GREEK PROFESSOR ACCUSED OF BEING A “SKOPJE” AGENT

GREEK PROFESSOR ACCUSED OF BEING A “SKOPJE” AGENT

Anastasia Karakasidou said that Aegean Macedonia is not exclusively Greek but a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural region

Anastasia Karakasidou was born and grew up in Greece. She is a professor of anthropology working in the USA. She was accused of “cannibalizing” the Greek nation and of being an agent of “Skopje”. She received death threats for saying that the Greek nation consisted of several different nationalities and cultures assimilated willingly and by force. After doing her field research in a small area near Solun she wrote a book entitled “Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood” in which she pointed out some facts on how some Macedonian people were Hellenized and that Aegean Macedonia is not exclusively Greek because it is a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural region.

This is what Karakasidou said, “My findings, interpretations and opinions were not always welcomed in the Greek communities inside Greece or by the Greeks in the Diaspora. Most blamed me of not supporting Greek national interests in their disagreements with the Republic of Macedonia. I however was motivated by broader interests outside of national attachments…”

The Cambridge University publishing house refused to publish Karakasidou’s book because of security reasons. In addition to receiving personal death threats Karakasidou’s work was also attacked. Some of her critics, who included journalists, politicians, religious leaders and common people, began a campaign against her work. Bitter polemics were waged by newspapers and magazines in Greece and the Greek Diaspora. Even the people she interviewed in villages denied what they had said claiming that their nationality was “24 carat gold” Greek and that she had misquoted. According to Karakasidou, however, a large number of these people’s ancestors were “Slavs” (meaning Macedonians).

Karakasidou continued, “My work was misrepresented and misquoted and in some cases even changed... Being born a Greek woman I critically wrote about the Macedonian Question and sometimes I felt like I was ‘accidentally’ looking behind the curtain and breaking a taboo about the ‘secret Greek national ideology’…” Today the Greek nationalists “blindly categorize the Slavic population and the bilingualism that exists in Greece from the past, as a modern national anomaly…”

This is what Karakasidou wrote, “In 1988, when I started to formulate the topic for my doctoral thesis, my intention was to understand how people with different cultural backgrounds who inhabited the same region, began to see themselves as a part of a single Greek nation and culture. According to a broadly accepted standpoint, which I learned when I was little, Greek Macedonia was populated by two different groups: “indigenous inhabitants” and “refugees” that came to Greece from Turkey in 1922 and 1923 who settled there among the “indigenous inhabitants”. Both groups were considered to be Greeks. I wanted to research these two groups, that sometimes seemed so different but now started to see themselves as members of one collective group, and how besides their obvious differences, were co-existing together and some in mixed marriages…”

Karakasidou herself is a child of a mixed marriage. Her father was a Christian from Turkey who did not speak a single word of Greek when he arrived and her mother was a member of the “indigenous inhabitants”. In 1975 Karakasidou left Greece to study in the USA. Then she did her field work around Solun. As a PhD candidate she did research for eight years. She started in a small place called Guvezna, later she continued in Asiros. She interviewed people, researching their past wanting to know about their ancestors. This is what she said, “I wanted to know what made both of my parents who came from different origins to become Greeks. Obviously subconsciously I was looking for my own Greek identity…”

From her research we can see that a great number of the Macedonians were Hellenized by force. From her research we can see that she looked at the Slavic population in western Macedonia,

the Muslim population in Thrace and the Greek population in the south…

According to Karakasidou, the Greek state applied different pressures and different influences to different situations. This is what she said, “Those who lived in the Macedonian regions and were closely connected with the Greeks didn’t experience as much unfriendly relations as did the others. The families and the communities that suffered the most had family members killed and exiled. These were people who for various reasons did not feel Greek. Their identities were formed as a result of close relations with each other and social connections and networks with others but with no participation in the dominantly Greek society… Events in the Second World War and the Greek Civil War worsened conditions for those who wanted to be assimilated. People who fought on the communist side were deprived of all rights including their citizenship…” Karakasidou here referred to the Macedonians who, half a century later, still are not allowed to visit their birthplaces because they are not Greek by origin.

Karakasidou is not a betrayer of the Greek cause, or an agent for “Skopje”, but she is an objective scientist who told the truth about Hellenizing the people in the Aegean part of Macedonia, which she investigated during her several years of research. This is what Vladimir Milchin said, “I don’t believe that Karakasidou’s intention at the start was to confront the modern Greek nationalist narrative based on the so called ‘Megali Idea’ (Great Idea), but her field research, her digging in the archives and her consultation with bibliographies, unavoidably brought Karakasidou in confrontation with the official Greek doctrine which claims that Macedonia was always Greek and only Greek…” Vladimir Milchin and the publishing house “Magor” were responsible for translating and publishing the book “Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood” into the Macedonian language.

According to Milchin, Anastasia Karakasidou does not hide the drama that she experienced when she discovered that the Greek nation was expanding into the region of Macedonia through different assimilating techniques and strategies of ethnic cleansing. This is what Milchin said, “Karakasidou’s courage was proven by

the fact that she exposed the assimilation but didn’t generalize on her discovery that other areas of Aegean Macedonian were also Hellenized, like Lerin Region for example, which was not as successful as the assimilation process that took place in Guvezna-Asiros…”

The newspaper “Library Journal” wrote that it had seldom seen a science book like “Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood”, provoke and upset so many people. This is what the newspaper wrote, “Karakasidou spent some time with the people from the villages in this region and claimed that Macedonia is not exclusively Greek, as Greek nationalists claim, but is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural region which has been put through political and religious disagreements in the Balkans. Karakasidou’s obsession with the truth brought her face to face with death threats from some angry Greeks. Her powerfully written statement, a loud statement of human courage, should remind the readers that there is no substitute for humanity and criticism…”