Greece, the Annexation of Macedonia and the Assimilation of the Macedonia People
We are told that statistics on the ethnic composition of Macedonia during the Ottoman occupation were virtually non-existent and unreliable at best, but almost all sources, except for the Greek ones, tell us that the Macedonian speakers in Macedonia constituted a vast majority before Macedonia´s partition. All except Greek sources find that the Macedonians were the largest single group of people living in historic Macedonia before 1913. "The figures range from 329,371, or 45.3 percent, to 382,084, or 68.9 percent, of the non-Turkish inhabitants, and from 339,369, or 31.3 percent, to 370,371, or 35.2 percent, of the area's approximately 1,052,227 people." (p. 141, Andrew Rossos, "Macedonia and the Macedonians A History")
The number of Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia began to decline during and after the Balkan Wars and particularly after the Treaty of Neuilly (November 27th, 1919) which provided for the so-called "voluntary exchange" of populations between Bulgaria and Greece. According to some estimates Greece evicted 86,382 Macedonians to Bulgaria between 1913 and 1928.
Under the Treaty of Lausanne (July 24th, 1923) during the so-called compulsory exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece about 400,000 Muslims, mostly ethnic Macedonians, were evicted from their homes and expelled to Turkey. About 1.3 million Christian Turk settlers from Asia Minor were then settled in Greece, mostly in Macedonia. In the years leading up to 1928, the Greek government settled 565,143 Asia Minor refugees and 53,000 Greek colonists in Greek occupied Macedonia.
From 1913 to 1928, by evicting 127,384 Macedonians and settling 618,199 Turkish Christian colonists on Macedonian soil, the Greek government transformed the ethnographic structure of Greek occupied Macedonia from predominantly ethnic Macedonian to the ethnic Macedonians being a minority.
In 1928 in an official Greek census, the Greek government then declared that Greece was an ethnically homogeneous state with a minority of only 81,984 "Slavo-phone Greeks".
A Macedonian historian (Stojan Kiselinovski) evaluated the pre-1914 statistics, migrations from the 1920s, and the Greek census of 1928 and estimated that at least 240,000 Macedonians still remained in Greek occupied Macedonia before the Second World War.
Population movements such as the ones described above were conducted by successive Greek governments purely to dilute the Macedonians to a minority in their own lands. How can a state justify this and consider it to be legal? Better still how could the world, especially those states who consider themselves to be fair and democratic, sanction such behaviour? The Macedonian people bore the entire brunt of the Greek state's policies of forced denationalization and assimilation and no one over the years objected!
The August 10th, 1920 Treaty of Sèvres required the Greek state to protect "the interests of the inhabitants who differ from the majority of the population in nationality, language or faith" and to provide non-Greeks with political and civil rights which would allow them to use their native mother tongues in the press, courts, churches, and primary schools. Unfortunately none of these ever happened and most shameful, especially for those states who guaranteed the Sèvres Treaty, is that they never followed up to make sure that the Greeks did what they were supposed to!
The Kalfov-Politis Agreement concluded by Bulgaria and Greece in September 1924, in which Greece recognized the presence of "Bulgarians" living inside Greece, provoked a crisis between Greece and Serbia angering Serbia and creating fears that Greece's recognition of the Macedonians in Greece as Bulgarians would not only justify Bulgaria's claims to them but also to the Macedonians living on the lands occupied by Serbia. As a result of this, Serbia threatened to abandon its 1913 alliance with Greece unless Greece recognized the Macedonians in the Greek occupied part as Serbians. This provided the Greek parliament with an excuse not to ratify the agreement and in January 1925 it was aborted.
After that fiasco and after being frequently criticized by the League of Nations in Geneva for not protecting minority rights as per the Treaty of Sèvres, Greece promised it would publish primary school instructions in the mother tongues of its minorities in the areas where they were a majority.
A three-member commission in the Greek Ministry of Education was appointed to prepare a Macedonian language primer for the schools. The primer called the Abecedar was published in Athens in 1925 and was based on the Lerin-Bitola Macedonian dialects using the Latin instead of the Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet. The Greek government submitted the Abecedar to the League of Nations as proof of its compliance with its treaty obligations.
"The Bulgarian representative described it as 'incomprehensible' but the Greek representative to the League of Nations, Vasilis Dendramis, defended it on the grounds that the Macedonian Slav language was 'neither Bulgarian nor Serbian, but an independent language' and produced linguistic maps to back this up." (p. 143, Andrew Rossos, "Macedonia and the Macedonians A History")
Unfortunately the Greek government never intended to make the Abecedar available in the schools and staged a train accident where the entire batch was burned on the way to its destination. All other copies were then confiscated and destroyed. If Greece truly intended to make the Abecedar available it would have re-printed it. Also if the League of Nations were truly interested in the welfare of the Macedonian people they would have followed up to make sure that Greece did what was expected. But none of those things happened!
As mentioned earlier, Greece, out of the blue, in 1928 decided that there were no Macedonians; only a small number of Slavophone Greeks living in Greece. Since then to this day it has denied the Macedonians their ethnic identity and has maintained a policy of forced assimilation.
Intentionally or not, the Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia have been ignored by the entire world, particularly by the West. They have suffered isolation not only from the world but more so from relatives in Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia and later Yugoslavia because of border restrictions. Not many Westerners ever ventured into the region, particularly in the regions west of Voden, until the start of World War II. Most westerners readily accept and hardly question Greek claims of "ethnic homogeneity" and Greek allegations that "Macedonians do not exist".
Inside Greece too, even though Macedonians existed, they were never part of Greek life and Greeks, especially the ruling class, readily accepted the idea of "ethnic homogeneity" and the "Macedonians' nonexistence". The forced assimilation, discrimination and oppression thus continued unnoticed as it continues to be unnoticed to this day. Conversations with Greeks frequently and to this day yield a "surprise" when discussing the subject of minorities living inside Greece.
The fact that the Macedonians living in Greece have been ignored is reinforced by the fact that hardly anyone has undertaken any serious research or published any scholarly studies on the political, social, economic, or cultural life of Macedonians or other minorities living in Greece. Even if scholars want to do research, the moment they mention "Macedonians" or "minorities" Greece slams the door on them denying them access to its archives.
Only the Communist Party of Greece took up the Macedonian cause but in retrospect as a whole it did far more damage than good. As was the case with other Balkan Communist parties, in the 1920s the Communist Party of Greece recognized the Macedonians in all three partitioned regions as a distinct "Slav nation" with its own language, history, culture, territory, and interests. Rizospastis, the main newspaper of the Communist Party of Greece was the only newspaper to write about the Macedonians and to this day remains a contested but invaluable source of information chronicling the struggles of the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia.
Between the world wars Greece was particularly harsh against the Macedonians by first turning them into a minority on their own lands and then confiscating their lands through land redistribution programs and scattering them into mountainous villages and small towns. Since Greece had expelled virtually every educated Macedonian and placed every brave Macedonian in exile in the hot, dry and desolate Greek islands, the Macedonian people over the years lacked an elite. Well-educated Macedonians remained few in number and those who were educated were selected for their loyalty to the Greek cause and estranged from their Macedonian roots and cultural traditions.
After 1936, at the hands of the dictator Metaxas, neglect and oppression gave way to murder and open persecution. Many Macedonians were whisked from their native villages near the Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Albanian borders and interned in the Aegean and other uninhabitable islands, where after being tortured they perished. Tens of thousands of Macedonians were thrown in prisons; their only "crime" was they identified themselves as Macedonians. It was a crime, enforced by law, to speak Macedonian. Policemen were paid a percentage of the fine imposed on people caught speaking Macedonian. Policemen often frequented the market targeting old women who could not speak Greek but had to communicate their needs in Macedonian, the only language they spoke. Policemen were also observed hiding outside people´s houses listening to conversations to see if they spoke Macedonian so that they could then charge them and share the fine with the courts.
Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia had no representatives of their own. Their main contact with the bureaucracy was through the local administrator, priest, teacher, policeman and tax collector, all of whom were state appointees. These officials were either all Greeks from other regions or in rare cases Grkomani (assimilated Macedonians very loyal to the Greek cause). Control of native Macedonians and their lands was in the hands of these people and in the hands of the newly settled Asia Minor settlers. Not only were these people in charge of administering the Macedonians but their methods were harsh, brutal, arbitrary and totally corrupt.
"Colonel A. C. Corfe, a New Zealander and chair of the League of Nations Mixed Commission on Greek-Bulgarian Emigration, reported in 1923: ´One of the Macedonians' chief grievances is against the Greek Gendarmerie and during our tour we saw many examples of the arrogant and unsatisfactory methods of the Gendarmerie, who commandeer from the peasants whatever food they want....One visits few villages where some of the inhabitants are not in Greek prisons, without trial.´
Captain P .H. Evans–an agent of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE), who spent eight months of 1943-44 in western Aegean Macedonia as a British liaison officer (BLO) and station commander–described the attitude ´even of educated Greeks toward the Slav minority´ as ´usually stupid, uninformed and brutal to a degree that makes one despair of any understanding ever being created between the two people´." (p. 145, Andrew Rossos, "Macedonia and the Macedonians A History")
Life was made even harsher for the Macedonians when the Greek government confiscated arable land from Macedonian peasants and villages and gave it to newcomer settlers for economic and political reasons. Macedonian peasants became marginalized in subsistence farming with plots too small and infertile, methods too primitive and yields too low, barely eking out an existence. Many were left with no choice but to leave their homeland if they wanted to survive.
Those Macedonians living in rural areas were no better off, there were a few large-scale government projects but they excluded Macedonians unless they renounced their identity and joined extreme nationalist, right-wing, or fascist organizations.
The only way out of oppression and economic strife appeared to be large-scale emigration, as many Macedonians left in search of a better life in Canada, Australia and the United States, which undoubtedly delighted the Greeks and facilitated easy Hellenization of the regions Macedonians abandoned.
Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia, in order to remain in their homeland, had to embrace their occupier´s identity which demanded total assimilation. Macedonians had to embrace the Greek national identity and become Greek in every respect, or suffer the consequences. Subsequent Greek governments employed all available resources including military, church, school, press, cultural institutions and society and sports organizations to further the Greek cause in Greek occupied Macedonia. These assimilatory tactics were later extended to Macedonians from Greece living in the Diaspora. Macedonians were threatened (with harm to their relatives still living in Greece) if they joined Macedonian organizations.
In November 1926 Greece passed a new law ordering replacement of all Macedonian names of cities, villages, rivers, mountains and so on with Greek ones. Greece wanted to eradicate all reminders of the centuries-old Macedonian presence in Greek occupied Macedonia.
In July 1927 Greece passed another decree ordering the removal of all Macedonian Cyrillic inscriptions in buildings, churches and cemeteries and their replacement with Greek ones. This campaign was particularly most vicious in the later 1930s under the Metaxas dictatorship when the Greek government prohibited use of the Macedonian language even at home.
With all its effort however, Greek attempts to assimilate the Macedonian people have failed and then as it is today Macedonians still speak Macedonian not only in Greece but the world over.
"As Captain Evans emphasized: ´It [Greek occupied Macedonia] is predominantly a Slav region, not a Greek one. The language of the home, and usually also the fields, the village street, and the market is Macedonian, a Slav language....The place names as given on the map are Greek,...but the names which are mostly used...are...all Slav names. The Greek ones are merely a bit of varnish put on by Metaxas...Greek is regarded as almost a foreign language and the Greeks are distrusted as something alien, even if not, in the full sense of the word, as foreigners. The obvious fact, almost too obvious to be stated, that the region is Slav by nature and not Greek cannot be overemphasized.´" (p. 147, Andrew Rossos, "Macedonia and the Macedonians A History")
References:
Rossos, Andrew. Macedonia and the Macedonians, A History. Stanford University: Hoover Institution Press, 2008.
Stefou, Chris. History of the Macedonian People from Ancient times to the Present. Toronto: Risto Stefov publications, 2005
You can contact the author at rstefov@hotmail.com

