NGO (Greek Helsinki Monitor) Report on Greece - Part 4
Past repression in Greece

Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority Rights Group - Greece have been the first Greek Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) to publicly use the term ‘Macedonian minority’ in Greece, to be followed, in 1995, by some other groups or individuals, too few though.

According to League of Nations statistics, which however were based solely on Greek sources, when Greece annexed over half the territory of Macedonia in 1913, the Greek speaking population made up just 43% of its 1,200,000 inhabitants as compared with 39% for the Turks, 10% for the Slav and 8% for the Jews (Wilkinson, 1951:266; Nicolaidis, 1992:32).
However, in those figures, Slav-speaking people who belonged to the Patriarchate were classified as Greeks. Should we limit the Greek population to the Greek-speaking one, we would reach an estimate of 20%-25% of Greeks vs. 30%-35% of Slavs (Lithoxoou, 1992c; Carnegie, 1993:195; Poulton, 1995:85).
In general, to quote Greek Minister of the Army K. Nider from a 1925 memorandum (Divani, 1995:77):
“When Macedonia was liberated by Greece, there was a mosaic of national consciousness, of Greek-leaning, Bulgarian-leaning, Serbian- leaning, Romanian-leaning people.”
The Slavs tended to be considered as Bulgarians by the Greek authorities, which explains why Professor R. A. Reiss who was commissioned by the Greek government to study ethnologically the new territories felt compelled to insist that “those you call Bulgarophones, I will simply call them Macedonians” (Reiss, 1915:3).
Following World War I, and the Greek-Bulgarian convention of 27/11/1919, which allowed voluntary population exchange, some 53,000 Slavs left for Bulgaria (Wilkinson, 1951:262), usually compelled by the Greek state’s discriminatory implementation of that convention in favor of those leaving the country (Nicolaidis, 1992:32); in ‘exchange’ some 30,000 Greeks emigrated from Bulgaria to Greece. Divani (1995:58) - whose book is using Greek foreign ministry archives- mentions - though without a source- an exchange of 46,000 Greeks for 92,000 Bulgarians, though she uses the 53,000 figure for Bulgarians later on (p. 332); Poulton (1995:86) mentions 25,000 Greeks for 52,000-72,000 Bulgarians. At the same time, and following the implementation of the mandatory exchange of population between Greece and Turkey after the Greek defeat in Asia Minor in 1922 and the Lausanne Treaties in 1924, some 700,000-800,000 Greeks settled in Macedonia (Wilkinson, 1951:263-269).
So, in the inter-war period, the composition of the population of Greek Macedonia was dramatically altered. To quote the current bishop of Florina (Lerin): “If the hundreds of thousands of refugees had not come to Greece, today there would be no Greek Macedonia. The refugees created the country’s national homogeneity” (Avgi, 9/2/1992).
Still there were many Macedonians left: some 82,000-85,000 according to official census data in 1928 and in 1940 (with their language referred to as Slavo-Macedonian), but probably as many as 200,000 in reality, as even the association created to help ‘Hellenize’ them (Association for the Dissemination of Greek Letters) admitted (Mavrogordatos, 1983:247; Divani, 1995:333).
This homogeneity could not have been achieved though without additional compulsory and repressive assimilation policies of the Greek state. Although the Greek state was compelled to protect its ‘Bulgarian’ minority by the 1920 Sèvres treaty and, in fact, tried to negotiate the implementation of the provisions of the latter in 1924 (by the Kalfof-Politis agreement), strong reaction by public opinion and by Yugoslavia canceled all such initiatives, and the special Abecedar printed in 1925 to teach the (Latin not Cyrillic) alphabet (based on the dialects spoken in Greece rather than on the Bulgarian or Serbian alphabets -hence its rejection by Bulgaria -Divani, 1995:148; Poulton, 1995:88-9) at the primary schools (as promised by Greece in the League of Nations on 10/6/1925, see Divani, 1995:323) was never used, as (Williams, 1992:83):
“The Hellenistic ideology of the post-Lausanne Greek state favors nation-building and assimilation into one Greek people of all other non-Turkish constituent minorities.”
On the contrary, since the mid-1920s, all Exarchate and Serbian schools from the pre-annexation era were closed, while the Slavonic icons were replaced or repainted with Greek names (Poulton, 1993:176 & 1995:89); likewise, the Slavic names of the villages were changed, a process which had already started in 1909 in the territories which were already part of Greece then (Lithoxoou, 1991:63-4; Poulton, 1995:88). Moreover, from Thracian villages near Bulgaria-but also from villages in Western Macedonia-, many Macedonians were exiled to Crete in an effort to neutralize hostile Bulgarian propaganda, partly carried out through IMRO band intrusions in Greek territory (Kargakos, 1992:100; Mavrogordatos, 1983:248; and Tounta, 1986:56). But for the Macedonian masses (Mavrogor-datos, 1983:249):
“The most explosive and perennial issue, however, was that of the land in conjunction with refugee settlement. Slavo-Macedonian natives reacted strongly and often violently to the massive settlement of Greek refugees and to their occupation of fields they had themselves coveted or even cultivated in the past. (...) Slavo-Macedonian peasants would massively declare themselves Bulgarians, or even Serbs, in the futile hope that their villages and lands would thus be spared the refugee invasion.”
As a result, Macedonians tended to oppose the most nationalist political family, the liberal Venizelists, whose electoral base was the refugees, and vote for the conservative populists, also because the latter were receiving strong support from Greek Old-Calendarists (Orthodox Christian who have not accepted the new calendar) and Macedonians were Old-Calendarists too. In fact, some local populist politicians campaigned among Macedonians using separatist slogans “Macedonia for Macedonians” and “Macedonia iskra” (Divani, 1995:80).
Nevertheless, a minority of the Macedonians was voting for the communists, who, along with the other Balkan communists, advocated an independent Macedonia. The consequence (Mavrogordatos, 1983:251):
“The connection between Slavo-Macedonians, Communists, and the threatened loss of Greek Macedonia was most effective-not only for propaganda, but also for the police repression of both Communist and Slavo-Macedonian agitation.”
Despite all this harassment, a large number of Macedonians, and their vast majority in the Florina and Kastoria (Kostur) district, lacked Greek national consciousness (Mavrogordatos, 1983:247; & Lithoxoou, 1992a:36-42). So, during the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-1941) - ironically Metaxas was the leader of a populist political party Macedonians had supported in the past, compulsory and repressive methods of assimilation were introduced, resulting in the alienation of the non-assimilated Macedonians (Kofos, 1990:116). The use of the Macedonian language was prohibited both in public and at home, and the penalties included fines, forced drinking of castor oil, thrashing, torture, and exile. All its native speakers were forced to attend night school to learn Greek. Special training schools for women were created to help ‘Hellenize’ the ‘Bulgarian-speaking mother’ (Divani, 1995:345). Finally, all those who had not changed their names from Macedonian into Greek ones, were obliged to do so, while 340 Macedonians emigrants to Canada or the USA were losing their Greek citizenship and were not allowed back even with their families living in Greece (Divani, 1995:345). It is no wonder therefore that many Macedonians, having felt hostile towards the Greek ‘bourgeois state’, were eager to cooperate with the Bulgarian occupants during World War II and, especially, with the communist resistance in the same period and the communist forces in the ensuing civil war, which, towards the war’s end even openly supported the idea of an independent Macedonia (Karakasidou, 1993:3; Kargakos, 1992:187; Lygeros, 1992:33; & Mavrogordatos, 1983:252).
In the villages under control of the resistance and then the communist forces, Macedonians had their schools, schoolbooks, newspapers, and church services and enjoyed a freedom they had never had before and have never had since (Poulton, 1993:178 & 1995:110).
The Macedonians paid dearly for their choice during the civil war (1946-9) and for their call for an independent Macedonia they made during it. Like most communists, some 35,000 Macedonians fled Greece after the defeat of the communist side (Danforth, 1993:4); but, whereas, in 1982, a law allowed the free return of and property restitution to all these political refugees, it excluded specifically all those of non-Greek origin, i.e. the Macedonians. All those who left lost their citizenship (on the basis of decree LZ/1947) and their property (first during the civil war with decrees M/1948 and N/ 1948 and after it with law 2536/1953) even if the latter had been left at the hands of relatives or tenants. Greek Helsinki Monitor (GHM) and MRG-Greece have documents showing that, at least in one case, a Macedonian, named Athanasios Gotsis, was stripped of his citizenship four years after his death in a civil war battle. With the same 1953 law, ‘nationally-minded’ Greeks, mostly retired army and police officers and privates, but also some Vlachs, were resettled in the Macedonian-populated areas, in the very lands which had been expropriated (Poulton, 1993:178; SAKE, 1993:20).
In the 1950’s, the policy of ‘memoricide’ was subtler than in the past. For example, the state opened many more kindergartens in the Florina (Lerin) district, where the Macedonian children could go spend the day, enjoy day-care and warm food, and take lessons of Greek, the only language they were allowed to speak. Thus, young children, when their parents were at work, were growing up away from the influence of the Macedonian-speaking grandmothers.
The Bishop of Florina praised the kindergarten’s work. (Avgi, 9/2/1992) Also, the ‘best and the brightest’ pupils were -and have since been-sent to at least two boarding schools far away in Kefallonia and Volos, in order to receive ‘proper’ education. Moreover, Macedonians could hardly find a job in the civil sector and their children were, reportedly, being discouraged from having a complete secondary education. Towards the end of that decade, the authorities pressured many villages to stage public swearing-in ceremonies in which they pledged never to use again the Macedonian language: these ceremonies were proudly reported in the Greek press (see for example: Eleftheria 7/7/1959; Hellenikos Vorras 8/7/1959; Vima 8/7/1959; Hellenikos Vorras, 5/8/1959; Kathimerini 11/8/1959; Hellenikos Vorras 11/8/1959).
Finally, many Macedonian villages near the border had been included, through the period of the dictatorship, in a restricted zone, where the movement of the citizens to and out of that zone was controlled by the authorities (such zone had also existed through 1995 in the mountain villages of Thrace where Pomaks and Turks, both identifying as ethnic Turks, have been living). At the same time, Greek authorities resettled in Macedonian-populated areas many Greeks with ‘healthy national consciousness’ often giving them the property of the Macedonians who had fled the country (Poulton, 1995:162).
In that context, it is interesting to mention the Greek-Yugoslav border movement agreement of 18/6/1959: it called for the freedom of movement of inhabitants of the villages and the two towns (i.e. Florina/Lerin in Greece and Bitola/Monastir in Yugoslav Macedonia) in a 10 km zone each side of the frontier between the two countries: some 3,000 of them from each side (excluding political refugees from Greece, though) could travel (without passports), trade, cultivate land and exercise liberal professions freely within that zone; the special licenses were issued in Greek and Macedonian (the term was used not in the text but by Greek foreign minister E. Averoff- Tossizza in parliament), which implied an official recognition of the latter by Greek authorities. The agreement was repealed in 1967 by the dictatorship and has never been reinstated since the restoration of democracy in 1974, despite repeated Yugoslav démarches in that direction (Valden, 1991:12-14 & 128). To be Continued…