘really European’ that is itself the product of a ‘crypto-colonial’ set of aesthetic and ethical norms.” On page 7 of Michael Herzfeld’s book “The Body Impolitic” we read “Greece is a country created and lauded by the West for virtues that were to a great extent invented in the West: the glories of classical culture, intensely studied and formulated in such universities as Gottingen and Oxford during the enlightenment, were imported during the romantic era in Greece, now under a western imposed Bavarian monarchy and Bureaucracy. In Athens, a partially Albanian small town dragged into modernity by being made the national capital, the florescence of neoclassical architecture signed the reconstruction of the present as a living past, but the local architecture (and especially those aspects of it that seemed to recall the Ottoman period) was demolished as quickly as possible. Domestic spaces nonetheless retained non classical interiors often with distinct Turkish-sounding names for the various features, in contrast to the classical names of the exterior ornament. In language, above all, ordinary speech was increasingly condemned as both decadent and foreign, a medley of Turkish and Slavic influence, and was replaced for legal and educational purposes by the newly created puristic language. Music, art and folklore –

everything was reclassicised in a formula created in Germany, Britain and France.” Further down on page 7 and at the top of page 8 of the same book we read “Greek independence was thus highly conditional. The bourgeoisie that emerged out of this situation was beholden to the west; the religious imitated the rationalism of the West; and the academic establishment, especially during periods of military rule, faithfully reproduced the self demeaning ideology of Greece the European ancestors as prime instrument of its own – highly conditioned – status and power.” I find it unnecessary to add any more information; the above few quotes quite remarkably define not only the fabrication processes but also the character imposed on the south Balkan people to create this fantastic entity called Modern Greece. These few quotes go a long way in describing what went on in the fabrication of this purely artificial nation called Greece and in the falsification of its history ; and if I may add at the expense, among others, of the Macedonian people. Now a few words about the other creator of Greece; Lord Byron “It is worth while to ask, for instance, how many of those who are moved by the poetry of Lord Byron has contrasted it with his opinion of the modern Greeks, when now and then he descends to sober prose? It is somewhat curious to notice the actual origin of Lord Byron’s expedition, and the opinion he really formed in the course of it. Dr. Millingen as his physician and constant companion, speaks with an authority on this point to which no one else perhaps can make an equal claim, and this is the account he gives; - Breaking asunder the shackles which checked their immorality, the late revolution has given the amplest scope to the exhibition of their real character, and it stands to reason that it must have placed in more glaring light the melancholy picture of their utter worthlessness. Even under the wisest government, the regeneration of a nation can be the difficult work of time, and certainly none can be less easily improvable than this. According to the same authority, Lord Byron, when asked why he fought for Greece, gave the following reason: - Heartily weary of the monotonous life I had lead in Italy for several years, sickened with pleasure, more tired of scribbling than the public if perhaps of reading my lucubrations, I felt the urgent necessity of giving a completely new direction to the course of my ideas, and the active, dangerous, yet glorious scenes of the military career struck my fancy and became congenial to my taste. I came to Genoa, but far from mediating to join the Greeks, I was on the eve of sailing to Spain, when informed of the overthrow of the liberals, I perceived it was too late to join R. Wilson, and then it was the unmanageable delirium of my military fever that I

altered my intentions and resolved on steering to Greece. After all, should this new mode of existence fail to afford me the satisfaction I anticipate, it will at least present me with the means of making a dashing exist from the scene of this world where the part I was acting had grown excessively dull.” (Pages 929 and 930, “The Nineteenth Century a Monthly Review”, edited by James Knowles, July-December, 1870) And now I leave you with this; “In order for Greece to be delivered her independence from the Ottomans by the great powers of the enlightened West, Greece had to prove not only that she could become a modern nation but, somehow, that Greece, under the oriental patina of the Ottoman subject, was always already the primal modern entity. Or alternatively, Greece could have followed Ludwig von Maurer’s advice, who, in 1836 said that ‘all the Greeks have to do in order to be what they used to be is mimic the Germans.” (in Tsiomis 1985b: 144). And the Greek intellectuals understood only too well that in order for them to be considered to be European they first had to prove that they were as ‘Greek’ as the rest of the Europeans.” (Page 28, “Fragments of Death Fables of Identity an Athenian Anthropography” by Neni Panourgia).

Essay 15 – Language Religion and Identity

By now everyone who has read the previous essays in this book should be aware of the history of how the so-called Greek nation was created. But what we have not discussed so far is the criteria used in identifying who was Greek and who wasn’t given that the Modern Greek nation was created from Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs. Putting the question another way, in the early 19th century when the Greek state was being created for the first time ever, how did one recognize a Greek from a non Greek given that the majority of ethnic groups living in the land who became Greek were predominantly Albanian, Slav, or Vlach? In James Knowles’s monthly review “The Nineteenth Century and After” volume LXXXVI, July – December 1919 on page 645 we read “But who are the Greeks? At least five-sixths of them, if not more, are Christian Albanians of the Orthodox faith, Albanians in sentiment and in language, who because they acknowledge the Patriarch of Constantinople are declared to be Greek in point of ‘national consciousness’. In point of fact, the greater number of the Christian Albanians, whether Orthodox or Catholic, are thoroughly Albanian in sentiment as well as in race and language, and have nothing whatsoever in common with Greeks except allegiance to a Church which styles itself Oecumenical or universal, not national or Greek.” In this author’s estimation, an Albanian whose allegiance was to the Orthodox religion was considered to be Greek. In the book “Greece in the Twentieth Century” edited by Theodore A. Couloumbis on page 25 we read “Greeks are those who speak Turkish but profess the Christian religion of their ancestors.” In the book “The Empty Cradle of Democracy” by Alexandra Halkias on page 59 we read “Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the average inhabitant of Greece called himself of herself Roman (Romios), and the (Greek) language Romeika.” “…though this was not articulated in racial terms but on the basis of a common language, history and consciousness. In effect, at this time, whoever called themselves a Greek was a Greek. It is because of this that many Greek-speaking Albanians, Slavs, Romanians and Vlachs were easily assimilated and became important players in Greek patriotism at the time. (Dakin 1972, 8)” “To some extent – the consciousness of the modern Greek of his classical ancestry is a product of Western scholarship.” Here Alexandra Halkias tells us that before Greece became a country in the early 19th century some of its people called themselves

Romios meaning Romans and the language Romeika. But no sooner had Greece been created by its Philhellene patrons than Romios and Romaika became Greek and all those who spoke Romaika, irrespective of their ethnic origins be it Slav, Albanian or Vlach, became instant Greeks. In the book “Greece and the Balkans” edited by Dimitris Tsiovas on page 43 we read “…common phenomenon in Balkan history: the ‘ethnicization’ of religious, social or occupational groups. Very often, such groups were denoted by the names of ethnic communities and they used these names to denote themselves as well. As we saw ‘Greek’ (Romaios) could mean ‘Orthodox Christian’ but also “city dweller’ and well to do ‘citizen’ in particular. In the same way ‘Turk’ often means ‘Muslim’. Bulgarian was used to denote ‘villager’, with or without pejorative connotation. ‘Vlach’ could mean ‘shepherd’ or ‘nomad’ in General.” In the book “Politics in Modern Greece” by Keith R. Legg on page 86 we read “The term ‘Greek’ differentiates the language spoken by inhabitants of modern Greece from the languages of the surrounding countries; but there is disagreement on what the Greek language was, is, and should be. At the time of independence, the range in local dialects was significant; a substantial portion of the population spoke Albanian.” In the book “Political Science Quarterly” edited by The Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University, Twenty-Third volume, published in 1908 on page 307 we read “There was little interest as to the nationality of the rayahs while Turkish rule was strong. They were nearly all Christians of the Byzantine kind, those in Europe at least, and were hence regarded as one people, for oriental theocracy cannot conceive of nationality apart from religion. They themselves knew the differences in their origins and in such traditions as they had; some were Slavs, some Vlachs and some Albanians…” “But they felt more deeply than they thought; the hardships of their common lot and the common worship of their church gave them a stronger sense of unity than disunity; they were all non-Muslims, all rayahs and in a sense all Greeks.” Here the authors do not hesitate to equate “Greek” with “Orthodox Christian” as was truly the case back in the 19th century, a formula that the Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians would later use to make Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians out of the Macedonians. “When we read that the Roumanians are Latins; that the Bulgarians and Servians are Slav, according to the opinion of this and that writer, or that they are Greeks, as Greece contends, we get the common coin of diplomatic exchange; but it is spurious and counterfeit if passed as

historical truth.” (Page 307, “Political Science Quarterly” edited by The Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University, Twenty-Third volume, published in 1908). In the book “Romaic Grammar” by E. A. Sofocles, A. M. published in 1842 on page iii of the preface we read “Romaic, or, as it is often called, MODERN GREEK is the language spoken by the modern Greeks.” Then on page iv in the same book we read “The revolution of 1821 has restored the ancient appellation ‘Ellines’ but as it is used chiefly by the inhabitants of Bavarian Greece, who perhaps do not constitute more than one-fourth of the Greek nation, it may safely be said that the mass of the people still call themselves Romeii and their language Romaiki.” In James Knowles’s monthly review “The Nineteenth Century” Vol. VI, July-December 1870, on pages 948 and 949 we read “The Orthodox Church, it is true, has striven more successfully to make Christian Greeks than to make Greeks Christians; but to assert that a Greek Christian is a Hellene it is as reasonable as to call all Roman Catholics Italian; and to claim a Slav or Albanian as a Hellene because he speaks Greek, is much the same as calling an educated Russian French, or an Irishman English, because they prefer French or English to their own less developed languages.” In William St. Clair’s book “That Greece Might Still be Free” on page 8 we read “In the eyes of the majority of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, it was primarily their religion that distinguished them from the Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Jews and others who made up the population of the Empire. All their feelings of being a community centered on the Orthodox Church with its Patriarch at Constantinople, and they felt themselves as alien to the Roman Catholic Greeks who inhabited some of the islands as to the Muslims. Their tradition lead back to the great days when a Greek-speaking Roman Emperor sat on the throne of a Christian Empire at Constantinople and the Orthodox Church and the Patriarchate had an unbroken succession which had been little affected by the Turkish conquest. The Greek language which they spoke was known as ‘Romaik’ from the time when they had been citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire. They called their children after the saints of the Orthodox Church, Georgios, Dimitrios, Spyridon. Most Greeks of the Ottoman Empire had no comprehension of that complex of ideas relating to territorial boundaries and cultural and linguistic uniformity which makes up the European concept of a nation state.” Then on page 9 of St. Clair’s book we read “The Albanians of Hydra and Spetsae, many of whom could not even speak Greek,

regarded themselves as Greek because their allegiance was to the Orthodox Church.” And finally on page 22 of St. Clair’s book “That Greece Might Still be Free” we read “In Greece itself the Greeks still thought of themselves as the Christian inhabitants of a Muslim Empire, not as the descendent of the Hellenes. The veneer of philhellenism in Greece was very thin indeed. The Greek leaders in Greece itself who joined the conspiracy were content to adopt the propaganda of their expatriates, but they knew that their power over their people depended on something else entirely. A policy of establishing a European nation-state based in ideas about ancient Hellas formulated in Western Europe was far from their minds. Their aim was much simpler. They wanted to get rid of the Turks and take their place as rulers of the country. But they had no wish to set up European political institutions, to assume Western or ancient clothes, or to speak ancient Greek. They did not want to be ‘regenerated’ at all. They were content with the primitive semi-barbarous Eastern way of life they had always known.” It is a shame indeed that so many living and vibrant cultures had to be destroyed to make room for “Hellenism”, something dead and artificial. In Michel Herzfeld’s book “The Body Impolitic” on page 7 we read “In language, above all, ordinary speech was increasingly condemned as both decadent and foreign, a medley of Turkish and Slavic influences, and was replaced for legal and educational purposes by the newly created puristic language. Music, art and folklore – everything was reclassicized in a formula created in Germany, Britain and France.” Again, so many wonderful and vibrant mother languages destroyed to make room for an ancient 2,000 year old dead language artificially resurrected and engineered for the artificially created Hellenic identity which bears no resemblance to the real identities that it replaced which existed on those lands before they were destroyed just in the same way the Greeks are attempting to destroy the Macedonian language spoken north of Mount Olympus. And now I will leave you with this; In Bayard Taylor’s book “Travels in Greece and Russia” published in 1872 on pages 261 and 262 we read “The fact is, a few deeds of splendid heroism have thrown a deceitful halo over the darker features of the Greek War of Independence, and most of those who bend in reverence to the name of Marko Pozzaris do not know that his uncle Nothi stole supplies from his own troops to sell to the Turks – that, which Canaris and Miaulis were brave and incorruptible, Colocotroni filled his purse and made cowards of his men, - that, while Karaiskais was honorable, others

broke the most solemn vows of their religion and murdered the captives they were sworn to spare. One can only say that the Greeks are what the Turks made them – that we should not expect to find in slaves the virtues of freedom; but treachery and perjury were never the characteristics of the Moslem. It is the corrupt leaven of the Lower Empire which still ferments in the veins of this mixed race. I have already said, and I will repeat it, that not one-fifth of the present population can with justice be called Greeks. The remainder are Slavonians, Albanians and Turks, with a slight infusion of Venetian blood.”

Essay 16 - Why expose the Greek Fraud?

Many Greeks, it seems, are not happy with the material I turn out in these essays and have bitterly complained. It is not that they believe what I have written nor do they believe anything anyone has written outside of their trusted state sponsored Greek educational system. Their problem is that they can’t understand why I do this! And by “this” I mean writing about their true identities which, for some reason, seems to offend them. The largest numbers of e-mails, outside of the profane and downright vulgar ones, I receive from Greeks on a daily basis, show a trend of puzzlement; “why, they want to know, do I do this?” Well, I will tell you. Millions of Macedonians have been denied their ethnic identity by no one else except Greek governments, Greeks and Bulgarians. This has been going on relentlessly for over a century. For over thirty years I have tried to reason with Greeks and explain to them how we feel about being treated this way but in spite of all my effort I have not being able to make any progress. All I received back was more ridicule and the standard Greek government sponsored responses such as “you are a Slav”, “there is no such thing as a Macedonian”, “Macedonia is Greek”, “Tito created the Macedonian identity”, etc., etc., etc. I have to be honest, I don’t much like what the Greeks are doing, especially considering where they stand regarding their own identity, so after thirty years of pleading I have decided to fight back in a familiar manner that every Greek would understand; deny their identity as they are denying mine. There is however, if I may point out, a big difference between the Macedonian ethnic identity and that of the Greeks. While Macedonians are people who are true to themselves and have accepted their ethnic identity as was passed on to them by their ancestors, the Modern Greeks have accepted an artificially constructed identity which is a product of the 19th century Western Philhellenic imagination. Macedonians have put up with a lot from the Greeks in the last hundred years and it’s time we start fighting back. Greece, with its partners Serbia and Bulgaria, invaded occupied, partitioned and annexed Macedonia, a land that did not belong to them. They each then tried to forcibly and against their will turn Macedonians into Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians respectively. Those Macedonians who resisted were persecuted to no end. Some were exiled, some were tortured and many were outright killed. Greece, in its new found megalomaniac glory, wanted to turn Macedonians into Hellenes which is not only

alien to Macedonians but downright artificial, a creation of the imagination. In their zeal to expand the curse of Hellenism into Macedonia, the Greeks did some very nasty and unforgettable things to the Macedonians, of which I am sure they are not proud. Among the nastiest things they did is torture, murder and exile many Macedonians because they refused to become Hellenes. They then introduced policies to change all Macedonian place names and people’s names to Greek sounding ones to prove to everyone how “Greek” Macedonia was. They even changed the engravings on church icons and gravestones to remove all traces of Macedonia and to make the past look like it was always Greek. On top of that the Greeks introduced laws to prohibit Macedonians from speaking their mother language in order to erase another unique and dear thing belonging to the Macedonians. Need I say more? Now that Serbia abandoned its share of divided Macedonia and the Macedonian people managed to scrape a little country together that they can call their own, the Greeks wasted no time in exporting their Hellenism and harassing them too. It seems if you are a Macedonian there is no safe place to hide from the curse of Hellenism. After all the things Greeks have done to the Macedonians how can anyone be surprised if the Macedonians started fighting back? Who are these Greeks anyway and what right do they have to abuse the Macedonians and get away with it? How can a fabricated nation of people who are not who they say they are have such rights? In fact, how can a people like the Modern-Greeks even be allowed to have a country? The only reason Modern Greeks have gotten away with what they have done (and are still doing to this day) is because the Macedonian people have been passive. Macedonians who have been abused over the last century have accepted their abuse as “an act of fate” because there was no one willing to help them. Macedonians however are human beings with rights and it’s a matter of time before they discover they have those rights and start fighting back and exposing the racist Greek attitude which has ruled over them for more than a century. If I am any example, Macedonians will no longer tolerate the Greek abuse and will fight for their place in this world and get back what was taken from them, including their identity and dignity. For many years Greeks have abused, tortured, exiled and murdered Macedonians and not a single perpetrator has yet to be punished. Naturally all Macedonians have lost faith in Greece and in Greek justice. Greece has shown no interest in coming to terms with the Macedonians and reconciling the past wrongs it has perpetrated against