BRITISH OFFICER CONFIRMS MACEDONIANS LIVE IN GREECE

BRITISH OFFICER CONFIRMS MACEDONIANS LIVE IN GREECE

“The people that live in Lerin and Kostur Regions are not Greeks or Bulgarians, they are Macedonians,” said Captain Patrick Hutchison Evans.

The people that live in Lerin and Kostur Regions are not Greeks, Bulgarians or Serbians; they are Macedonians. This is what Captain Patrick Hutchison Evans, a British communications officer, concluded when he served in the region for nine months from March to October 1944. He came to this conclusion from personal experience and from having met and spoken to Macedonians. He wrote down his observations in a report that he sent to his Foreign Office through the British Embassy in Athens.

This is what Captain Patrick Hutchison Evans wrote about the Macedonians in Lerin Region in 1944. “One fact about the area which is the subject of my observation, an unspoken fact, rarely understood by an Englishman, even one who knows Greece, doesn’t know much about the northern part of Greece because Englishmen seldom go there. The Greeks also don’t know much about it for a couple of reasons. First they don’t want to know. It is in their interest to believe that all the places marked as “Greek” on the map are or have to be Greek by sympathy or by any other means. The Greeks by nature don’t want to admit that a great part of the people in Macedonia in Greece have as many good reasons to consider themselves Macedonians as the Greeks consider themselves Greeks. That however is an unsatisfying motive, a kind of fraud, which is an inseparable part of the Great Idea (Megali Idea). The second reason is, or at least I was told so, that after Greece liberated the Slav speaking region from the Turks, beside the people being different, the Greek governments agreed to support this lie, leaving the impression among its own people and in the world that there is no Slav minority in Greece. If a foreigner that is not familiar with Greece visited the area around Florina (Lerin) and after forming his or her own opinion of the country in general, the conclusion would be that the Greeks are the minority.”

According to Captain Evans, the region is inhabited mostly by a Slavic speaking population. The language in the homes and in the fields, the village roads, in the market is Macedonian, a Slavic language. This is what Evans wrote in the classified report he sent to the Foreign Office, “Many of the women, especially the older ones, and many of the older men and almost all of the children born around 1939 and later don’t know Greek at all. Even those that speak Greek want to speak more Macedonian when they can. A foreigner who will say “good morning” in the Greek language will get the same reply, but if the same is said in the Macedonian language, he or she will receive many phrases of welcome. The place names written on the map are Greek: Kalitheia, Trigonon, Throsopi and so on, but the names that are used, even though written on the map with very small letters and in brackets, if they are even written at all, are: Rudari, Oshchima, Belkamen - Slavic names.”

According to Captain Evans the people from that area think of the Greek language as almost foreign and treat the Greeks as foreigners. The obvious fact is that the area is naturally Slavic and not Greek. This is what Captain Evens wrote, “It is also important to stress that the inhabitants are not Greeks, are not Bulgarians or Serbians, or Croatians. They are Macedonians. For this here I cannot dogmatize, because I don’t know the history and especially the ethnology of the Macedonians. The Greeks always call them Bulgarians and therefore they criticize them, only EAM/ELAS, which showed a bit of wisdom called these people ‘Slavo-Macedonians’. If they are Bulgarians, spread in four different countries, from which one is Bulgaria, why then would they consider themselves a separate entity and most of them declare themselves as ‘Macedonians’. Those that consider themselves Bulgarian in any case are confirmed.”

Captain Evans was well aware and admitted that Bulgarian propaganda did exist in the Aegean part of Macedonia and was disseminated by Andon Kalchev and Minela Gelev. Kalchev worked as an assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sofia and served as a

reserve officer in the Bulgarian army. During the Second World War Gelev served as the main agent for the Bulgarian Government and as an associate of the Germans and the Italians. This is what Captain Evans said, “The Macedonian idea could also be something artificial as a result of the propaganda. But it doesn’t seem so. It seems very objective that the Macedonians consider themselves as a separate entity, although they are in small number and subject to sharing...”

Captain Evans believed that Macedonian patriotism was not artificial, but natural, spontaneous and with deeply inserted feeling that began during childhood, like any other patriotism. This is what Captain Evans said, “It seems to me that this is a historic mistake or a lapse in history (I repeat, I don’t know anything about Macedonian history) for the nonexistence of an independent Macedonian state. In a longer period of their history the Macedonian people were an overpowered people, more than any one of their neighbors. The Macedonian people lost their cleverness and initiative and remained behindhand. They were freed from the Turks but they never freed themselves from their European lords. When nations were being created and when each was reinforced and strengthened, the Macedonians were not brave enough and were not united to do the same. Now when it looks like they are ready to take a serious step toward national unity, it’s too late. The fact that great conditions for an independent Macedonia sometimes existed, it doesn’t mean that the case is the same today.”

This is what Captain Evans wrote in his report, “The problem with the existence of the Slavic minority in Greece cannot be solved completely, but it can be reduced. ‘If the Greeks give the Macedonians what they ask - freedom to speak their mother tongue and a better life - they will be willing to remain Greek citizens…”

The British Embassy in Athens found Captain Evans’s report very informative and dispatched it to the British Foreign Office. This, among other things, was said in the dispatch, “The basic impression that came out of Evans’s report was that an unexpected strong Slavic-Macedonian presence, which is not Greek according to customs, religion and language, was found in the area. Because of the unkind and irreparable relation it has with almost every Greek in the territory, including the local EAM leadership, it remains

dissatisfied. Captain Evans believes that if the population is treated with some respect, with less cruelty and if its customs and language are not forbidden, as was the case in the past, before the Metaxas years, this behindhand mountain population could reconcile its differences with the Greek administration.” The British Embassy in Athens also felt that the Macedonian population in this area was suspicions of the British. It wrote, “The Slavic-speaking population in the villages associates the British with the Greek King and with Metaxas and the repressive measures he took against them…”

In the same dispatch which accompanied Captain Evans’s report it was written that ‘the western-Macedonian Slavic population’ was much larger than that shown by the official Greek statistics and that the local Slavic political movement didn’t work for Bulgarian interests but for an independent Macedonia. Also the Macedonian population in Greece did not see itself as separate from the Macedonian populations in the other parts of Macedonia. The Macedonian population inside Greece feels that it belongs with the other Macedonian population living in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia which are only separated by artificial borders. A large Slavic population such as this would be more difficult to transfer than originally believed and would be an obstacle for Greece. There is no reason to not believe the author’s report. It is accurate, free and fair…