Friday, September 19, 2008

Greek Census in 1921 shows 500,000 Macedonians





Prilep's Dragan Mitreski, owns an old Austrian Atlas who shows that in 1921, 500,000 citizens, 8.8% of the population in Greece declared themselves as Macedonians.
This is just another document from the thousands of documents about the Macedonians in Greece.
- This document is very important, because our southern neighbors continue their claim they have no Macedonian minority. I found this document by accident. This is a "heavy"document because it is done by a famous historian and author, as well as by an independent country, Austria. From the documents, in 1921, the Yugoslavian census listed 600,000 Macedonians, and this is exlusive, the Austrians also clearly distinguish the Macedonians in Bulgaria, however, their number was not given. For Bulgaria, because of the large number of Macedonians in Pirin Macedonia (what is now Bulgaria), the Austrians put 4 million "Bulgarians and Macedonians". Very interesting is the flag of Albania, they had no two headed eagle, rather a red and black flag with a white star", says Mitreski.
Mitreski is not selling the book, he simply wanted to make the documents in it available to the Government for free, in their absurd negotiations with Greece.
Mitreski says he found the book 15 years ago, when an older individual burned old books in Prilep's center. - There were Old Church books too. I have always been fascinated with old books, and made my hobby to gather old books. So i picked up several books from the old man, to save them from burning. One of those books was this great Atlas where all of the Balkan is documented.
The documentation i.e. the Austrian Atlas was published several months after the Greek Census from December 19th, 1920. The results of this census were never publicly revealed by Greece, even though it was a census of great importance because for the first time was done on the so called "new territories".
Questions included in the Census were:"What is your mother tongue?", "What language do you speak at home?", "If your language is not Greek, do you understand Greek?"
Greece publicly released census information only for Greek territory before 1913, the actual Greece. All data for the newly occupied territories, including Aegean Macedonia, was hidden and never released. The Greek Government has refused to do another census since 1921.

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