Macedonia after the Greek War of Independence

[Prokomenos]

The Greek War of Independence (1821-1830) changed the course of the history of Macedonia. The war irrevocably tied developments in the land to the wars of national liberation the Greeks fought for nearly a century. The uprising of the Greeks of Macedonia in 1821-2, which was part of the general Greek uprising, and its bloody suppression by the Ottoman Turks tied the fortunes of the northern Greeks with those of their southern brethren for at least two reasons: a) because they piaced Macedonia within the scope of Greek irredentist action, and b) because they caused a wave of refugees who settled in south Greece: These refugees and subsequent waves produced by the rising of the Greeks of Macedonia during the Eastern crises of 1854, 1875 and 1896 became a formidable link connecting the independent Greek kingdom in the south with the unredeemed Greeks of the north.

With the active support of independent Greece, but principally through the nuclei of organised political, economic and cultural life of the Greeks of Macedonia - the community councils, the professional guilds, the schools, the churches, and the variously named patriotic societies - the northern Greeks were able to further develop their national identity and position in the land and to strengthen the elements among them pressing for independence from the Turks. By the time other serious claimants to the land appeared - the Bulgars after 1870 - the Greeks has been able to shape the land to their image which the newcomers were unable to overrun. Nevertheless, the Bulgarian propaganda which sought to win over Slavonic-speaking Christians living in certain enclaves in Macedonia met, predictably, with Greek resistance and sparked off a bitter conflict between the Greeks and the Bulgars that lasted from 1904 until the Young Turks' Revolution of 1908. This was the "Macedonian Struggle", the struggle waged by the Greeks in Macedonia to ward otf the dangerous threat of Bulgarian expansionism. Both Greek and Bulgarian guerrilla bands drew men from the Greek kingdom and Bulgarian principality respectively, though most of their fighters were Slavonic speakers from the disputed enclaves, who took sides according to their nationalist convictions.

The Balkan Wars (1912-13) , which terminated with the deliverance of Macedonia from Ottoman domination, put a temporary end to the unrest in the region as the combatants acquired he former Turkish vilayets of Thessaloniki and Monastir. The Greek kingdom secured the liberation of the main part of historical Macedonia -that taking in Thessaloniki and those great Macedonian centres of Ancient Greek culture: Aegae (Vergina), Dion and Pella. Another part, the northern one, was taken over by Serbia while a much smailer one was placed within the boundaries of the Bulgarian state.

The First World War confirmed the territorial status quo produced by the Balkan Wars, while the treaties that ended that war radically changed the linguistic and national composition of the population of Macedonia. The Greek-Bulgarian Convention signed at Neuilly in 1919, which provided for the reciprocal and voluntary emigration of people from one realm to the other after liquidating their property assets, gave the opportunity to perhaps more than 100,000 people from each side to emigrate to the side of their choice. The Greek element in Greek Macedonia was further strengthened as a result of the Greek-Turkish War of 1919-22 and the Lausanne Convention of January 1923, which provided for the mandatory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. In the place of the departing Musiims of Macedonia, more than 600,000 Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace and the Pontus settled in the land and irrevocably changed the national composition of its population. In this way, through the voluntary migrations between the different countries, significant progress was achieved in respect of the homogeneity of the respective populations. It is characteristic that, according to the statistics held by the League of Nations, 88.8% of the population of Macedonia in 1926 was Greek. It is worth noting that of the remainder a large proportion was made up by the Jews of Macedonia. What had come by then to be known as the "Macedonian Question" was further complicated in the interwar period, when the Soviet-sponsored Communist International projected the slogan for an independent Macedonia and the theory of a "Macedonian" nationality, and imposed them on the Communist parties of Greece and Yugoslavia. It was in fact the line of the left-wing branch of IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), the Bulgarian terrorist organisation that furthered before the Balkan Wars Bulgaria's claims to Macedonia.

During the Second World War, following the occupation of Greece by the Axis, Greek Macedonia was divided in three zones. The Bulgars occupied an eastern zone, the Germans a central, including Thessaloniki, and the Italians a western zone. The Bulgarian authorities deported from their zone of occupation a portion of the Greek population and encouraged the settlement of Bulgars with a view to altering the ethnological composition of the population. At the same time, they used various material inducements and spread the impression that Greek Macedonia had come under Bulgarian control to lure a few thousand Slavonic-speaking Greeks of central and west Macedonia away from their attachment to Greece. As a result, in 1944 all those Slavonic speakers who had compromised themselves as Bulgarian sympathizers had to make for the new political entity that appeared after the end of the Second World War, the new communist republic in the south of Yugoslavia: a number of Slavonic speakers from Macedonia also took refuge there; thus marking themselves otf from the Slavonic speakers who demonstrated their Greek national consciousness by remaining behind.

A product of opportunism, created out of an amalgam of fascist, nationalistic and communist elements, the leadership of this newly-formed republic on Greece's northern border committed itself to fashioning a nation out of the region's disparate linguistic and religious elements: the pro-Bulgarian Slavonic speakers of Greek Macedonia and Southern Serbia, Albanian-speaking Muslims, Greek- and Vlach-speaking Christians, and also Gypsies. However, by adopting a name which historically belongs uniquely to Greek Macedonia, the leaders of the communist federal state of Yugoslavia were clearly laying claim to Greek territory.

The newly-formed communist state inaugurated a new period in the history of the Macedonian question during which it has attempted to appropriate the name Macedonia and falsify history through a constant of propaganda, has claimed various historical symbols as its own and has also passed off as Macedonian a language fabricated in the twentieth century thereby misleading international public opinion. The problem has subsequently assumed dramatic proportions as, following the break-up of Yugoslavia, the republic has changed its status from that of a prmince of a federal state to one of a sovereign state which seeks to be called Macedonia and claims to embrace the Macedonian nation within its borders.

Greek Macedonia, an organic part of Hellenism since antiquity, is politically, economically and culturally an integral part of Greece. The linguistic and other cultural survivals in the region are elements of a rich and dynamic heritage -the heritage of the Greek nation, one of the oldest cultural communities in this south-eastern corner of Europe.

by J.S. Koliopoulos
Professor of Modern History

[pankration]

Great article. I haven't seen this one before. Explains a lot.