CHAPTER TEN - Part 01

CHAPTER TEN

1. Political acrobatics

The Macedonian mother tongue, well-preserved over the ages, became the key rallying factor for unifying the subjugated Macedonian people in seeking their freedom. And as the Macedonian printed word began to spread far and wide it became the most effective driving force in the mobilization of the Macedonian people in the struggle for their liberation.

By taking away the Macedonian people’s native language in Greek occupied Macedonia through Greek chauvinistic policies, the Greek bourgeoisie tried to strip the Macedonian people of their key rallying factor in their attempt to liberate themselves. By taking away their language their aim was to turn them into a completely oppressed and subjugated people.

But there were times, mainly due to external pressures, when Greek governments were forced to recognize the Macedonian people:

One time they recognized them as a Bulgarian minority when about 95,000 Macedonians were expelled to Bulgaria on the basis of the Greek-Bulgarian “voluntary population exchange” convention.

Another time was when they recognized them as a Yugoslav minority in accordance with a respective agreement between Greece and Yugoslavia.

A third time was when the Macedonian people were recognized as a Slavo-Macedonian minority. This was at the time when Greece, as a member of the League of Nations and a signatory to the Convention for the Protection of Minorities, and in accordance with the Seville Agreement, was forced to begin preparations for opening Macedonian schools. The Greek Ministry of Education established a special Commission which, among others, included Papazahariou, Lazarou and Shaikdzhis, people who knew the Macedonian language and who apparently were of Macedonian origin. These people created a Macedonian primer. The book was published in 1925 in Athens. The text in it was neither Serbian nor Bulgarian.

The text was written in the Macedonian language using the Lerin-Bitola dialect but not with Cyrillic letters. The text was written using the Latin alphabet. The book was called “Abecedar”. Here is a sample text from the “Abecedar”:

LENKA, THE BAD GIRL

Petre and Giorgi went to the field to play with their friends. Petre’s little sister Lenka wanted to play with them. Petre would not let her. Lenka cried, yelled and threw herself to the ground and began to kick. Her dress became dirty.

Her grandmother, who at the time was in the barn feeding the oxen hay, heard her crying. She ran to her, picked her up, brushed the dirt off her dress and gave her a red apple. Lenka stopped crying and began to eat the apple... (See May 1962, Testimonies: International Agreements and Bilateral Conventions between Greece and Bulgaria and Greece and Yugoslavia, article by Hristo Andonovski.)

But, as the “Abecedar” was being prepared, the bourgeois governments in Belgrade and Sofia reacted sharply and condemned the Greek government’s initiative. The Serbians vigorously demanded that the language of instruction for the Macedonians be Serbian. The Bulgarians demanded that it be Bulgarian.

The Greek government, however, refused to be influenced by either and used their “opposition” to not open any Macedonian schools. All copies of the “Abecedar” were destroyed...

There was also the series of articles entitled “Minorities” published by the Athens newspaper “Eleftheria” from October 9 to 12, in 1954, in which Greek publicist Dioniskos Romas wrote about this Greek attempt to give the Macedonians minority rights, that is, to open schools for Macedonian children so that they could learn in their native language. This is what Romas wrote: “As was generally agreed upon at the First Balkan Congress in Athens in 1929, the Slavo-Macedonian minority would have their own schools, just like the Turks, Vlachs, and Jews. After several discussions, the Greek government accepted and ordered a commission to compile books for the four lower grades for the Slavo-Macedonian minority schools

in the new areas (newly annexed Greek occupied Macedonia), of course, in the Slavo-Macedonian linguistic idiom. But then, both the Bulgarians and Serbians protested and demanded that the books be written in the Bulgarian and Serbian language respectively. It was completely unacceptable for us, quite naturally. For we had no intention of becoming the bearers of their propaganda...” (Andonovski)

2. Imperialist division of Macedonia

Regarding the resolution on the national question, the following was proclaimed during the CPG’s 3rd Extraordinary Congress, 26.12. -3/12/1924:

“...the significance of the struggle against national oppression is very strong. The oppressed nationalities, subjugated by the Balkan bourgeois, belong mostly to the agricultural social composition and the struggle for their national liberation is at the same time a struggle for poor agricultural masses against foreign wholesalers and capitalists.

The only front for workers, peasants and oppressed nationalities in the fight against the oppressive bourgeoisie, and the right to true self-determination of nationalities, is the unification of the Balkan peoples in a Balkan Federation, and that is the basic slogan of the Communist Party of Greece.

The CPG consistently strives to implement the Macedonian and Thracian question following this line...

The imperialist wars in the Balkans and the peace treaties that followed not only did not resolve but, on the contrary, they further complicated the national question in Macedonia and Thrace. After many years of being subject to the warring battles of the bourgeoisie from neighbouring countries, many of the people of these two countries were exterminated in the long-standing wars. On top of that they were economically devastated and then divided between Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece. This division of Macedonia and Thrace was carried out by the political and military forces of the opposing Balkan bourgeois which supported the imperialistic

interests of the Western European powers. By this division the Western European Imperialists created small and weak nations and secured their bases for their conquests and counterrevolutionary plans in the Balkans and the Middle East. By this division the Great Powers not only enslaved the Macedonian people by putting them under the yoke of the opposing bourgeoisie, but at the same time intensified the antagonism and rhetoric between them (bourgeoisie) and intimidated them with the threat of new wars...

The danger of war becomes even greater with the intensified antagonism between the imperialist Great Powers themselves, for hegemony over the Balkans and the Black Sea, as well as with their plans to turn the Balkans into a base for military operations against the Soviet Union...

Despite all the Balkan bourgeoisie efforts to cause cleavage in the Macedonian and Thracian people, sowing and cultivating national hatred in their midst, both of these nations were constantly striving and struggling to get rid of their foreign yoke...

The Bulgarian chauvinist bourgeoisie never stopped trying to infiltrate Macedonian organizations and use the Macedonian people’s liberation struggle to their advantage by sabotaging it. The Yugoslav and Greek bourgeoisie, on the other hand, employed policies of forced deportation and denationalization, as well as by depositing colonists and settlers on Macedonian territories in order to ‘solve’ the Macedonian National Question and present this solution to the world.

Even before they acquired their parts of Macedonia and Thrace the Greek bourgeoisie openly showed their hypocritical character when they declared that they were there to ‘liberate their enslaved brothers’…

With their adventurous imperialist politics in Asia Minor and their shameful exchange of populations, the Greek bourgeoisie managed to uproot more than a million people from their homeland so that they could expediently colonize parts of Macedonia and Thrace (they occupied). They used violent and inhuman methods to strengthen their power and have future recruits in the wars they were

preparing against their opponents and use these people as cannon fodder.” (Rizospastis, February 6 and 7, 1925, CPG, official texts, Volume 1, PLE edition, 1964, pp. 514-516.)

I decided to include the above document in this book because life has confirmed that there is truth in it and this “truth” is valid even today. The ever present interests of the foreign-bourgeois forces are preventing the Balkan people from coming together. And we know why. If the Balkan people unite it will be the end of dubious, bourgeois interests and the end of Great Power plans for hegemony over the Balkan states. By enforcing Macedonia’s division they have created an “obstacle” for the unification of the Balkan nations...

3. Chauvinistic rage

It is well-known that the so-called “voluntary population exchange” Agreements signed between Bulgaria and Greece and between Turkey and Greece were well placed international actions committed by Greece to change the ethnological composition of the population in the Greek (occupied) part of Macedonia in favour of the Greek element.

And we, of course, know exactly how this was done. The Greek authorities forcefully expelled the Macedonian people who resisted the Greek occupation the most to Bulgaria. I mentioned something about this earlier in my book, especially the testimony given by the French Colonel Lamush. As a member of the Commission for Minorities in the League of Nations, Lamush, in his report to this Commission during the November 10, 1928 session, stressed that the 1913 and 1919 peace agreements made the situation in Macedonia even more difficult because the majority of the people in these regions are Macedonian and are under the rule of regimes that are hostile to them. These regimes are proving to be even harsher than the Turks who never tried to strip their language, culture and national sense. In addition, Greece has turned the “voluntary” exchange of populations, envisaged by the 1919 convention, into “a forcible” eviction of Macedonians...

By his comments, this League of Nations high official unveiled Greece’s true face to the world. Greece being an English semi-

colony in England’s embrace, however, found no obstacles in strengthening its “national interests” in Macedonia. And forced evictions of Macedonians from Greece became a common practice which has not ceased to this day.

I should mention at this point that Greece’s population exchange with Turkey was not based on an “ethnic” basis, but on a religious one. The Greek authorities expelled Macedonians from Macedonia because they were Muslims and accepted people from Turkey because they were Christians. Included among the Christians from Turkey were Turks, Armenians and others with absolutely no connection to Greece.

The Macedonian people too have no linguistic, ethnic or historic connection to Greece. They are a separate and unique Slavic speaking nation with its own traditions, customs and culture. Unfortunately the Greek chauvinists refuse to recognize them as such and hypocritically declare that the Macedonian people are part of the Greek people and that only Greeks exist in Macedonia! Of course, these are lies so that Greece can make claims to Macedonian lands. If these Macedonians do not exist then why are they being belittled, persecuted and exiled en masse?

As mentioned earlier, if Macedonians do not exist then why did Sklavenas stand before the Greek Parliament and say:

“If one happens to pass through Macedonia, especially in those districts inhabited by compact masses of Macedonians, they will certainly feel the extraordinary pressure put on them. The rights to have their own schools, to use their Macedonian language and to practice their own customs, have been strictly forbidden...”

Even though Sklavenas said all this he did not say everything.

He did not say that the Greek chauvinists enacted a law to change all the names in Macedonia from Macedonian to Greek in order to erase everything that was Macedonian including the people’s names, the names of villages, cities, mountains, rivers, and so on. This law was published in the official Greek government gazette “Efimeris tis kivernisseos”, number 332 dated November 21, 1926. The new

Greek names were then published in the same official gazette, that is, “Efimeris tis kivernisseos”, number 346. (Peiov, cited work, p. 100. Lazar Moisov, regarding the question of the Macedonian national minority in Greece, Skopje 1954, p. 231.)

In a footnote on pages 235 and 236 of the same book mentioned above, in connection with the attitude of the Greek authorities towards the Macedonians, Lazar Moisov quoted the Englishman V. Hill saying:

“The Greeks persecute not only the living Slavs (Macedonians), who at one time they called “Bulgarophiles”, and another time “Slavophones”, but also the dead Slavs (Macedonians), whose graves are destroyed all throughout Macedonia. They don’t give them any peace even in their graves. They have wiped out all Slavic inscriptions on the crosses and removed their bones from their graves and burned them...” (Peiov, 204)

In 1929, Eleftherios Venizelos’s Liberal government surpassed all the chauvinistic rage of previous Greek governments when it enacted a “special” law for making it a “criminal offence” and high treason to recognize the right to self-determination until secession from Greece. This was done to target the communists and their ideologies on the right to self-determination for other nationalities living in Greece.

This law was enacted to end all talks about the self-determination of the Macedonians who... did not exist! Obviously, it was a special law directed against the Communist Party of Greece and against the Macedonians, who from then on had no right to express themselves as Macedonians.

The fascist dictatorship that came to power on August 4, 1936, went even further. It completely banned the use of the Macedonian language everywhere, even in the privacy of the home. I visited my native village during the summer of 1938 or 1939, and on several tables I found papers in the church and village café with orders ordering the Macedonian people to:

“Speak Greek!” and

“Foreign languages are prohibited!”

But the Greek authorities had no problem with Turks, Vlachs, Albanians and Roma (Gypsies) openly speaking their languages in the market in Lerin. On top of that all kinds of foreign languages (English, French, etc) were taught everywhere in the respective schools all throughout the Greek state. Only the Macedonian language was banned.

Another benefit that resulted from banning the Macedonian language, which we should not forget to mention, is the financial benefits for the Greek state, a huge, new source of revenue, a new way of robbing the Macedonian people with fines because they were caught speaking to each other in Macedonian, they only language they knew.

But that was not all. Every Greek person everywhere in Macedonia, of their own will and at any moment, had the right to accuse any Macedonian of anything which could then land them in the prison camps in the Aegean islands. And, there was a lot of abuse!

Evening classes were opened for the older generation of Macedonians, both men and women, who spoke Greek very badly or did not speak Greek at all. After a day’s hard work people were ordered to attend evening school. Those who missed classes were fined and even sent to jail.

4. In the deep night, dawn is born

The following is a summery of a longer story of an event that took place one evening at one of those evening classes. Any similarities to an actual event or actual people are purely coincidental...

He usually stopped working by the end of the day but this day Mile decided to continue working until it was dark and could no longer see out in the open. It was pitch black when he returned to the village. After passing through the village square he noticed the light inside the school. The evening classes for adults were still ongoing...

“They are tormenting the people! Those evildoers...!” he said to himself.

That same evening it had rained hard and the dust on the road had turned into sticky mud. Walking through the mud with his pigskin slippers getting soft and soggy, Mile stepped up his pace to get away from the school as fast as possible. With the school behind him, Mile turned into the familiar lane and was home.

But, before he had a chance to get inside the policeman Mitsotakis jumped in front of him. “What the devil is this guy doing here?” Mile thought.

“Hey you! Why aren’t you in school, eh?!” yelled the policeman.

“I don’t go to school!” responded Mile in broken Greek.

“What???!!!” said the policeman angrily, surprised that the villager dared to speak so easily and calmly about this. “And may I ask why not?!” continued the policeman with a wolf’s smile.

“I am not on the list, I’m not in the list…!” replied Mile in broken Greek.

“You’re lying…!” yelled the policeman, cutting him off. “Even if you are not on the list, you are coming with me and I will put you in the list!” he added imitating Mile’s broken Greek and then yelled: “Now move!”

Mile did not move.

“I know enough Greek. It’s enough for me. I am not a lawyer…!” said Mile, trying to make light of the matter but without much success.

“You know nothing…! March, fool!” yelled the policeman and grabbed Mile by the sleeve. Mile went along and did not resist...

When they reached the school gate the policeman pushed Mile into the schoolyard and, in an intimidating tone of voice, said:

“I had better not catch you doing this again! And if you are not really registered, tell the teacher to register you!”

Mile did not say anything as he quietly approached the school entrance, opened the front door and entered the corridor. He then went through another door to the right and entered a large hall crowded with people. Being out in the open fields and breathing fresh air all day he found the atmosphere in the room hot and full of odors. It stunk of dirty feet and sour sweat mixed with garlic. It literally stunk like a toilet.

Sitting on the benches on the right side of the hall were many of the mothers, aunts and grandmothers from the village. One of the mothers was changing her baby’s diaper and wiping the baby’s butt. Sitting on the left side were the students... eighty-year olds. Without constraint, some uncontrollably farted. But that was nothing! There was a rifle shot outside and no one reacted.

There were many people in the room. Some were constantly coughing and others constantly talking. There was a cheerful two-year-old giggling and playing with the woman sitting next to his mother. The baby who had his diaper changed was now crying. These were mothers who had no one to leave their children with. The poor teacher, Ms Melpo, had a severe toothache and was distorting her face from the pain while yelling with all her might hoping that everyone would hear her.

“What did I just do now?” Ms Melpo yelled out as she handed Vasilka, standing next to her, a long ruler.

Vasilka Puiova was a 30 year old woman who was there to assist Ms Melpo. The teacher was addressing Tane Petkovski but Tane stood there silent and unable to answer her because he did not know the right Greek words. Feeling the need to help him out, his wife Taneitsa Petkovska, butted in and said:

“Endose (instead of ethoses) i karaka (instead of ton haraka) na Vasilka! (You gave the ruler to Vasilka)” proudly finishing the sentence in Macedonian.

Taneitsa’s pronunciation of the Greek words was so ridiculously distorted that it brought on cheers and an outburst of laughter from a few of the women and a lot of hee hee and ha ha and smiles under their mustaches from the men.

The poor woman had no idea this was going to happen; all she wanted to do was help out her husband for whom she felt sorry because he was very tired from loading sacks of grain to take to the market.

Sixty-five year old Spiro Temelkov, who was constantly coughing, sweating, red in the face and eyes tearing, stood up and headed for the exit. Mile, who at the time was sitting near the exit, where he was seated when he came in, followed Spiro Temelkov out of the hall. While Spiro waited in the corridor until his cough calmed down, Mile went out into the yard and visited the school toilet. After spending a short time outside the two men set off for home.

As it turned out the teacher did not see Mile at all. Neither when he entered, nor when he left the school.

The next day when the policeman came to the school to inquire about Mile, the teacher said: “I did not see any Mihalis Saropoulos here last night...”

The policeman then pulled the little black book out of his pocket and wrote Mile’s name in it. Mile was now blacklisted. After the Macedonian language was banned from being spoken anywhere, the Greek authorities specifically opened the evening schools for Macedonians to learn Greek, especially for those who did not speak the Greek language at all. And here was Mile defying them. That is why Mile’s name was now entered in the long list of those who dared to resist this Greek policy.

The Greek authorities did not react and Mile was not immediately punished for skipping school. And as the days went by, Mile figured his incident with the policeman was forgotten. Then, about a month and a half later, when the Greek authorities were carrying out “cleansing acts” against the scourge in the Lerin Region villages,

Mile too was arrested. Mile Sariovski, or Mihalis Saropoulos as the Greeks called him, was arrested among sixty-three “communists and their sympathizers”. The Greek authorities descended on the villages around midnight and captured them in their beds while they slept. They were all taken away.

After a short stay in jail Mile was charged with being “an active Slavo-communist” and sentenced to forty-two months in prison, being deprived of his personal liberty.

Since Mile was never really told why he was arrested, especially since he was not a communist, he made it his obsession to wonder what he had really done to deserve the heavy sentence that was handed down.

“Why, why, why, why… ah?” he kept thinking while feeling bitter and extremely upset.

For a long time Mile did not know that the Greek authorities had “singled him out” because they believed he was part of the Macedonian people’s avant-garde, in other words, they believed that he was part of the most conscious, revolutionary and resistant element that needed to be crushed and destroyed. Clearly, this was the work of Mitsotakis, the local policeman, who wanted him punished for defying him.

This all became clear to Mile but only after going through hell in the various island prison camps, only after he lived there with other prisoners, including many old and experienced Communist revolutionaries, who knew the Greek chauvinist score very well. Only after being accepted by an organized group of communists in the Akronavlia Prison, did Mile slowly, slowly begin to see things clearly, to understand what was happening to him and, with clenched teeth and squeezed fists, focus his rage against the bourgeois chauvinist dogs who were doing this!

This is how Mile ended up being a determined soldier of the popular resistance, and a member of the Communist Party...

5. The Greek Bourgeois “Megali Idea” (Great Idea)

There was never a “Greek Empire” with Constantinople as its capital… it never existed. Yet here were books intended for children in which the Mother of God is incredulously crying for fourteen decades because… the Greeks lost Constantinople and the temple of St. Sophia to the Turks. And the young Greek bourgeois comfort the infamous Mother of God with the words:

“Min Kles, Kira Despina…! Pali me xronia, me kerous, pali thika mas tha ine!” (Don’t cry Mrs Despina…! After years, in time, they will be ours again!)

This, of course, is treated like it was a folk song.

The “Megali Idea” (Great Idea) is a modern Greek ambition to create a Greek Empire in place of the old Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. This has been Greece’s distant and final goal, both internally and as a foreign policy of the Bourgeois, since the time Greece became a state for the first time in 1830.

Intoxicated by the easy success they had in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) when Greece expanded to the north, occupying and annexing the larger and richest part of Macedonia, immediately after the First World War, the Greek bourgeoisie decisively turned their attention to the near east. The Greek army began its Asia Minor campaign (1919-1922) with high hopes that it would finally realize the “Megali Idea”. But this very ambitious Greek dream quickly turned into a catastrophe. The campaign failed miserably and revealed that the “Megali Idea” was nothing more than an illusion. But did the bourgeoisie learn anything from this? No! The Mother of God is still crying… to this day...

6. Hegemony over all minds

Let us now have a quick glance at one of the many Greek propaganda books written in the spirit of the “Megali Idea”. This particular book, entitled “I blame the Greek Communist Party as its own witness”, was written by Georgios Kanelakis and published in Athens in 1953.

Kanelakis did everything possible to prove that in principle the CPG recognized the democratic rights of the Macedonian people and by doing so it committed national treason against the Greek nation. And according to Ahilas Kirou, head of the Athens newspaper “Estia”, in a letter he sent to Kanelakis which Kanelakis included in his book, this was “the biggest betrayal that Greek history can reveal…”

Among other things, the book claims that the Slavs created their states in the Balkans on top of “Greek territories” (see: Volume 1, p. 33), and at the end of the book, “instead of an epilogue”, he has included two maps of the European part of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. One depicted the middle of the 6th century AD and the other depicted the second half of the 7th century AD, with the map titles “The Greek state in 527-565” and “The Greek state in 668-685”. In the first map it also says “Our borders then extended to the Danube River and the Black Sea!” On the second map it says “the white plains between the Danube River and Mount Emos (Stara Planina) represent the first Bulgarian state that was founded on our soil and then expanded through annexing Greek territories.” (See: Volume 1, p. 155.)

Kanelakis very clearly identified the borders of Greater Greece. The northern borders started at the Black Sea in the east, followed the Danube River across, right through Belgrade, and ended at the Adriatic Sea in the west.

This book was officially approved for publication by the Ministry of Public Order under Act number E. 1021 F.D. on April 14, 1950 (signed by A. Vahliotis, Minister) and by the Greek army general staff Act number 60316/848793 OAM (3rd Bureau) dated November 23, 1949 (signed by G. Bairaktaris, OAM General Staff Director General). These acts were also included in Kanelakis’s book.

According to Zahariadis: “Cultivated for decades, the ‘Megali Idea’ became so strong that it prevailed everywhere and, with its tortuous and monopolistic hegemony over all the minds, forced every other movement to be placed under its wing...” (Nikos Zahariadis: “Thesis on the history of the CPG”, CPG Central Committee edition, 1944, p. 22.)

7. Chauvinism – today an essential manifestation of the “Megali Idea”

The Democratic Army of Greece (DAG) was defeated in August 1949. About 60,000 Macedonians were forced to leave their ancestral homes. They fled to Yugoslavia, Poland, the USSR and other European socialist countries. Many of the abandoned Macedonian villages were burned down, some were left in ruins as a reminder of what had taken place and others were settled by Greek families from Epirus and Thessaly.

The Macedonian people who did not flee their ancestral homeland immediately became the targets of a systematic, large-scale, denationalization process. An army of Greek teachers, priests and police officers flooded the Macedonian landscape. New school buildings and police stations sprang up almost everywhere in the Macedonian villages. The Greek authorities began to regulate the previously neglected village centres and mobilized the villagers to volunteer both their labour and materials for building projects. In some villages they built a water supply network and brought water to the village from far away springs. In others they installed electrical lighting. And everywhere in the arranged settlements and other convenient places, they erected monuments of the “Greek national heroes”, who, like Pavlos Melas, laid down their lives during the Ottoman occupation in the struggle to “liberate” Macedonia. Of course, all this was always followed by festivities and demagogy, in conditions of intensified propaganda that never ceased.

Even the most respected bishop, Bishop Augustinos, the bishop of Lerin, was very active in all this. Like the district governor Tsaktsiras, Bishop Augustinos managed to collect millions in “voluntary contributions” from the poor Macedonian population. According to witnesses he did this by threatening people that if they did not donate they would be blacklisted.

But unlike Tsaktsiras, Bishop Augustinos did not spend the money to support the “royal military aviation”. Not because today Greece is a republic without a king but because, as he himself said in an

interview with Georgios Lianis for the magazine “Epiker”, he is not interested in “politics”. Namely, for about forty years now, he has been consistently staying out of the political party struggles be it pro or anti-monarchal. Let the state take care of the state military aviation. Bishop Augustinos spent part of the money doing God’s work. He forcibly baptized all the Roma (Gypsies) in the region. In an ambient and markedly festive atmosphere he lured all the Roma and baptized them in the waters of the river near St. Nicholas Church. He turned them into Christians against their will and gave them Greek names and surnames, and each family was given a house as a gift in the Chiflik settlement of Lerin.

By turning Gypsies into pure Greeks, Bishop Augustinos helped the Greek nation receive new blood and intensified the Greek-ness of Lerin and the entire county. He did all this with the help of money he had appropriated from the Macedonian people.

Besides baptizing the Gypsies, the good Bishop Augustinos put his financial support behind some orphanages and educational establishments, where children were brought up and educated in the good Greek patriotic spirit.

But most of the money he collected he used to build new Patriarchate churches at the site of the demolished Exarchate churches. Among the many churches that the Bishop destroyed were: the Sveti Pantaleimon Cathedral in Lerin, the church in Sorovich (destroyed with bulldozers) and what remained of Tsar Samoil’s church on Ail (St. Achilles) Island, in Lake Mala Prespa. The Bishop hired labourers and leveled the Exarchate churches to the ground because... according to him; they were built “by Bulgarian hands”. This tells me that the Bishop indeed engaged in politics.

These churches were indeed “Exarchate” churches but they were sponsored and built by the Macedonian people. Since the Ottoman authorities would not allow the Macedonian people to have their own Macedonian church, they had no choice but to go to foreign churches such as the Patriarchate or Exarchate, both of which at that time operated inside Macedonia. On top of that, the Exarchate church, through its own bishops, similar to Augustinos, also

collected so-called “voluntary contributions” and erected some of these churches. They were built in exactly the same way the Patriarchic churches were built with Macedonian money and they belonged to the Macedonian people. They were monuments of Macedonia’s dramatic history and demolishing them was considered vandalism. Unfortunately, this is the bitter truth: the antagonism between neighbours continues to undermine the Macedonian people even today.

I have seen Tsar Samoil’s church on Ail Island with my own eyes. One sunny, spring day in 1948, while visiting Prespa with my associates from the NOF central council agitation and propaganda department, we boarded a fishing boat and visited the island. We also located the remnants of the old church. It was surrounded by blackberry bushes and nettles. Bare walls stuck out of them all eroded by the wind and rains There was no roof; it had collapsed a long time ago. We went inside and noticed the saints on the walls were painted on two layers. On the first layer, made of mortar about an inch thick, the saints were still well-preserved as well as the inscriptions, which were in Greek (Greek script). However, different saints peeped from under this layer where the plaster had been scratched or crumbled over time. These icons were inscribed with Cyrillic letters (Slavic script). This, no doubt, was an attempt by the Greek Patriarchy to glorify Tsar Samoil’s Church and make it look like it was a Greek church. Time, however, has revealed the truth and put things in their right place.

Like the veneer that was put on Samoil’s church to make it look like a Greek church when in fact it wasn’t, something similar was also done to the Macedonian people, including to those who were with me that day on the island.

Among us there was a professor of philology, two teachers, graduates from the pedagogical academy, two students, one proletarian poet, etc., all with a Greek education and upbringing. I still remember the time in the schoolyard when I was standing in the first row with other children, dressed in a long village shirt and long pants made of white linen, barefoot, proudly singing (in Greek) in the dust:

“I am Greek! And I am proud! And I know my origin! I have a Greek soul! And I live free!”

I mentioned the song to my comrades and one of them recited the entire song exactly as I remembered it. However, there came a time when this Greek veneer began to wear off and the Macedonian in us woke up. And not just in glimpses, like that of the Slavic saints, the veneer completely shattered and cast off the entire Greek layer and we were off fighting for our rights and our survival!

Now let us return to Augustinos, the respected Bishop of Lerin. This Bishop went way beyond the Greek Patriarchy and did more for the Greek cause than was expected from him. He completely demolished Tsar Samoil’s church in Ail, with all the saints in it. Bishop Augustinos is now at peace because there are no longer Slavic saints to peek at him. He replaced Tsar Samoil’s church with a new Greek church, with Greek saints and Greek inscriptions.

From what I remember, St. Achilles in his day was a bishop in the city Larissa, Thessaly, in central Greece, which at that time was a Byzantine province. Also at that time, Tsar Samoil was king of the Macedonian people in Macedonia and soon after conquered parts of the Byzantine Empire including Thessaly. He had freed the people who were paying unbearable taxes and as a result Samoil’s regime became very popular. In comparison to the Byzantine regime, it was almost libertarian and populist and that is why the people of Thessaly, through their bishop Achilios (i.e. St. Achilles), accepted and supported this regime. Samoil as the king of the Macedonians and Achilios as the bishop of Larissa cooperated well and became good friends. History has shown how sincere and profound their cooperation and friendship was through Samoil’s deeds. When Bishop Achilios died at the beginning of the 11th century, Tsar Samoil had his remains brought to Macedonia, to his imperial residence in Prespa. Bishop Achilios’s remains were buried on the island with great honour. To further honour the bishop, Samoil built a church on top of his grave and honoured his name by naming the church “Sveti Ail” (St. Achilles). This is also how the island became know as “Ail” (Achilles). And with this Achilios became a Slavic

saint. Both the saint and the church became parts of the centuries-old Macedonian history and Macedonian culture. By destroying St. Achilles’ “Slavic church”, Bishop Augustinos assassinated St. Achilles. He did this in vain, however, because time has a tendency to bring out the truth which will finally puts things in their place. This is how it has always been...

8. The CPG and the “Megali Idea”

According to Zahariadis, as per the document entitled “thesis of CPG history” mentioned earlier, the period of “the tortuous and monopolistic hegemony of the Megali Idea over all the Greek minds” ended when World War I started, that is when the Communist Party of Greece was established.

Life however proved otherwise.

The worker and communist movements and the CPG, their fighting avant-garde, still remained under the influence of bourgeois ideology and politics which hid in the shadows of the “Megali Idea”. The consequences of this were catastrophic, both for the Greek people and for the Macedonian people in the Greek state, especially for the Macedonian people.

We have seen that during one decisive, critical and fateful historic moment, the CPG leadership renounced all alliances and military and political plans with their northern neighbours and people’s revolutions and threw itself into the arms of England.

I would say this was an incredible move… an unbelievable move…

What makes this even more interesting is the fact that the “Megali Idea”, according to Zahariadis, was dead and buried, it reared its ugly head when Zahariadis’s very leadership declared that it needed England to be its strategic partner in order to “strategically secure Greece’s northern borders”, which meant - taking parts of Macedonia from Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. Clearly this was only possible with English help.

It is also well-known that during the Greek Civil War the CPG leadership pursued a policy of permanent political flirtation with England, a policy which “undermined DAG’s victory” and brought its demise. (This was noted at the CPG Central Committee 6th General Plenary Meeting in March 1956.)

And this too was absolutely incredible and unbelievable…

However, it seems to me that the practical policies the CPG leadership practiced quite convincingly and exhaustively explain the CPG’s “real” motives. It is a fact that the CPG at its Party’s headquarters declared that it was seeking and was prepared to fight for “strategically securing Greece’s northern borders”, which means that it was prepared to take Macedonian territories from Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania as well as Northern Epirus from Albania. Clearly, the CPG and Greece could not do this alone without English help and without an English presence in Greece. This was only possible if Greece worked together with England and its western allies...

Also, it seems to me, that the CPG leadership itself, in its own authoritarian way, utterly convincingly and exhaustively explained all this through its own actions. Namely, the CPG was afraid that it was going to lose the Greek (occupied) part of Macedonia to Yugoslavia. It was convinced that given the situation in Yugoslavia, that is the existence of the People’s Republic of Macedonia in the Yugoslav Federation and given that the Macedonians here, in this part of (Greek occupied) Macedonia, were all organized in NOF and massively armed in DAG’s ranks, victory for DAG would be imminent. England would then be driven out of Greece, which would lead to the loss of (Greek occupied) Macedonia. “Tito would join Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia with the People’s Republic of Macedonia and place it in the Yugoslav federation!” (CPG 1931-1952, p. 271.)

From very young the Greek people are all brainwashed to believe in the “Megali Idea”, at least in relation to Macedonia and the Macedonian National Question, and this is reflected in their daily practical politics including in those of the CPG since the day the

CPG was formed. Let us now have a look at some basic facts and events regarding this.

During the first six years after its inception in November 1918, the CPG ignored the Macedonian national question. It ignored the idea that the completely disadvantaged Macedonian people in the Aegean (Greek occupied) part of Macedonia had no rights at all and refused to take steps to recognize them as Macedonians.

There was nothing in the CPG’s program, not even a mention of Macedonians.

The CPG leaders not only kept their eyes shut with regards to rights for the Macedonian people, but they kept very quiet as the Greek bourgeois authorities exterminated them and committed cultural genocide against them, including forced assimilation and denationalization.

The CPG would have done nothing and would have never included anything about the Macedonians in its program had it not been initially for the Balkan Communist Federation in 1923 (6th Balkan Communist Conference), and a year later for the Communist International (5th Congress held in Moscow), to prompt it to make the decisions to include the Macedonian national question in its program.

“The Balkan Communist Federation and the Communist International in 1923-1924, adopted the thesis of an independent Macedonia and so on... that expressed the Macedonian principle line on the national question...” (See Party documents in the book: “The CPG 1918-1932”, Volume 2, p. 41.)

At the end of 1924, during the CPG’s 3rd Extraordinary Congress, the CPG proclaimed that “The Party supports all the national and political demands of the oppressed Macedonians in the Greek state and recognizes their right to freedom and self-determination, until secession from Greece and the formation of a single and independent state, including this and the other parts of their country occupied by the three Balkan bourgeois...” (CPG, official texts, Volume 1, p. 517.)

9. Verbal revolution and opportunism

But, as it turned out, the “proclamation” the CPG made was made in principle only… empty words to appease the Communist International, which imposed this need externally and did not follow up to determine if it was applied internally.

From that moment on the CPG followed a dual policy on the Macedonian national question, a declarative and practical policy. While at the leadership peak the CPG consistently employed revolutionary words, down below, in its work with the masses, it employed opportunistic and counterrevolutionary practices.

The fact that the CPG did not care to equitably tackle the Macedonian national question, was made quite clear during the next Greek parliamentary elections held in November, 1926. Here again there was nothing mentioned about the Macedonian people in the CPG program it developed during the pre-election campaign. And yet again the elementary human rights as well as the civil and national rights of the Macedonian people were ignored.

This was how the CPG operated in practice.

Then, during the 3rd regular Party congress, soon after the March 1927 elections, the CPG strongly emphasized that: