The Making of Greece
The Greek Constitution of 1827 was signed and ratified in June 1827 by the Third National Assembly at Troezen during the latter stages of the Greek War of Independence for liberation from Turkish rule.
Let's look at the articles of the first Greek constitution that practically defined the character of the state, its territory and its inhabitants.
The Article under nr. 4 says:
“Provinces of Greece are all those that were taken and will be taken by weapons against the Ottoman Dynasty.”
Followed with the answer of how the Greeks defined themselves:
1) —> 6. Greeks are:
2) —> a. All those indigenous people of the Greek State who believe in Christ.
3) —> b. All those, believers in Christ, who under the Ottoman slavery, came or they will come to the Greek State to struggle or to reside in it.
4) —> e. All those aliens, who come and enroll as citizens.
NOTE: To become a Greek, it was enough to be a Christian!
This document proves that Greeks have a very short memory. They do not remember how the Greek State was made and also who the modern Greeks are.
Why should we Macedonians have to prove that we are Macedonians since antiquity when the Greeks do not have to prove anything for being Greeks?
The fact is that about 180 years ago anybody who was a Christian in the Greek State became a Greek automatically, why does that not bother the modern Greeks?
You see, if someone was a Jew or a Muslim or a Catholic, he/she was excluded immediately. Let us now ask ourselves what Greek racism is and where did it come from?
Without any tendentiousness, but this document of the highest official importance shows that the Greek ethnic identity is consciously produced.
To make this paradox even more bigger lets remind "The Greeks" at their first President George Koundouriotis (1782-1858) who served as Prime Minister of Greece during the reign of Otto of Bavaria as King of Greece, and later G.K. became the first President of the Greek state (1823-1826).
Mr. Koundouriotis comes from famous Albanian family which with no doubt gave his great contribution the Greek revolution. The original family name was Zervas, but was changed to Koundouriotis according to one of their ancestors who was a resident of the village Kountora, Megarida. His brother Lazaros Kounduoriotis who fought in the Greek War of Independence in 1821year was called "Father of the Nation." Grandson of Mr.Kounduoriotis, Pavlos, was celebrated after the First Balkan War and was twice elected President of Greece. George Kounduoriotis was an Albanian who knew only Albanian and He became the first Greek president.
“Greek government officials, rule out their first President Mr. Kounduriotis and his name is not mentioned in any modern text because of Greek political sensitivity about his Albanian origin”, wrote George Finley in his book "History of the Greek Revolution" from 1861. This is not coincidence, the Albanian character of the Greek state is also confirmed by other celebrated revolutionaries who took part in the Greek War of independence, and they were also Albanians who did not know Greek language. Among them are Bocaris Marcos, Kicos Tzavellas and Andreas Miaoulis. After them we can also mention the celebrated Albanian revolutionary in Greek war Theodoros Kolokotronis who advocated bilingual country (Greece) with Albanian and Greek language. Albanians had their own representatives in the Greek Parliament which discussed the use of Albanian as second official language in Greece. Still, it never came to that.
Beside Kolokotronis, another Albanian figure is also characteristic in Greek revolution, and that is Laskarina Bouboulina the woman who first raised the revolutionary Greek flag on the island of Speces. Bouboulina played a major role in the revolution and today occupies a special place in Greek history, but what is hidden and never highlighted is its Albanian origin.
“We always spoke Albanian and we called our self Romaioi but then Vinkelman, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Delakrois, they all have said "No, you are Hellenes, direct descendants of Plato and Socrates, and it happen.If on a small, poor nation is put such a burden on the shoulders, she will never to recover. “
(Nikos Dimou - in an interview titled "Elgin Marble Argument in a New Light" – New York Times, June 23, 2009)
In 1923, after the Greco-Turkish War of Thrace, was signed an agreement between Turkey and Greece for population exchange based upon religious identity. All Orthodox Christians of Turkey were deported to Greece, and all Muslims of Greece were deported to Turkey, regardless of ethnic identity. Following this treaty 1/3 of the Aegean
Macedonians who were Islamized moved in Turkey and on their place came the Karamanlides.
Karamanlides or simply Karamanlis are Orthodox Turks who lived on the territory of Asia Minor. They formed the first Turkish sultanate, Karaman; belonging to the Turkish tribe Bozdoğan, which belongs to the people of Oghous, part of the Turkish nation. The Karaman sultanate exist as an independent sultanate between 13-15 century when Seljuq Turks conquered them, but besides most of the Karamanlides retained their Christian faith.
Karamanlis were subordinate to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which attempted to assimilate all its subject into Greeks. The policy of the Patriarchate was simple: each patriarchal subject is Greek.Therefore, the Karamanlides and rest of the Orthodox Turks separated in a separate Turkish Orthodox Church from the late 19th century. Eftim Baba, Pope of the Orthodox Church in Turkey strongly opposed the deportation of Karamanlis In Greece, because they were solely ethnic Turks, Orthodox, and not Greeks.
About 850,000 Karamanlides have moved in modern Greece, contrary to their desire to stay in Turkey. (December 4, 1922, “The New York Times” Page 16, Col. 3)
Turkey, as predominantly Muslim country wanted to get rid of the Turkish Christians, and to receive the Balkan Muslims in their society. Greece, the Orthodox Turks always identified as Greeks, though their native language was Turkish. (E.Z.Karal "Osmanli Tarihinde Turk Dili Sorunu", "The Turkish Language Problem in Ottoman History) страна 25.).
See the above photo ( Tragedy Stalks Through the Near East as Greece and Turkey Exchange Two Million of their People, in The National Geographic Magazine. Volume XLVIII, No. 7-12, July- December, 1925.)
Most of these Karamanlides 638,253 or 52% of all Immigrants (Source: Educational Institute of Greece ) settled in Aegean Macedonia, to neutralize the Macedonian population. These Orthodox Turks, are now the biggest Greeks and claim to be the “true” Macedonians. Of course, they make this claim partly as a consequence of the Greek aggressive propaganda of the last century, but also from the fear their properties which the Greek state gave them, and belonged to the expelled Aegean Macedonians, to be confiscated.
The so-called "Greek-Macedonia" is a fabrication, an artificial creation that serves as the basis for territorial and historical claims of the Greek side. The real ones and the only Macedonians are denied and repressed in order for Greece to have a foreign territory and to steal someone else's history.
However, the repressive assimilation measures adopted by the Greek authorities that were used in the past for the Macedonians, covered also these settlers from Asia Minor. Namely, they were prohibited from any trip back to Turkey, threatened with removal of their Greek citizenship if they did. They were also prohibited by the Greek law to identify as Turks. (Martin Baldwin-Edwards,"The Asia Minor atrocities and the ‘Exchange of Populations")
In 1925, Salvanos Chief of Staff of the Tenth Army Division located in Western Macedonia had a task to make ethnological research of the Florina region which should serve for orientation in the further displacement of settlers.
He wrote that those with pure Greek national consciousness are insignificant minority, while the “Slavophone” population is divided into three groups: first, in which predominates the Greek sentiment, the second in which prevailed the Bulgarian sentiment and the third group that was indifferent in terms of nationality and were only interested to keep their daily lives. The latter, a third group, stressed Salvanos, constitutes the majority of the population and call themselves as Macedonians. They consisted of between one half and three-quarters of the total population in a given village, while those with Bulgarian sentiment no more than a quarter, and last, slavophone group with Greek sentiment was only from one to five families within a village. (Minorities in Greece" by Richard Clogg, 2002, page 129)
The best commentary on the end of the second part of “The Making of Greece” will be the one of the Bishop of Florina, Augostinos Kandiotis who said:
"If the hundreds of thousands of refugees had not come to Greece, Greek Macedonia would not exist today."
(Anastasia N. Karakasidou,“Fields of wheat, hills of blood: passages to nationhood in Greek Macedonia1870-1990“, page 141.)
1927 the Greek government issued a directive calling for the destruction of all Slavic inscriptions in churches and forbidding church services from being held in a Slavic language. Finally, in 1936 a law was passed ordering that all Slavic personal names, both first and last, be Hellenized (Human Rights Watch/Helsinki 1994b: 6-7).
Evangelos Kofos, the Special Counsellor on Balkan Affairs in the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reports that:
“The Greek state, like other Eastern European countries of the interwar period, had pursued a policy of assimilation of ethnic groups. After World War I, and some hesitation in the early 1920s, it had decided to treat the remaining Slav-speakers as Slavophone Greeks.“
(Evangelos Kofos, Nationalism and Communism in Macedonia, Aristide D. Caratzas, Publisher, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1993, page 255.)
Thus in the period from 1918 to 1925 inclusive, 76 centres of population in Aegean Macedonia were renamed: in 1918 - one; in 1919 - two; in 1920 - two; in 1921 - two; in 1922 - eighteen; in 1923 - eighteen; in t924 - six and in 1925 - twenty-six. But as soon as the processes of migration came to an end and the position of the state was strengthened, and, following the legislative orders of 17th September 1926, published in the "Government Gazette" N2 331, 21st September 1926, and the Decision of the Ministerial Council dated 10th November 1927, and published in the Government Gazette S2 287, 13th November 1927, the process of renaming the inhabited places was accelerated to an incredible degree. Consequently, in the course of 1926, 440 places in Aegean Macedonia were renamed: 149 in 1927, 835 and-in 1928, 212, i.e. in only three years , 1926, 1927 and 1928, 1,497 places in Aegean Macedonia were renamed.
By the end of 1928 most of the centres of population in Aegean Macedonia had been given new names, but the Greek state continued the process by a gradual perfection of the system of renaming, effected through new laws and new instructions. On t3th March 1929 the special law known under its number, 4,096, was passed and published in the "Government Gazette" S-- 99 of 13th March 1929. This law contained detailed instructions and directives as to the process of renaming places. By the force of this law and the earlier instructions, amended by Law Ng 6,429 of 18th June 1935, Law S2 1418 of 22 November 1938, Law N2 697 of 4th December 1945 and many other instructions, legislative orders and other enactments, the process of renaming the inhabited areas has been carried on to this day, taking care of each and every geographical name of suspicious origin throughout Macedonia, including entirely insignificant places, all aimed at erasing any possible Slav trace from Aegean Macedonia and from the whole of Greece.
With these laws, instructions and other enactments, the district commissions in charge of the change of place names and the Principal Commission at the Ministerial Council of Greece (established as early as 1909) enforced many more changes. In the period from 1929 to 1940 inclusive, another 39 places in Aegean Macedonia were renamed, and after World War II (up to 1979 inclusive) yet another 135 places in this part of Macedonia were renamed.
An estimated total of 1,666 cities, towns and villages were renamed in Aegean Macedonia in the period from 1918 to 1970 inclusive.
In 1953 submitted the Law NL- 2536 for colonization of the northern territories with selected people of pure Greek origin - the prevailing anti-Macedonian element in this law is evident in the exclusion of Turks in Western Thrace from such measures.
As evidence of the forced change in the character of Macedonia, believe it or not, is the parliament building in Athens where today stand in scripted the original names of Macedonian villages, which the Greeks forcibly renamed with Greek names, among them can be found: Pecovo (changed to Ditto), Banica (Vevi), then Nevrokop, Klisura, Ostrovica, Rupel, Pogradec.
If Macedonia was always Greek, why would the Greek government have to change the Macedonian names of people, towns, and villages to Greek?
