 Macedonia: Its Races And Their Future
Here is one document from which all of you Greek people can learn about true history of Macedonia. I see you asked for many answers from the Macedonians on this forum. Well.... here you can find answer to any of your questions about the history of Macedonia.
Do you think that Europe and the world do not know this history? I would say yes. That's why 120 countries recognise Macedonia. This document is not propaganda but the truth about Macedonia and the neighbour's propagandas. That's why we say that we are proud to say that we are Macedonians and we are going to die like Macedonians. We stood for more centuries and nobody defeated us. No body can take the Macedonian from us.
You my friends are victims of your own Greek propaganda and you were teached in wrong way. A dont blame you, but the Greek policy over the past 100 years.
I hope that i wont be banned and i would have time to discuss with you again here. Here is the book. Please read it carefully: MACEDONIA: ITS RACES AND THEIR FUTURE
.
by H. N. Brailsford (Methuen & Co., London, 1906)
Title Page
Photographs Maps
This book is published in London 1906 by H. N. Brailsford. If you read this external European source, maybe you will understand the Macedonian history. Here are some quotes:
IV. The races of Macedonia Quote: |
The legend that Alexander the Great was a Greek goes out by one road, and the rival myth that Alexander was a Bulgarian comes in by the other. The Mass, which was droned unpunctually in ancient Greek, is now droned (punctually) in ancient Slav. But beneath the rather comic aspects of this incident the fact remains that the village was now obtaining education in its own tongue, and opening its doors to civilising influences which came to it in a form which it could assimilate and make its own. The bribe of 5 did but hasten an inevitable process. I have heard a witty French consul declare that with a fund of a million francs he would undertake to make all Macedonia French. He would preach that the Macedonians are the descendants of the French crusaders who conquered Salonica in the twelfth century, and the francs would do the rest. But after all, the Greeks dispose of ample funds, and yet the Greeks have lost Macedonia.
| http://www.kroraina.com/knigi/en/hb/hb_4_10.html
11. National Propagandas
Reasons for Servian Failure Weakness of Greek Claims Quote:
Weakness of Greek Claims
The Servians have a respectable historical and ethnographical claim to be reckoned a Macedonian race, however weak their political position may be. With the Greeks matters are reversed. The legend that Macedonia is a Greek province like Crete and Cyprus, a true limb of Hellas Irredempta, is firmly planted in the European, and especially in the English, mind. Lord Salisbury advanced this curious argument in the crudest form against the Treaty of San Stefano. It keeps its hold in the West no doubt because the Greeks are well known through their commercial colonies and their romantic history, while the Bulgarians are a purely local race which has no roots beyond the East. And yet it is a sheer fiction and a trifling with words. The Greeks are not a Macedonian race, though they have a powerful Church and a considerable party in Macedonia. If one takes the linguistic test there are practically no villages in European Turkey whose mother-tongue is Greek, save along the coasts of the Aegean and the Black Sea, in the peninsulas of Chalcidice, and the Thracian Chersonnese, and in the extreme south of Macedonia near the Thessalian frontier. [3] They have a large population in Salonica and Constantinople, but Salonica is nevertheless predominantly a Jewish town, while Constantinople is hopelessly cosmopolitan. Historically their claims are no better. The Byzantine Empire had no footing in the interior of Macedonia after it had ceased to be Roman and international, and had become patriotic and Greek. The Greek claim rests mainly upon this, that there is still a large faction of the Macedonian population which, either from fear, from superstition, or from preference, remains within the "Greek" Orthodox (i.e., the Patriarchist) Church. These people are Vlachs, Albanians, Serbs, or other Slavs of uncertain origin, but they are no more Greeks than the Orthodox Russians are. But the growth of Greek influence is none the less a curious study. It depended almost entirely upon the Church, and it must have been immeasurably stronger in the Balkan peninsula after the coming of the Turks than it ever was before. It embraced not merely Macedonia, but Roumania, Bulgaria, and even Servia as well. The few Slavs in the interior who were educated at all were taught to regard themselves as Greeks, and the very tradition of their origin was in danger of dying out. Two fatal errors alone wrecked what was nothing less than a scheme for Hellenising the Balkan peninsula. The women were not educated, and for all the Greek schools might do every Slav child learned his own despised tongue at his mother's knee. The peasants also were neglected. The Greeks regarded them with the unmeasured and stupid contempt which a quick town-bred people instinctively feels for a race of cultivators. They were barbarians, beasts of burden, men only "in the catalogue." The Greeks denied the rights of men to the Slav peasants and refused to accept them as brethren. The consequence was that the peasants never quite lost their sense of separation, and a certain dim consciousness of nationality remained, rooted in injuries and hatred. The nemesis came at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Greeks, rising at last to the height of their national idea, struck their great blow for freedom. The flag of Greek independence was first unfurled, not in Greece, but in Roumania, which had long been ruled by Greek Governors appointed by the Turks, and the Greek army found itself to its amazement confronted not merely by Turkish hordes, but by native Wallachian bands inspired by a national patriotism of their own.
There is no region of the earth where the national idea has wrought such havoc or rioted in such wantonness of power as in Macedonia. It poisons and secularises religion. It sanctions murder, excuses violence, and leaves more kindliness between man and beast than between the adherents of rival races. In its name peoples have done great deeds which liberty should have inspired, and perpetrated oppressions of an iniquity so colossal that only an idea could have prompted them. The miseries of ten centuries have been its work, and the face of the Balkans to-day, furrowed with hatreds, callous from long cruelty, dull with perpetual suffering, is its image and memorial. One turns from a survey of these races and their rivalries, asking what future of peace and common work there can be while the curse of this national idea still teaches men that the vital fact in their lives is the tradition, or the memory, or the habit of speech which divides them from one another.
| http://www.kroraina.com/knigi/en/hb/hb_4_11.html
VII. The Greeks
9. Note. Greek Statistics Quote:
A favourite line of argument with Greeks is based upon a comparison of their school-statistics with those of the Bulgarians. This is really a very elaborate sophistication which requires some space to unravel. They claim that in what they are pleased to call "Macedonia" there are 998 "Greek" schools attended by 59,600 pupils, as against 561 Bulgarian schools attended by 18,300 pupils. These figures may or may not be accurate, but the following considerations rob them of any importance.
(1) The definition of "Macedonia" is quite arbitrary. The Greeks mean by the term the two vilayets of Salonica and Monastir. This is at once too much and too little. It includes the purely Albanian districts of Elbasan and Koritza, where the Christians, although they attend "Greek" Orthodox schools, are all Albanians. It excludes the vilayet of Uskub, obviously because it would be hard to find in it a single native Greek family. It is, with the exception of the Albanian, and Servian districts of the west, entirely Bulgarian.
(2) Even in the two selected vilayets the population of the "Greek" villages of the central districts is either Slav or Vlach; and even children who have attended a "Greek" school frequently leave it with no real knowledge of the language.
(3) The fact that a Slav village possesses only a "Greek" school does not even prove that its sympathies are Greek. Smerdesh, for example, which is ardently Bulgarian in politics, is still almost wholly "Greek" in culture. The Greeks have every historical advantage, and it is safer for a prudent village to profess itself patriarchist. If it becomes Exarchist it at once exposes itself to the suspicion if not to the persecution of the Turkish authorities.
(4) The Greeks are the wealthy town population, and in addition they possess the accumulated wealth of the monasteries, so that wherever a village will accept a "Greek" school they have the means to plant one. The Bulgarians, on the other hand, are a rude peasant people, with less need of education, less desire for it, and less wealth with which to procure it. A large proportion of their villages are still without any school worthy of the name, and I have known villages where not a single inhabitant could read or write. But the most potent factor in delaying the development of the Bulgarian schools is the hostility of the Turks, from which the Greeks do not suffer.
| http://www.kroraina.com/knigi/en/hb/hb_7_9.html
VII. The Greeks
2. Grounds of Greek Claim to Macedonia Quote: |
Happily for the Greeks their Church reckons only one Borgia among its Bishops. The man has a quick wit, a restless will, a nervous, well-knit body which have all gone to the making of an exceptional temperament. But about his attitude there was nothing at all unusual. The Greeks of Macedonia are before all else legitimists. The Bulgarian will assert that in point of fact the Macedonians are Slavs. The Greek takes higher ground. His mind moves among abstractions. He talks not of Greeks, but of Hellenism, not of fact, but of right. That Hellenism has a right to Macedonia is his thesis, and he is never at a loss for an argument. He begins of course with Alexander. It does not trouble him that in classical times the Greeks possessed only a few isolated colonies on the Macedonian coast. He waves aside the objection that for the ancients, Alexander and his Macedonians were no better than barbarians. Aristotle won the country for Hellenism when he gave lessons to Philip's son, and all Macedonia is in consequence a sort of legacy bequeathed by the Stoa to King George. Object that even the Macedonians vanished, and the Greek changes his ground. Hellenism, which had meant Athenian culture, now stands for the Byzantine Empire. But in the interval between Aristotle and Constantine Macedonia was more or less Romanised. In the dark ages it was ruled by Servian krals, by Bulgarian tsars, and even by Frankish kings, but still its legitimate overlord was Byzantium, and Byzantium had become Greek. One may answer that the Byzantine Empire has after all gone under, and that it had lost Macedonia to the Slavs long before it was driven from Constantinople. But once again the old elastic abstraction re-appears. "Hellenism" claims these peoples because they were civilised by the "Greek Orthodox" Church.
| Quote: |
The Slavonic Churches had disappeared from Macedonia, and everywhere the Greek Bishops, as intolerant as they were corrupt "Blind mouths that scarce themselves knew how to hold a sheephook" crushed out the national consciousness, the language, and the intellectual life of their Slav flocks. It is as a result of this process that the Eastern Church is a Greek Church. The sanctions of Hellenism so far as they rest on the Church, are the wealth of the Phanariots and the venality of the Turks. But it is after all a barren title. The Greeks had their chance. For three centuries they monopolised the culture of the Near East. The very names of Slav and Bulgarian persisted only as terms of abuse. Slav letters were forgotten, and even the Slav libraries in the old monasteries were burned by the Greek Bishops. But while they alone had learning, riches, or influence, they never rose to the height of their position. Had they played their part as elder brothers in civilisation towards their Slav parishioners, under the common oppression, the Balkans would have been Greek to-day. Their thoughts were all of the rights they had bought, and the profits they might make. They acknowledged no duties, and Macedonia in consequence was never Hellenised.
| Here is the whole document: http://www.kroraina.com/knigi/en/hb/index.html  |
03-23-2008, 02:57 AM
Linear Mode
