X-Vmsmail-To: HELLAS
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.hellas
Date:         Sat, 21 Nov 1992 22:42:53 -0700
Reply-To:     DIONYSHS@PHYAST.LA.ASU.EDU
From:         DIONYSHS@PHYAST.LA.ASU.EDU
Subject:      Makedonia, 2.
Comments: To: hellas@brownvm.brown.edu

  The term Macedonian is an ethnic name for one of the major groups
that comprised the early Greek people: The Macedonians were more
related to the Doreans than the Ionians. The region they initially
occupied corresponds to the modern Greek province of Macedonia.
Their major difference from the other Greeks was that they were
ruled by a king, a form of government that, by classical times, was
obsolete in the rest of Greece.
     They greatly expanded their dominions under the rule of Philip
II. Philip belonged to the royal house of the Argeiades (the name
Argos is also found in Thessaly and the Pelloponese) and he
managed, through brilliant warfare and statesmanship, to impose
Macedonia as the leading Greek power ,and also to take over the non-Greek
people that lived in modern Albania, Bulgaria and southern
Yugoslavia (I use the modern geographical designations). Philip's
greatest achievement and legacy was his son, Alexander the Great,
who spread the Greek language over all Asia. His royal emblem was
the 16-ray Sun of Vergina (The tomb of Philip has been excavated
in the modern town of Vergina -ancient Aiges- by the late professor
Manolis Andronikos, of the Macedonian University in Salonica).
     Macedonia survived under Roman rule, to which it fell in 168
B.C. following the fatal battle of Pydna. It came back into
prominence in the Eastern Roman Empire, which soon became the
medieval Greek Byzantine Empire. Macedonia was one of the richest
and most prominent prefectures of Byzantium. It supplied
Constantinople (today Istanbul) with merchandise, grain, and human
resources. Its capital, Salonica (Thessaloniki in Greek) was a
convenient center for the administration of the rest of Greece, the
Aegean islands, and  the balkan frontiers of Byzantium. As a result
Thessaloniki, and cities as Kastoria, Edessa, and Naoussa, were
always a target for  any new peoples adventuring in the area. Slavs,
Hungarians, Arabs and Bulgarians repeatedly attacked the area. The
Bulgarians were crushed and reduced to a vassal state around 1018-
20 by the Emperor Basil II, hence called the slayer-of-Bulgarians.
     The byzantine prefecture of Macedonia was far greater, in
spatial extent, than the old Macedonian kingdom of so long ago.
When the byzantines of that era referred to Macedonia, they often
included modern Albania, parts of Yugoslavia, and the region of
Thrace in Greece. For example, the emperor Basil II whom I
mentioned above, belonged to the Macedonian dynasty which had
actually originated in Thrace.
     When the Ottoman Turks came into prominence after the 12th
century A.D., one of their major successes that helped them to
crush the Byzantium was the take-over of Macedonia, which turned
into an Ottoman state. After the  fall of Constantinople and the
establishment of the Ottoman empire, the byzantine prefecture of
Macedonia became Ottoman prefectures, vilayets, as called in
turkish: The vilayets of Thessaloniki and Monastir. In Ottoman
times the Greek, Christian orthodox population reduced its numbers,
while the Bulgarians/Slavs increased theirs (and the Turks of
course). However, the Greek population was always the prominent one
(I'll soon quote some census reports) and they kept their Greek
identity with a passion. Greek rebels ,such as the famous
Nikotsaras and the priest (whom the Turks captured and killed on
the cross in 1807) papa-Thymios Vlahavas, kept the Ottoman army
busy and always on alert. The Greek War of Independence of 1821
actually started among the Greeks of southern Bulgaria and
Macedonia. The uprising was crushed by the superior Ottoman forces.
The legendary, in Greek history, captain Georgakis Olympios, a
Macedonian, fought then a retreat and surrounded by the Turks at
the monastery of Soutsos, blew himself up rather than surrender. As
the uprising was crushed by the Turks, the women of Naoussa drowned
themselves and their children in the local waterfalls and did not
surrender...
     At the turn of the century, the Bulgarians formed a Committee
that intended to drive all Greeks into acknowledging Bulgarian
sovereignty. Then, from 1903-4 to 1908, a covert war broke out
between Greece and Bulgaria in Macedonia, which was still under
Ottoman rule. Many of the Greeks that fought in this time were not
speaking Greek as their native language, but identified themselves
as Greeks nonetheless. As an example I can quote two guerilla
leaders, captain Mitro-Kottas, and captain Brammos, who was a house
builder in his civil life and who died fighting an Ottoman cavalry
unit that trapped him. They both conferred in Slavic.
     The official Ottoman census of 1904, by Hilmi-Pasha, gives us
the following figures:

                                  Greeks      Bulgarians
                      _____________________________________
 Vilayet of Thessaloniki         373,227        207,317
 Vilayet of Monastir             261,283        178,412
                    _______________________________________
           total figures:        634,510        385,729

     The vilayet of Macedonia stretched from Veroia and Edessa to
the west, to Kavala to the east and Stromnitsa and Gorna to the
north. The vilayet of Monastir, on the west side of the vilayet of
Thessaloniki, stretched to Kastoria and Grevena. After the Balkan
wars almost all the vilayet of Thessaloniki and the southern half
of the vilayet of Monastir formed the redeemed Greek province of
Macedonia. I quote the official figures for the vilayet of
Thessaloniki from the Bucharest treaty that ended the Balkan wars:

     The vilayet of Thessaloniki was split as follows:
to     Greece:   34,603 km^2, or 51.57%
to Yugoslavia:   25,714 km^2, or 38.32%
to   Bulgaria:    6,789 km^2, or 10.11%

     By a curious coincidence, the Greek province of Macedonia was
almost identical in spatial extent to the ancient Greek Macedonian
kingdom.
     After the destruction of Smyrna in 1922 and the defeat of the
Greeks by the Turks, a Greek-Turkish exchange of populations
followed. The census report of the League of Nations (the U.N
precursor) in 1926 gives the following figures for the total
population in Macedonia:

                 Greeks:     1,341,000    88.8%
                Moslems:         2,000     0.1%
             Bulgarians:        77,000     5.1%
 others (mostly Jewish):        91,000     6.0%
                     ______________________
           total             1,511,000

     During the Nazi occupation of Greece (1941-44) Macedonia was
actually under Bulgarian rule. The Bulgarians tried again what they
had tried in 1904-8. When the Germans left, the Bulgarian
population emigrated to Bulgaria. The Jews that survived the nazis,
and who lived in Thessaloniki, emigrated to Israel, mostly to
Haifa. There the term "Salonikios", which means in Greek the person
who comes from Thessaloniki, is very well known.

     The Russians, the Balkan Slavs and the Bulgarians, from their
early medieval times wanted an exit to the Aegean. Even in as late
as 1915, the Foreign Office and the British Administration had the
opinion that Czarist Russia ought to rightfully seize
Constantinople (e.g. see 'A peace to end all peace', by David
Fromkin).
     As early as 1922-23 the communist Comintern used the term
"Independent Macedonia", which was the line of the Bulgarian
communist leaders, Kolarov and Georgi Dimitrov. The Greek Communist
Party (KKE) had accepted this line: as a result, many  Greek
communists resigned from the Party. One of the most eminent of them
was the Historian Giannis Kordatos, at the time editor-in-chief of
the KKE newspaper 'Rizospastis'.
     After 1935 the KKE changed its official line calling for "just
treatment of all minorities". In Yugoslavia, Marshall Tito now took
up the dream of a Yugoslavia reaching the Aegean. He supported the
KKE army in its savage attempt to rule Greece. The Greek civil war
lasted until 1949, and Tito supplied fighting men, refuge,
ordnance, and commissars for political direction, to the KKE army
almost to the end. It was Tito who merged regions of the former
Ottoman vilayets of Thessaloniki, Monastir, and Skopje into a
Yugoslav Republic ruled by Skopje and called "Macedonia". He
cultivated a "Macedonian" language using Serbian,Greek, Bulgarian
elements and the local idioms and he employed Party historians to
propagandize on the "Macedonian" history.
     The idea was to play on the two current usages of the term
"Macedonia", namely the geographical region and its associated
adjective macedonian which signifies a geographical determination,
and the historical Macedonia and the Greek people that have born
the name through the millennia. The latter is clearly an ethnically
descriptive usage and evidently differs from the first. Today's
state of Skopje deliberately continues the confusion, in an attempt
to create an ethnic identity by usurping the Greek history. Skopje
is actually a multi-ethnic state, with the Moslem Albanians
comprising a 20% of the population, and with Greeks, Vlachs, and
Bulgarian minorities living in with the ruling Slavic majority. It
is this majority which is carried away by nationalism, calling
their state "Macedonia", capitalizing on the Greek history and
envisaging (with the publication of written material and maps) the
"Major Macedonia" reaching the Aegean and, of course, engulfing the
Greek province of Macedonia.



Dionyssios Mintjopoulos
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ, 85287/1504
e-mail: DIONYSHS@PHYAST.LA.ASU.edu
tel: (602)350-9179
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU