AFTER MACEDONIA’S DIVISION THE MACEDONIAN PEOPLE EXPERIENCED A HARSH GRIP OF G

AFTER MACEDONIA’S DIVISION THE MACEDONIAN PEOPLE EXPERIENCED A HARSH GRIP OF GENOCIDE IN THE HANDS OF STRANGERS

There was rarely any room left for error or omission throughout that entire period. History, about those on the Left, has shown that the powerful often tend to mask their mistakes, make them less visible, cover them with a veil of forgetfulness. This became apparent during World War II and during the Greek Civil War. The cruelty of life grew to unbearable hatred, which culminated in the victimization of the Macedonian population.

Studies have shown not only how, but to some extent why the leftist forces destroyed the Macedonian rebels (freedom fighters) in Greek occupied Macedonia and then organized the Greek Civil War (1946 - 1949). The truth is hidden in the secrets of those who ruled; they possessed the hidden facts that are rarely recorded in history books.

Included in this conflicting ideological grouping of communists, that wanted the destruction of the Kostur rebels, were some prominent Macedonian Communists who had joined forces with the Madzhir colonists from Asia Minor. These colonists were deposited in the Kostur villages in 1924 and saw themselves as proud internationalists. It was ironic that the left, in which Macedonians were included, wanted to destroy Macedonian-ism which, at the same time, met the strategic objectives of the Greek kingdom which, for a long time, had performed genocide over the Macedonian people with a single goal: “to create a pure Greek state with a pure Greek nation...”

The outcome has showed us that only the Kostur rebels were guided by Delchev’s philosophy and by the Macedonian freedom fighters who believed that if you die for something then die for Macedonia. And this is exactly what led them to create their own Macedonian army and to refuse to be subservient to the Greek government or to the Communist (internationalists) and that is exactly why they were destroyed.

History will record the strategy of the rebel eternal desire: to have our identity and language returned, to protect our families, properties and villages and to remain masters of our grandfather’s hearth.

First: The rebels, as the rightful sons of these Macedonian lands, brought back the Kostur dialect of the Macedonian language, which for years had been prohibited by Greek law from being spoken;

Second: The rebels re-opened the Macedonian churches and liturgy was conducted in the Macedonian language and so were other rites including baptisms, weddings and funerals;

Third: The local militia addressed the people in their native Macedonian language.

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TO DESTROY THE KOSTUR REBELS, CPG LEADER SIANTOS REQUESTED ASSISTANCE FOR THE CPY AND MET WITH TEMPO FROM MONTENEGRO

During the Tempo – Siantos talks in August 1943, Siantos accepted Tempo’s suggestion to create a special Macedonian military unit in Greek occupied Macedonia for the purpose of leading, agitating and spreading propaganda in the Macedonian language. This was the first step in setting the bait; have Macedonians snare the rebels by an all Macedonian organization and calling it Slavo-Macedonian Liberation Front (SNOF). Let us be clear, however, about something here; this organization was not created by Macedonians and ironically, no one asked why?

A while ago I was reading a provocative book entitled “The Macedonian National Liberation platform in the Aegean part of Macedonia - January 1944” by Dr. Alexander Litovski who, on page 233, wrote: “...regarding the Macedonian national question in the Aegean part of Macedonia, the Macedonian movement was institutionalized through SNOF.” Then, on page 236, he wrote: “In fact if we consider SNOF’s political propaganda activities we can clearly seen two dominant directions of action; the first towards attracting the Macedonian population into EAM (National Liberation Front) and the CPG, and the second towards strengthening a separate Macedonian national identity in the Aegean part of Macedonia.”

When I read these two paragraphs I froze in silence!?

The old people used to say: “Thoughts that don’t take reality into account are easy thoughts to think.”

Unfortunately Dr. Litovski, even though he is Macedonian, had no clue that the words “Slavo-Macedonian” in SNOF were “a tribal attribute”.

There is nothing worse for a Macedonian than Macedonian science, half a century later, to be celebrating a fraud perpetrated by strangers, in this case by Siantos and Tempo, both representatives of

the Left; Siantos of the CPG and Tempo of the CPY, who rightly saw the Macedonian people as “useful idiots”.

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THE “DEED” PROPOSED BY THE LEFTISTS WAS ACCEPTED BY THE MACEDONIAN COMMUNISTS AND BY THE PEOPLE OF ELAS (GREEK NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY) BUT NOT BY THE MACEDONIAN REBELS

We, the Macedonian soldiers who fought in the Greek Civil War from 1946 to1949, paid the price for the manipulations, sins and concerns of the Macedonians – renamed “Slavo-Macedonians”!

Did the CPG, i.e. the Greek communists, really stop being racists against the Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia? Did they repel or at least dissociate themselves from the assimilatory laws that past Greek governments had passed that worked against the Macedonians?! The answer is: No!

It is understandable that CPG Secretary Siantos, a Greek, would be prejudiced against the Macedonians, but Tempo? It was CPY representative Tempo, a Montenegrin, who proposed to the Greeks to create SNOF, a Macedonian organization to snare the Macedonian freedom fighting rebels and destroy them. Why “Slavo-Macedonian”? Did Tempo, from his experience with the Macedonians in the Republic of Macedonia, not know that the people living in Macedonia were Macedonians and not “Slavo-Macedonians”?

After World War I the Greeks invented a new name for the Macedonians. Convinced in their own minds that the “real” Macedonians were Greeks, they decided to call the living, thriving, indigenous and autochthonous Macedonians “Slavo-Macedonians”. This name and its thesis were propagated by the Kostur Bishop Karavangelis. The living Macedonians were robbed of choosing a name for themselves or determining their own ethnic identity; the Greeks did that for them and forced upon them the derogatory slave name “Slavo-Macedonians” meaning that they were not Macedonians but newcomer Carpathian “Slavs” living on

Macedonian lands, which were Greek lands, and that these “Slavs” did not belong there. That was the impression given not only to the Greeks and to the rest of the world but also to the Macedonians themselves. In other words “your grandfather’s lands are no longer yours” and “you do not belong here”!

The name “Slavo-Macedonians” was introduced on an ethnic map of Macedonia in 1918 by Sotiriadis, a Greek by origin. Greek scientists were responsible for establishing the new name for the Macedonians. (See the book “Macedonia is not Greek” by Turkish Lieutenant General Erdogan Oznal.)

Without Macedonian consent, following Tempo’s proposal and Siantos’s approval, on October 20, 1943 SNOF was created in the village Snichani, Kostur Region by Hristos Kalfas – Andreas, CPG Secretary for Western Macedonia, Antonis Andonopoulos – Pericles, CPG District Committee Secretary for Kostur Region, and by Tansis Kartsounis, CPG District Committee Secretary for Kozheni Region.

SNOF and everything else that came with it were intentionally created to break the rebels with assurances that Macedonian Organizations were already established and that they were not needed. So, after the formation of SNOF in Greek occupied Macedonia we had “Slavo-Macedonians”, ELAS fighters and freedom fighting rebels.

It is worth mentioning here that in January 1944, the CPG allowed the formation of a so-called “Slavo-Macedonian” army called SNOV and placed it under the direct leadership of EAM and ELAS. Later it was from this “army” that the “Aegean Brigade” was formed and transferred to Tito’s Army in Yugoslavia.

Immediately after its creation, the so-called “Slavo-Macedonian” battalions received orders to prepare to liquidate the rebel formations. Then, on August 21, 1944, the Kostur battalion attacked several armed rebel villages and managed to disarm a number of rebels.

At the end of August about 300 rebels from Kostur Region joined the Lerin - Kostur Macedonian battalion which, at the time, belonged to ELAS under the command of Captain Markos. But Captain Markos did not want the Macedonian battalions in Macedonia and demanded that they be transferred to Epirus with new tasks.

As usual, the Greeks communists, showing their true colours, began to threaten the Macedonians who were organized in SNOF. As a result many no longer wanted to belong to ELAS and a large number disconnected themselves and fled with their people and villages and went over the border to Yugoslavia. Then, on November 18, 1944, these battalions were regrouped in Bitola to form the “Aegean Brigade” and deployed in Tito’s Yugoslav Army.

WHERE DID SNOF, NOF AND AFZH’S POLITICAL STRATEGY, PREACHED IN THE MACEDONIAN VILLAGES IN GREEK OCCUPIED MACEDONIA, DISAPPEAR?

Some of the more dissatisfied Macedonian communists belonging to ELAS, guided by their servile conscience, moved to Yugoslavia and left their own people, properties and homeland to be destroyed by their enemies in Greek occupied Macedonia.

Those fighters who left Greek occupied Macedonia and went to Yugoslavia came under the leadership of the CPY/CPM (Communist Party of Macedonia). It was from these fighters that, in Skopje on April 23, 1945, the organizations NOF, AFZH and NOMS were formed under the initiative of the CPY/CPM and sent to organize the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia in preparation for a new conflict - the Greek Civil War.

Studies have shown that all members of NOF and AFZH were obedient people with limited leadership potential who the CPG and CPM/CPY easily manipulated and used in the villages to do their dirty deeds and carry out orders given from “above”. Soon the people of NOF and AFZH became the strongest centres for spreading ideological propaganda in the villages. It is a fact that at that period of time, before NOF and AFZH, there was no ideological activism in the Macedonian villages. In principle there is no memory

of it but in practice it was needed to provoke the people and cause hatred between them. And as such, the CPY and CPG assisted the Greek authorities to push the Macedonian nation into an unwanted war and eventually to its destruction.

If we take a closer look we will see that, at precisely that time when World War II (WW II) was over, the organizations NOF, AFZH and NOMS were formed under the initiative of the CPY/CPM and sent to organize the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia in preparation for the Greek Civil War. By then WW II had ended and the “Great Powers” were in the process of resolving all issues by peaceful means. The Conference to settle post war issues, regarding the entire globe, had already taken place in Yalta in Crimea, which lasted from February 4th to 11th 1945. By then the world was already divided into spheres of influence and Agreements had been signed. The US, UK and USSR openly and widely made it known that the entire globe was divided into spheres of influence, and the three had openly announced their goals and aspirations. It was also made abundantly clear that Greece, including Greek occupied Macedonia, fell under the influence of England and America, and that Yugoslavia, including the Republic of Macedonia, fell under the influence of the USSR. These were two opposing forces that shared an international border running straight through historic Macedonia and neither was willing to give up territory to the other, especially the United States. So the question is, why start a new war when all wars had just ended? Why fool the Macedonian people into believing that a United Macedonia was possible, especially when an insoluble international border was running through it, guaranteed and protected by opposing Great Powers? NOF and AFZH should have understood that! They should have known that uniting Macedonia at this point in time was impossible! They should have also understood that it was not possible to defeat the Royalists in Greece since one, they had British and American or Great Power support and two, the Macedonians had no such support because the USSR had already agreed to place Greece, including Greek occupied Macedonia, under British and American influence. So how can one not think that this was a planned genocide and that it was kept hidden by our 70 years of silence? It is an amazing fact that no one has investigated this and no one was made accountable for this horrific historic irresponsibility.

The question now is, “Is Macedonian history today any better at exposing such historic injustices?” Have Macedonian historians today made it any clearer as to how and who called on the Macedonian people to get involved in this so-called Greek Civil War? Have Macedonian historians recognized that this was not an ordinary civil war because one, it was not exactly a grass roots movement but an imported ideological movement brought in by foreigners and two, most of the fighters in this war were not volunteers but ideological conscripts and “useful idiots”. The villagers who participated in this war were clueless as to what these “ideologies” were and how they benefited them. We need to ask ourselves, “Why would an uneducated peasant who owns a home and property and is practically economically self-sufficient want to fight for a system that would strip him from his centuries old possessions?” And what does he get in return? Well, to truly understand this concept one has to look at the Ukrainian experience and count the number of villagers that died of starvation while working on their own lands because the government needed their yields elsewhere! We need to ask ourselves “had the Macedonian peasant really known what he fought for do you still think he would have willingly fought in the so-called Greek Civil War?” The answer is no! So let us cast aside all notions that this was some kind of “just” war and it was fought for the sake of “uniting Macedonia” and for the sake of “gaining human rights in Greece”! By stripping all the lies and propaganda out of this historic rhetoric we will find that this was a war instigated from the outside to “get rid of the Macedonians from Greek occupied Macedonia” by legal means! Force them to pick up guns and then legally exterminate them in the name of national security. And that is exactly what Greece did! The only time the glorious Macedonian fighters were told the truth about what they were fighting for was at the end, when it was too late! The architects of their demise told them that now they had to fight if they wanted to live! In other words, they were fighting for their lives and not for a United Macedonia or for human rights in Greece! What irony! Has today’s official history recorded the truth? Not yet! We seem to follow the Yugoslav axiom that we need to keep this quiet and to ourselves for the sake of “good neighbourly relations” with Greece! And how has Greece “rewarded us” for this? By denying our existence!?

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Even though the topics covered in this book are wide ranging, the main focus of this study will be to investigate why we lost our eternal homeland in Kostur, Lerin and Voden Regions.

The Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia were and still are well-acquainted with the savagery of Greek fascism ever since 1913 when Greece occupied Macedonian territories and since then has tried to exterminate the Macedonian people. Since the arrival of the Asia Minor colonists in the 1920’s and the entire period that followed, the communists, comprised of colonists, offered no new progressive vision of their true coexistence with the Macedonian people. Instead they instigated hatred in the Macedonians, for which they wanted reciprocity in order to make the Macedonians their daily scapegoats.

The Macedonians, those who were members of the CPG in those days, held a position of surprise. Those in NOF and AFZH had to remain silent. Macedonians had to remain servile before the powerful CPG and later the CPY. Common sense no longer mattered and wisdom was replaced with stupidity. It became a virtue to be a member of the CPG, casting aside the fact that most members were treated like useful idiots. This is how the CPG and the CPY wanted things to be with regards to the Macedonians.

But how did the average Macedonian regard all this and was there a rebellious spirit in him or her to want to willingly fight for what he or she believed? We need to know the truth. We need to cast out the lies and false pretenses and look at the truth and the truth is that we, the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia, were pushed into a situation created by outsiders, foreigners and made to fight for foreign interests. That, by today’s views, is a fact.

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So then who were the foreign leaders who gave the orders to create the organizations SNOF, SNOV, NOF, AFZH and NOMS? For what purpose were these organizations created? Under whose strict

control were they placed once they were dispatched to serve their purpose? Obviously their aims were to fuel Macedonian passion and agitate the rise of communism in ordinary Macedonian villagers!? Why did these innocent, ordinary and naïve Macedonian people have to pay the price for foreign interests in a situation created by outsiders and strangers?! Why did they have to experience genocide and forever leave their homes just because they were not “Greeks by genus”?! It does not take a genius to see what is happening here! The Macedonians were set up to fail! But why? Because the Greeks and their patrons found the right opportunity to exterminate any and all traces of Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia so that Macedonia could finally be Greek!

These are bitter historical truths that are not easy to accept and may haunt some of us, but they are not new. The genocide perpetrated against the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia is nothing new; it has, however, been kept a secret for the last 70 years or so supposedly for the good of “somebody”! But for who? It certainly has not been for the good of those who experienced the genocide, the expulsions, the loss of lives and eventually the permanent loss of they grandfather’s homes. Many wrongs were perpetrated against us the Macedonian people about which very little is known!

The ideological offensive perpetrated by the Left, with its cosmopolitanism, was designed to target the Macedonian national consciousness, to rip out the Macedonian people’s indigenous roots in order to save Greece which, according to its Greek strategy, wants to remain a conventional state: “One king, one nation, one church, one language, one state” in which there is no room for us Macedonians…

Even today there are people who don’t believe and don’t want to believe that there were Macedonian communists serving in the ranks of ELAS who participated in perpetrating “fratricide”, brother killing brother, in the destruction of the Macedonian freedom fighting rebels in Kostur and other regions!? The Macedonian freedom fighting rebels were a compact whole with more than 9,800 armed fighters, organized in 64 Kostur Region villages. They were all Macedonians and fought honourably against Hellenism in order

to preserve the Macedonian national identity. They bravely stood up to the Greeks and were unwilling to accept Hellenism, but instead of being valourized as national resistance heroes in our history, they have been vilified and called everything else except what they truly were – protectors of the Macedonian people, villages and homes – protectors of our national identity. What is interesting about all this is that during the Greek Civil War, from 1945 to 1949, many Macedonians were massively enlisted by the CPG, some even by force, including remnants of the surviving rebels, and placed under almost the same commanders, Markos, Himaros, Arianos and others, who in fact were responsible for the destruction of the Macedonian rebels! The CPG violently destroyed the Macedonian rebel movement and then forced the surviving rebels, and later their sons, to fight for communism, for an anti-Macedonian ideological struggle.

The appearance of the Macedonian freedom fighting rebels was not only unique but an amazing moment in our Macedonian history. They were a uniquely Macedonian grass roots movement sparked inside Macedonia by the Macedonian people exactly at the right moment when the Macedonian people were in danger and needed help to survive. The rebels followed our Ilinden traditions and showed respect and dignity for the Macedonians, for their own people, and appropriately dealt with those who were there to harm them. The rebels loathed being called “Slavs” and were against the mutation “Slavo-Macedonians” being forced upon us by the Greek state and by the CPG communists. The rebels were truly a child born of necessity which fought for the safety, dignity and preservation of everything that was Macedonian, and thus it had to die… at the hands of its own people. SNOF was created by our enemies, for exactly that purpose; to destroy the rebels, by deception and at the hands of Macedonians… to commit “fratricide”! SNOF lasted only a short time, until it served its secret purpose.

If we look around us we will find that there is rarely a nation in the world that would destroy something native, something created by its own people. We the Macedonians are unique in that respect. We can go on blaming others for this or ourselves but the fact remains that we placed the value of “ideology” about our national sentiments and allowed the communists to dictate “what is best for us”. And if what

we did was best for us then we need to think about why were we turned into villains and why were we expelled from our native hearth with no hope of ever returning?

We should also be aware of the fact that the Macedonian freedom fighting rebels in Greek occupied Macedonia did not have it easy. Of all the Macedonian people, they experienced the worst discrimination from the Greek state, even before they were born. They were despised for who they were, even recklessly anathematized, for being the children of Ilinden. History must never forget that! These people were seen as the scourge of Greece by the Greeks because they, as long as they lived, reminded them that Macedonia was not Greek. The Greeks did everything in their power to persecute, humiliate and embarrass these people at every opportunity.

Another set of tough question that comes to mind are: “Who organized the fratricide” in Kostur Region?! Why and by whom were the Macedonians renamed to “Slavo-Macedonians!? Why were the Macedonian people with a rich history, language, culture and country of their own turned into a tribal people with the qualifier “Slavo-Macedonians”?!

In the period from 1930 to 1949 the Left, i.e. the CPG, took the word “endopii”, meaning indigenous or native, generally used to refer to the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia and genetically turned it into “Slavo-Macedonians”. This was important for the communists. As for the Macedonian freedom fighting rebels, they were labeled “Fascists” and had to be destroyed!

Who were these “left forces” leading through the CPG and through the Party organs? These were the colonists and settlers deposited in Greek occupied Macedonia after the population exchanges with Turkey, Bulgaria, etc. To the Macedonian people they were known as Prosfigi from Asia Minor and Madzhiri.

To solve their “Macedonian” problem, the communists created SNOF and ordered it to disarm the Macedonian freedom fighting rebels because they were told that these rebels were fascists and worked for the “Bulgarian cause”!

The question here is why did the Macedonian communists allow the formation of SNOF and agree to place SNOV, its military wing, under the command of ELAS? They must have known that this would cause serious problems for the SNOV units and that it was a trap for the Macedonian freedom fighting rebels?

If we were to review historical events, will we discover that the fate of the Macedonian people was to be decided in the years 1940 to 1949?!

The answer is no, because a new reality appeared in the years 1945 to 1949, full of spilled blood and hatred, a reality that swept over all the Macedonian villages in Greek occupied Macedonia and infected the Macedonian people with hate and anger. Their ideological heroes, without a twinkle in their eye, converted them into something alien, into something that did not belong in their lives. This extreme absurdity continued right through the Greek Civil War from 1945 to 1949, until the people were either killed or driven out of their homes and lands... Was this done by design? The answer is YES! This was organized by outsiders who managed to fool the Macedonian people into doing exactly what they wanted them to do; self destruct!

Why else would the Macedonian people not be allowed to organize their own political movement that would work for the benefit, desires and demands of the Macedonian people? If we were to ask those who were in charge in those days, they would have told us that “there were no capable Macedonians to do the job”. If not the communists, we know for a fact that the Macedonian freedom fighting rebels were not only capable but had already formed Macedonian organizations which worked for Macedonian interests!

Still, there are questions that remain unanswered: “How and why did we lose our grandfather’s hearth in Kostur, Lerin, Voden and other Regions?

From a national aspect, this was not the death of one part of a nation, or only of Kostur Region, this was the death of the entire Macedonian nation; this was genocide!

By examining history and events that took place between 1940 and 1949, we have discovered that the Macedonian people’s fate was not decided by the Macedonian people, as it should have been, it was decided by aliens and strangers!

Studies have shown that the ideological activism conducted over the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia from about 1940 to 1949, was done to lead the Macedonian people to make sacrifices for foreign strategic and political interests, and to spill Macedonian blood for foreign and alien glories. But saddest of all about this story is the fact that many Macedonians still don’t know what happened and have not yet realized that there is no war without propaganda and that, to this day, many believe that this was “a Macedonian revolution…”

It is very sad that we Macedonians had no strategy even to the point when we experienced genocide and the Greek Civil War was over. There are still many Macedonians who remain unconvinced that what took place was not really a perpetrated disaster and that various Macedonian organizations acted in World War II. It is even clearer that never, after the Ilinden Uprising, did we ever raise our Macedonian voices against the Greek strategic which endeavoured to change the ethnic composition of the population in that part of our Macedonia. We never once complained about Greece re-populating out lands with aliens and giving them our lands and properties as gifts…

And this is why, today, the history of the Macedonian people, especially in Kostur Region, is written by the colonists from Asia Minor who, after half a dozen decades of living on our lands, feel like they are the “real” Macedonians and rightful heirs to the Macedonian heritage!

The colonists of Asia Minor, in the years 1940 to 1949, were responsible for activating and propagating the ideological activism which, with their various campaigns, virtual and real propaganda wars, cruelty and stigmatization, created a climate of hatred and divided the people into rebels, communists, ELAS fighters, pro-Greek factions, United Macedonia factions, etc. This greatly

contributed to creating a corrosive situation inside Greek occupied Macedonia and made the people easy targets for manipulation by the likes of the CPG, the CPY and by personalities like Tito, Tempo, Kolishevski, Uzunov, Zahariadis, Markos and others who had aims at destroying everything that did not serve their purpose, including the Macedonian freedom fighters, because they were “fascists” and “Macedonian-ism” itself, on one hand, was in the way of friendly “neighbourly relations” and on the other stood in the way of Greece becoming a pure Greek and homogeneous state with 100% Greeks living in it!

Greek occupied Macedonia was destabilized for the purpose of eliminating everything that was Macedonian from it, starting with the Macedonian freedom fighting rebels. These people were prominent Macedonians, remnants of the Ilinden Uprising who stood for a free and independent Macedonia. And who better to get rid of them than the Macedonians themselves, through lies and deception! Many Macedonian communists who joined the colonists were convinced that it was better to be “internationalists”, a sure thing, than fight a losing struggle to remain Macedonians! What is ironic about this, if not a coincidence, is that the destruction of the Macedonian rebels fit perfectly with the long term strategic Greek plans to have a “pure Greece” without Macedonians. As mentioned earlier, the destruction of the rebels was in line with strategic Greek objectives of “having a Macedonia without Macedonians”!

And as we said before, the outcome has shown us that only the Kostur rebels were guided by Delchev’s philosophy and by the Macedonian freedom fighters who believed that if you die for something then die for Macedonia. And this is exactly what led them to create their own Macedonian army and refuse to be subservient to the Greek government or to the Communist (internationalists) and that is exactly why they were destroyed.

History will record the strategy of the eternal rebel desire: to have our identity and language returned, to protect our families, properties and villages and to remain masters of our grandfather’s hearth.

First: The rebels, as the rightful sons of these Macedonian lands, brought back the Kostur dialect of the Macedonian language, which for years had been prohibited by Greek law from being spoken;

Second: The rebels re-opened the Macedonian churches and liturgy was conducted in the Macedonian language and so were other rites including baptisms, weddings and funerals;

Third: The local militia addressed the people in their native Macedonian language.

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