Greek minority in FYROM

[Ptolemaios]

Ethnic Greeks currently form a small minority in FYROM. They are a remnant of the formerly much larger indigenous Greek community of that part of the wider region of Macedonia that fell within the borders of the Kingdom of Serbia after the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

Greeks are mainly settled in historical region of Pelagonia and in cities of Bitola (Monastiri) and Gevgelija (Gevgeli). There have been widely divergent figures and estimates about their number, a fact that is partly due to the statistical treatment of Aromanian (Vlach) population groups, who were historically often identified with the Greeks and are still counted as Greek by Greek sources today. On that basis, the number of Greeks including Vlachs has been estimated to as high as 250,000 in 1994.[ Official census figures from the most recent census (2002) cite only c.400 Greeks and c.10,000 Vlachs.Higher figures were found in earlier census data. In a 1941 census, conducted by the German occupation authorities of what was then occupied Yugoslavia, there were about 100,000 Greeks (including Vlachs) counted among a total population of c.800,000, 12 per cent of the population. After the war, in a 1951 census conducted by the Yugoslav authorities, that figure was put at 158,000.

There is some educational activity among minority members, however the establishment of a Greek church has met stiff opposition from the majority Slavic population who have destroyed two such buildings under construction.


Grecomans

“Grecomans” was used by the Bulgarians as a derogatory term to define the Greek Slavophones, i.e. those who remained firm to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and to Hellenism.
It is interesting to note that in 1883, despite the growth of the Bulgarian national and ecclessiastical movement, the situation in terms of ecclesiastical affiliation in the northern “border” bishoprics of the contested central zone presented the following picture Bishopric of Ohrid and Prespa, patriarchist families 3030, exarchist 6003, Bishopric of Pelagonia (Monastir), patriarchist 6459, exarchist 4988, Bishopric of Moglena (Florina), patriarchist 2433, exarchist 699.
The majority of these patriarchists were Vlachophone and Slavophone “Grecomans”.


Grecomaniac or Grecophile

The above words are terms that used from the ultra-nationalist in order to determine the Greek Slavphones during the Greek Struggle in the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century.
These terms came from Bulgarian or Serbian nationlist elements.Today the FYROMian ultra-natiolists diaspora centers REPLACE these odds and using these terms in order to insult these Greeks.
For the sake of the thread let us accept that the old Bulgarians, those who in current Makedonoski theory “considered” themselves Bulgarians and who, in fact, lived in Macedonia, as a minority community, however, as is apparent from the Ottoman statistics for 1905, have erroneously been taken as constituting a segment of the “Macedonian” nation.
As we have said, however, these people were Bulgarians:they never (at that time) called themselves “Macedonians”, they fought as comitadjis in the ranks of the Bulgarian Committee and later, in 1924, taking advantage of the Kafantaris-Molov agreement on the “voluntary exchange of populations”, they left for Bulgaria.
None of them moved to what was then the district of Skopje –which, moreover, was at that time certainly not called “Macedonia”: it was merely “Vardarska Banovina” (Directorate of the Axios), an administrative district of the then Kingdom of Serbia. Serbia consequently delivered a protest to the Greek government for having exchanged these people for Greeks living in Bulgaria when, according to Serbia, they were in fact Serbs, (not, of course, “Macedonians”). All the “Bulgarophones”, as they were called at that time, who remained in Greece were old Patriarchists (adherents of the Ecumenical Patriarchate) from the time of the Bulgarian Schism, veterans of the Macedonian Struggle.
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