Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia 01
Monday, 19. May 2008, 01:48:53
Karakasidou, Anastasia, Politicizing Culture: Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia , Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 11:1 (1993:May) p.l
Politicizing Culture: Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia
Anastasia Karakasidou
Abstract
Nation-building directly affects ethnic identity as it transforms the peoples of a region into the people of a nation-state. Since the incorporation of Macedonia into the expanding Greek state in 1913, Greek authorities have attempted to wrest control of enculturation away from the private domain of the family and to place it under the control of state institutions, hi the process, Slavic speakers of the area have found themselves forbidden to use their Slavic language or to engage in songs, dances, and other public cultural activities. Some have resisted, protesting that such restrictions destroy their distinct local culture. This paper investigates such charges, examining Slavo-Macedonian claims to a distinct ethnic heritage and minority status, as well as reactions and counter-claims by Greek authorities to such assertions. I argue that the politicization of culture in Greek Macedonia has directly contributed to the denial of ethnic identity among Slavic speaking inhabitants there.
A case study narrative
In July 1991 while en route to Florina, conducting research on the region's Slavic speakers, my husband and I made a detour in the highlands above Edessa.
The road we followed eventually opened onto a narrow plain covered with fruit trees where people were busy loading boxes of ripening fruit onto tractors and donkey-back.
As we rounded a bend and entered a village, the torrential thunderstorm threatening all day suddenly broke, and with visibility cut to a few meters we decided that it would be best to stop until the downpour subsided. Unable to find the village coffee-shop, we pulled up to a grocery in the village square and asked if we might sit for a few minutes.
We seated ourselves at a table under the porch eaves to watch the rain, hoping to strike up a conversation with some local villagers.
Two young men were seated next to me, speaking in a language I could not understand.
They greeted me in Greek, and I asked what language they were speaking. " 'Macedonian,'2 the language of Al¬exander the Great," they replied to my surprise, for in the region of Central Greek Macedonia where I have been conducting research for several years all Slavic dialects spoken there in the past and the present are referred to as "Bulgarian."
As my husband went for a round of drinks, I began to talk amicably about the village with a sizable group of men who slowly filed over to the shop.
Although our conversation was conducted in Greek, they would break into Slavo-Macedonian at moments to argue a particular point among themselves before one of them presented me with the agreed version of the facts in Greek.
Like all villages in the area, theirs had its name changed to its current Greek form in 1936 under the Metaxas dictatorship. A small church in the village used to bear an inscription in "Slavic,"3 but it was later plastered over. When asked, they told me that village men first learned Greek during their military service after 1912. Rather than being sent to the "Serbian Front" during World War I, recruits from this area were stationed in the Larissa area of Central Greece. There they were "surprised" to find young children speaking Greek. They themselves were treated poorly, and often referred to as "Bul¬garian-speaking" Greek citizens, a term at which they took offense. "We are not Bulgarian speakers," they explained. "We have difficulty communicating with the 'Serbs' who come down to work our fruit harvest. We speak the same language as they do in Gevgeli or on the Bulgarian border, but we don't understand the language used inside Bulgaria or Serbia."
The women of the village, it was said, were the last to learn Greek, and some old people now dead never learned it at all. Under the Metaxas regime all villagers were forced to attend night school to study Greek. Anyone "caught" speaking Slavo-Macedonian was forced to drink ретоглоАабо (castor oil) and some were even tortured. Youths who used Slavo-Macedonian at school were thrashed. In the evenings, an individual was assigned to make rounds of the village to listen for people speaking Slavo-Macedonian at home.
Today, the Slavo-Macedonian language is slowly disappearing from the village. The youths feel it is "out of fashion" and are em¬barrassed to speak it. Most people are still uncomfortable talking about their native Slavo-Macedonian tongue. "We don't want any more trou¬ble," some explained. Whenever they find old documents or materials written in Cyrillic script they simply destroy them.
As the rain stopped, some of the men, particularly the later arrivals, began to voice suspicions about my presence. Visibly fright¬ened and worried, they began to ask repeatedly who I was and what I was doing there. Finding ourselves well into the night, my husband and I decided it best to take our leave. But one local young man, eager to discuss the topic with us more, urged us to stay. "You can stay at my place," he offered. "I'll sleep downstairs, you sleep upstairs. I'll give you my carbine and no one will bother you."
An overview
Culture is the fundamental rubric that encompassess the social actions and institutions of human society, as well as society's ideological rules, values, conceptions, and perceptions. Studies of national politics, economy, society, religion, ideology, and the like are rooted in as¬sumptions about the cultural basis of "a people." The cultural basis is itself a product of national state formation processes, which inher¬ently amalgamate the peoples inhabiting a particular region into the people of the nation-state. Often this process is portrayed as construc¬tive, glorious, and liberating, although in reality it often may be de¬structive, oppressive, and harsh.
Amalgamation does not only entail the political and economic incorporation of diverse cultural groups into an expanding nation-state; it also transforms the 'identities" of those people, both as they conceive of themselves and as they are perceived by others. Viewed from above, nation-building "elevates" cultural and ethnic identities from a local and particular context, attempting to replace them with a newly created and propagated national consciousness. Seen from below, from the level of everyday life and social interaction, however, it uproots families, destroying existing patterns of local life, language, and culture.
The case of Macedonia
With the wave of media sensationalism following the "collapse of communism" in Eastern Europe, we have seen the dramatic con¬sequences that can result when this process fails. The current conflicts in the former Yugoslavia may be just a forerunner of an entire era of ethnic strife as competitive economies heighten tensions between ethnic and social groups. Yet rarely do we stop to examine the equally tumultuous, albeit less visible, effects of successful campaigns for na¬tional integration. Greek nation-building in Macedonia is one such case —one that provides considerable insight into the processes of nation formation and their impact on incorporated ethnic groups.
The integration of Macedonia into the expanding Greek state in the second decade of this century and the subsequent resettlement there of nearly 500,000 Greek refugees from Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace in the 1920s were accomplished by constructing a national culture of coexistence among the various ethnic groups that inhabited or resettled the region.4 The nation-state building process there has been enormously successful. Most of the inhabitants today, regardless of their ethnic background and how they or their ancestors might have defined themselves one hundred or even fifty years ago, conceive of themselves now as nothing less than Greek.5
Yet in redefining ethnicity as nationality, the Greek state created the contradictions that form the basis of the minority problem in Northern Greece today. The current unrest and protest among Slavo-Macedonians6 in Western Greek Macedonia (most notably around the town of Fiorina in the far northwest of modern Greece, from where the data for this paper were collected) can be seen as a reaction to these pressures and influences.7 While assimilation and amalgamation in Central Greek Macedonia, where the process had its impetus a generation earlier, is now essentially complete, in the Fiorina region some local communities continue to claim and display ethnic (i.e. Slavo-Macedonian) consciousness despite their national Greek identity.8
What most seek is simply recognition of their status as an ethnic minority within the greater nation-state, and thus the right to gain equitable access to jobs, to practice their own Orthodox religion, to speak their own language, and to educate their children in the folklore and stories of their ancestors. These claims, as well as how they are perceived and reacted to by the Greek authorities and various political, religious, media, and academic figures, reveal one continuing theme: nation-building processes tend to politicize culture, redefining the once largely personal social issues of ethnic identity, language, religion, and ethnic ascription into the realm of national concerns.
Contesting culture, transforming identity: culture, state-formation and cultural revolution
Culture has both material and ideational aspects. It consists of the particular material basis for the production and reproduction of a people's life and livelihood, the organizational forms that a people construct to regulate social interaction, and the ideas, values, or ideal set of "rules" that explain, interpret, and guide that people's behavior. The processes of state-formation that mold and create a "nation" are also processes of "cultural revolution." Such processes reconstruct social relations and reshape classifications, identities, and loyalties,
cementing them in [the nation's] routines, broadcasting (claimed) col¬lective representations and sanctifying them in ritual. . . . [DJominant images of national identity and tradition . . . are closely bound up with both the culture of the ruling classes and the (claimed) history of the state forms through which their power is organized. (Corrigan and Saver 1985: 191-192).
As regions and populations become incorporated into the expansionist state, local culture is transformed, destroyed, and reproduced in a new form: national identity and national culture. Under this new regime, what was formerly ethnicity and local culture becomes "re¬gional variation" within the "illusory community" of the homogeneous nation-state.9
The nation epitomizes the fictive community in which we are all citizens. . . . To define "us" in national terms . . . has consequences. Such clas¬sifications are means for a project of social integration which is also, inseparably, an active disintegration of other focuses [sic] of identity and conceptions of subjectivity. They provide a basis for construction and organization of collective memory —the writing of history, the manu¬facture of "tradition" —which is inseparably an active organization of forgetting. (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 195)
The oppositions that arise under such pressures are contests not only for personal, cultural, or social identity, but also for control over the means of producing and reproducing that identity. Nationalism appropriates ethnic identity, wresting control over economy from the family and the locale as well as control over the powerful symbols of iconic imagery. This process is accomplished through the agencies of education, religion, the military, the police, and bureaucratic admin¬istration and regulation. Social structure, organization, and identity in local communities are destroyed and transformed; they are replaced by new structures, organizations, images, and identities manufactured and propagated by the regulatory agents of the new "national" ruling classes. To understand how this transformative process takes place requires a close and critical examination of changes in the encultur¬ation processes.
The contest for private and public spheres: family and state in local society
While culture (learned behavior and organization transmitted across generations) and identity (the form through which historical experience is comprehended) are derived from a broad social matrix and network of interaction, the family or domestic household is the primary locus of the enculturation process. This locus of marriage and child-rearing provides the most intimate context for the produc¬tion, transmission, and reproduction of culture and identity. Control over enculturation was a principal arena of conflict in the process of building national identity in Greek Macedonia.
As the Greek state and the Greek Orthodox Ghurch, once a pseudo-state itself under the Ottoman Empire, wrested control of enculturation from the domain of the family and placed it under the control of the localized institutions of the Greek state (i.e., schools, churches, marketplaces, the military, etc.), the "public" realm was domesticated as the "private" realm became nationalized. The au¬thority of the state forcefully intervened in the "private" domain of the family, taking over responsibilities of enculturation that had pre¬viously been largely domestic. In doing so, the Greek state, the em¬bodiment of the Greek nation, made the family both a forum for nationalistic aspirations and a tool for those aspirations. The intimacies of enculturation were lifted out of the "private" domain and trans¬formed into fundamental national issues. As the reproduction of cul¬ture became a political issue (indeed, a highly charged one in the wake of the Balkan Wars) and as it was removed from its "private" locus of the family and placed in a "public" realm of national society, the public/private dichotomy lost much of its force. The result was that as the populations of Greek Macedonia homogenized, the ethnic iden-tity of the peoples there was slowly negated —transformed into a broader, more inclusive national identity and consciousness.
The ramifications of this process were profound. Slavo-Macedonians found themselves no longer permitted to speak the language that they had learned at home as children— the language of their mothers and grandmothers. Fines were often imposed on adults who did so in the marketplace; children were physically punished at school if they spoke any language other than Greek. Their religious cere¬monies and rites could no longer be observed in their native language, and the music, dance, and folklore of their ancestors were deemed "subversive" and were outlawed.
Appropriating ethnic identity in Macedonia: academic legitimization, Greek politicians, and propaganda
For many years the central theoretical — and methodological — problem in the controversy over Slavo-Macedonian ethnicity/nation¬ality has been to determine what constitutes ethnicity and what con¬stitutes a nation. Greek scholars have maintained that the determining characteristic of the Greek nation during the Ottoman period was Orthodox religion, along with language and a common national con¬science. These scholars argue that since language underwrites cultural identity and since the inhabitants of Greece (and here they include Macedonia) all spoke Greek, they shared both a common cultural tradition and a common cultural memory of the "glorious history of the ancestors." In this manner they composed a nation. At the head of this nation, according to Martis (1984), was the Ecumenical Patri¬arch of Constantinople, whose duty it was to protect the culture and religion of the Orthodox, providing them with the possibility of pre¬serving their national conscience.1() Such arguments provide the Greek nation with a "glorious past" stretching without interruption from the Classical era through Hellenistic and Byzantine times and up to the 19th century; they claim that this nation consisted ol one unchanging Hellenic group with a continuous, uninterrupted ethnic history and civilization.11
The predominant view of such Greek nationalist intellectuals is presented par excellence in the work of Stilpon Kyriakidis, a prominent Greek folklorist in the first half of the century.12 In his 1946 thesis, published in English as The Northern Ethnological Boundaries of Hellenism (1955), he argues that while people do tend to become mixed under a common oppressor, the "nation" (of the Greeks) continued to exist through the centuries of Turkish rule.13 He goes back to Herodotus and adopts the four characteristics that the ancient historian believed made the "Hellenes" an ethnos (nation): common blood (i.e., race), language, temples and sacrifices (i.e., religion), and habits (i.e., cus¬toms). Kyriakidis maintains that although some of these may fade or be forgotten, common habits and a common national consciousness are the decisive factors. He puts it rather bluntly: 'The social phe¬nomenon we call a nation is mainly psychic, this being the fundamental tenor which differentiates it from [the] herds and the swarms of an¬imals" (1955: 11). He then adopts a historical perspective, examining the centuries from Hellenistic to Ottoman times in an attempt to prove that the Greeks have always maintained a superior civilization in the Balkans despite the fact that the "simpler language of the lower tribes [Slavs] prevailed over the more complicated one, borrowing words and phrases" (1955: 46).
Despite its racist undertones, the "common blood" metaphor— so frequent in turn-of-the-century evolutionary and nationalist the¬ory—continues to seek legitimacy in social science. Drawing on genetics and Social Darwinism, such pseudo-biological perspectives have grasped at group legitimacy in a variety of contexts, from claims to the status of a particular "super-race" in Europe to arguments for "revolutionary purity" in China. Such metaphors neither recognize the workings of kinship and descent, nor do they understand those workings. As Schneider (1984) has so poignantly pointed out, models of kinship and descent are largely reified constructs imposed on a diverse network of social relations. Descent paradigms, whether con-structed by anthropologists or the people they study, are meant to
achieve particular ends (see Goody 1976 for an extended discussion of descent and inheritance). The point is that while "common blood" may flow through the veins of a particular local group (although not through the veins of a national one), that "blood" is inevitably so mixed and muddled that it may be traced only through the selective adoption of a particular form of descent and kinship reckoning. Put in extreme terms: whether one subscribes to evolutionary theory or creation the¬ory, we all share "common blood," and all reinterpretations of common descent are but selective manipulations of social relations.
Nevertheless, Kyriakidis's argument has remained the dominant ethnological, historical, and political position of the overwhelming majority of Greek scholars who identify ethnicity with nationality. A most pertinent contemporary example comes from Konstandinos Vak-alopoulos (1988), who maintains that "national consciousness" is the determining criterion of ethnicity in general.1' Macedonia, he argues, was made up of three zones. A southern zone was inhabited mainly by Greek speakers with Greek consciousness. In a western zone were Slavic speakers also with Greek national consciousness, a fact attrib¬utable to the incomplete blending of the Greeks and the invading Slavs in the sixth and seventh centuries, when the Greeks lost their language but retained their national consciousness. To the north, in a third area, Greeks lost both language and national consciousness in their intermingling with Slavs.15
It is perhaps necessary to suggest that the so-called historical perspectives of Kyriakidis and Vakalopotilos actually impose the cat¬egories of the present on a very different situation that existed in the past. There is documentary evidence to support this. Brailsford, writ¬ing during the turmoil of the Macedonian Struggle, some forty years before Kyriakidis, provides first-hand observations on the issue:
One hundred years ago it would have been hard to find a central Mac¬edonian who could have answered with intelligence the question whether he were Servian or Bulgarian by race. The memory of the past had vanished utterly and nothing remained save a vague tradition among the peasants that their forefathers had once been free. (190(5: 99)
But "traditions," as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, are constructed or invented: "They seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, . . . they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past" (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983: 1). The efforts of Greek intellectuals and politicians to construct a tradition of Greek heritage in Macedonia has led to a protracted campaign to denigrate or even deny the existence of a Slavo-Macedonian ethnic minority in Northern Greece. While the issue may seem "academic" to some observers, it has very real practical consequences not only for the ethnic culture of the people in question but for the political stability of the Greek nation-state.
Greece versus the people without history: the continuing "falsification of Macedonian history"
Slavo-Macedonians, such as those I encountered in the Fiorina area, insist that "before the arrival of the Greeks in 1912 there were only Slavo-Macedonians and Turks" in the area. Greek settlement in the region began in earnest only after Macedonia's incorporation into the Greek state in 1913, when many teachers, public servants, military personnel, and Asia Minor refugees of Greek descent moved north and established communities throughout Macedonia. Those Slavo-Macedonians who claim that they are a legitimate ethnic group also claim that it was Greek migration into the area that transformed them into a minority, quite aside from the fact that the Greek state ideo¬logically denied them cultural legitimation and recognition as such. They charge that, as a minority, they are economically marginalized in an underdeveloped region and that they are frequently refused work in coveted civil service jobs. Let us consider their case.
The plaintiffs
The ethnic Slavo-Macedonians' struggle for recognition in Northern Greece involves an attempt to gain national and interna¬tional acknowledgement of their cultural roots and ethnic status within the context of the Greek nation-state. No mere question over legiti¬mizing a long-standing cultural heritage, this struggle has involved battles for (1) the Slavo-Macedonians' right to use their native lan¬guage, (2) the right of emigrant relatives to return and settle, and (3) the right to sponsor and hold their own public cultural activities such as music, song, and dance festivals without interference by or retali¬ation from the Greek authorities.
Language. The most frequently heard complaint from Slavo-Mace¬donians in Greece concerns the Greek authorities' refusal to permit the use of the Slavo-Macedonian language.
The roots of this contro¬versy can be traced back at least to the Bulgarian Exarchate's schism with the Greek Orthodox Church in 1870.16 While the disputes be¬tween the two national church hierarchies clearly had political and economic subtexts, the conflict was expressed through the question of language.17 The Exarchate asserted that the inhabitants of Macedonia spoke a dialect of Bulgarian, an assertion based more on Bul¬garian political strategy than on linguistic evidence. At the time of the schism, liturgical language represented the only "legitimate" visible marker on which the Bulgarian elite could base their break from the dominance and suzerainty of the Greek Partriarchate. Article X of the sultan's firman establishing the Exarchate permitted any "Bul¬garian-speaking" community to secede from the Greek Patriarchate and join the Exarchate provided two-thirds of its inhabitants voted to do so (Stavrianos 1958: 519).18
Having "lost the battle but won the war," so to speak, Greek authorities today still refuse to recognize the existence of a Slavo-Macedonian language, insisting that it is a mere "dialect" or "idiom" of Bulgarian (or sometimes Serbian or even Greek), lacking both "syntax" and "grammar."19 This is the position taken by Papathemelis, who argues that the "Macedonian" tongue is basically Greek. He claims the "Macedonian" colloquial (AaAtd) has only 300 to 500 words that were used by the shepherds to communicate with one another, while the remainder of the language is Greek (cited in Skiadopoulos 1988: 44).2()
While many Greek scholars nevertheless maintain that the "Mac¬edonian" language is a communist construct, a political "trick" de¬signed to wrest territory away from Greece, Friedman, a linguist of Slavic languages, argues that Macedonian (Makedonski) is a recog¬nized Balkan language containing many dialects transitional between Serbian and Bulgarian. He acknowledges political aspects of the de¬bate, but stresses: "the fact remains that this language and ethnic identification arose among Macedonians themselves as a result of his¬torical and linguistic circumstances quite independent of Yugoslav interests and before such interests even existed" (1986: 298).
A picture begins to emerge in which the 19th century Slavic speakers of Macedonia were threatened by both Hellenization from the south and Bulgarization from the north. As noted earlier, the persecution of Slavo-Macedonian speakers by Greek authorities be¬came more forceful in 1936 under the Metaxas dictatorship, when villages in the region were given new "Greek" names (e.g., "Fiorina" to replace Lerin) and Slavo-Macedonians were obliged to change their surnames from Slavic to Greek ones. Some respondents likened Greek rule at the time to that of an "occupier" or "colonizer." People were fined for speaking Slavo-Macedonian in public, and the locals had a saying, EAAdc,, EAAdc;, (Greece, Greece, pay and don't talk).
Control was so strict that even today many people are afraid to admit they know the language. Some clearly terrified respondents nervously attempt to explain their fluency. As one Fiorina Slavo-Mace-donian put it, "The more languages you speak, the better off you are. They are useful. You end up being in a place, and if you know the language nothing is going to happen to you. You're not going to get lost." Such comments obliquely suggest the fluid character of popu-lation and language in the region prior to incorporation. Some in¬habitants of Fiorina rationalize the continuing existence of a "Slavo-Macedonian idiom" by claiming that their commercial district is eco¬nomically dependent on tourists who travel down from the Skopje area and Serbia. They maintain that the locals have had to learn "Serbian" in order to provide services. But Slavo-Macedonians are quick to point out that their language differs from both Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. Villagers in Fiorina, especially in the border area near the Prespa lakes, claim to speak the same language as do people from Skopje. Each community in the area, they maintain, has its own in¬tonation and pronunciation, but all are mutually intelligible. This is not true, they point out, of languages spoken further to the north in Yugoslavia or Bulgaria. They insist that they cannot understand the people from Belgrade.
Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia 02
Monday, 19. May 2008, 01:50:18
"Political refugees."
Another sensitive issue has been the disposition of several thousand "political refugees" living in former Yugoslav Macedonia. Originally from Greek Macedonia, many fled north during and after the Civil War and have been denied permission to return.21 About 8,000 of the 30,000-40,000 Greek Slavo-Macedonians cur¬rently living in Skopje and throughout former Yugoslav Macedonia actively seek permission to return to their homes in Greece. While people from Greece are permitted to visit kin there and to return, a ministerial decision of the socialist PaSoK government forbade these "political refugees" from returning to Greece even for the funeral of a close relative.22 Successive Greek governments have claimed that these people are agents deeply involved with "Skopian" anti-Greek propaganda activities.25 Refusing to declare themselves '; ; (of Greek descent), a label that would allow them to return to their homes in Greece, these expatriates are seen by the Greek gov¬ernment as a subversive force.
The physical and administrative separation of relatives is a par¬ticularly sensitive issue for many Slavo-Macedonians living in Greece.
Regardless of whether they have "Greek consciousness" or "Slavic consciousness," many have relatives living on the other side of the international border, which in many cases was drawn without regard to existing marriage or marketing networks. Consider the case of a Slavo-Macedonian fishing village on the Prespa lakes. Relatives in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania, although they were formerly a broad intermarrying network, are now cut off from each other. A trip to visit a matrilateral cousin living in an adjacent village around a rocky point along the shore used to take five to ten minutes by boat. But now Slavo-Macedonian villagers from Greece are obliged to drive 168 kilometers by a circuitous road to reach those same relatives living just over the hill.
Songs, dance, and cultural activities. Infringements of civil liberties con¬tinue in other realms as well. Slavo-Macedonians are not permitted to dance their folk dances in public, and even today when inhabitants of some villages sing in their mother tongue, the "local" Greek po-liceman comes over and orders them to stop.24 In one Fiorina village where cultural activities were held in 1990, local organizers were obliged to report in advance to authorities what kind of dances would be performed. They claim that a hundred Greek policemen were on duty in the village that day to make sure that no Slavo-Macedonian activities were conducted. Respondents tell of a musician from the area who was constantly harassed and arrested by the аосраЛеш (se¬curity forces) every time he performed at a local celebration. Unable to endure the harassment any longer, the man emigrated to Germany. Resistance in the Fiorina area has taken many forms, both active and passive. Efforts to establish a cultural association, the Iieyq МакебохчкоѓЗ ПоЛпшиоѓЗ (Shelter of Macedonian Heritage), have met with unyielding opposition from Greek local and regional authorities, who strenuously raise constitutional objections to clauses in the group's charter pertaining to national independence and autonomy. The case was forwarded from the regional court of appeals to the Greek Su-preme Court, which upheld the government's decision to forbid the association.
Appeals to the European Community. Frequently faced with such intran¬sigence, Slavo-Macedonian activists in Greece have taken their cause to international forums such as the commissions and courts of the European Community. Yet these tactics have only served to provoke the anger of the Greek government. For example, and according to some activists, one of the men who represented the case of the Slavo-Macedonians at the June 1990 meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was removed from his job in his native Fiorina area and transferred to another part of Greece.
Often viewed by Greek authorities as "Skopian agents" with "Slavic consciousness," most Slavo-Macedonian activists have never sought to secede from Greece or to change the country's borders in any way. They seek only official recognition of their ethnic identity and the protection of equal status that such recognition accords. In one village with a high proportion of activists, one man explained, "We have [certain] obligations to this country, but we have [certain] rights too. And we want equal rights." Many point to wild misrepre-sentations of fact among media and academic circles in Greece which, intentionally or through carelessness, stigmatize their ethnic group and the claims they are pursuing. They are offended by the argument that even if a Slavo-Macedonian people once existed it has long since disappeared, or by the wild assertion of the right-wing newspaper Ezoxoq that 30,000 weapons have been secretly stored in Northern Greece in preparation for secessionist uprisings. One Slavo-Mace¬donian man summed up their predicament with an oblique reference to a New Democracy campaign poster in the elections a few years ago. The advertisement pictured the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and read, "The World is Changing. And Us?" This Slavo-Macedonian recounted the story of a group of Australian World War II veterans who had fought in the Fiorina area and who returned last year to visit. "The Berlin Wall has fallen," he quoted them as saying, "but the wall around Greece has not fallen yet."
The defendants
"For the defense of our national right and the historic truth, we Greeks, from Crete to the mountains of Epirus, and from the Ionian islands to the Aegean, we are all Macedonians"
— Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis, Address to the Veroia Symposium on Macedonia, delivered in his behalf by his
Press Secretary, 7—8 September 1991.
Journalists and politicians.
Most political and media circles in Greece view the "Macedonian" issue in a conspiratorial light, radically polit¬icizing it by linking it inseparably with issues of territorial integrity and national security. A survey of coverage of the issue in the Greek press during the summer of 1991 revealed just how prevalent such perceptions are. Not only did most Greek writers refuse to recognize the existence of a Slavo-Macedonian ethnic minority in Greece, but their attempt to delegitimatize the "Macedonian" issue went so far as to lead them to refer to Yugoslav Macedonia (in both text and car¬tography) as "Skopia" rather than "Macedonia," and to the inhabitants of the region as "Skopians" rather than "Macedonians."25 Most re¬garded the issue as a product of Slavic or communist designs against Greece which sought to deprive the country of its grain-rich northern lands. This issue of national concern is one of the few in which all Greek political parties, from right to left, are united.
The conservative defense.
Many conservative Cxreeks see "Skopia" (i.e., the government of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) as clearly the villain in the whole affair, asserting that it has fomented nationalist propaganda and has fabricated claims of a "Macedonian" minority in Greece in order to advance its own territorial designs. Such people accuse "Skopia" of seeking to force Стгеек authorities to act against "Skopian agents" and "naive Greek" demonstrators, thus precipitating a crisis. One editor exhorted: "Just as our Pan-Hellenic general Alexander the Great did more than twenty-three centuries ago, we should draw our swords to cut the Gordian knot."2()
In 1991, Ekavi Nomikou, an attorney, charged that the Slavo-Macedonian minority in Greece was a construct, a "myth" devised to promote Yugoslavian chauvinist plans to conquer Greek Macedonia (Nomikou 1991). She claimed that Stalin ordered the Yugoslavs to start the "Macedonian" case in 1945.27 Former KKE partisans and their descendants, she maintained, are now the leaders of the anti-Greek propaganda efforts and activities within the "Skopian pseudo-state" and abroad. She accused the Yugoslav Consulate in Thessaloniki of guiding agents to spread systematic propaganda to villages and towns in "our Macedonia": "To the educated people they talk about the oppressed minority and to the uneducated they promise the cre¬ation of the Switzerland of the Balkans, the independent Macedonia, where life would be as in heaven" (Nomikou 199l).-s Such conspir¬atorial perspectives and "siege mentalities" are shared by many Greek conservative writers.
The liberal defense. Yannis Kartalis, writing in the popular liberal Sunday weekly Vhna, considered even the use of the term "Macedonian" in¬appropriate. The "Macedonian" language was constructed, he main¬tained, in order for the Macedonian Republic to have an independent existence. He charged that, along with language, "the Skopians" have manipulated religion and historical tradition for the same ends. He argued that people with Slavic consciousness had once existed in Northern Greece, but that they departed for Yugoslavia and were assimilated into the local environment there (Kartalis 1990). His re¬fusal to consider similar assimilation processes in Greece gives the "Macedonian" issue a tone of "foreign conspiracy" echoed more ex¬plicitly by some of his colleagues.
The leftist defense.
Most Greek leftist writers, as of the summer of 1991, spoke of the important and potentially positive role Serbia could play in the issue. Many leftist intellectuals wrote in support of Serbian designs for a "Greater Serbia" that would include "Skopia" and thus keep the nationalists there in check. Some not only endorsed but actively encouraged strong-arm methods by the authorities in Bel¬grade to control the "Skopians." Lazaridis, for example, wrote:
The parents of today's Skopians could never imagine that they made up a separate ethnic group outside the Serbian nation. . . . Today the assimilation of the Skopians by the Serbians is a condition for the rees-tablishment of the Serbian nation-state and precondition of "good neigh¬borhood" of the Serbs with the peoples of Greece and Bulgaria. (1991a)29
The role of Turkey. While the political Right in Greece accused the Left of sympathy toward "the Skopians" and their agents,30 former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou (1991) was equally ferocious in denouncing "the Skopians," who he claimed were "already in touch with Turkey." He charged that Turkey was manipulating minorities in the Balkans and had already "infiltrated" Bulgaria with five hundred companies. Papandreou feared a real danger of 'Skopia" merging with Bulgaria.
Turkey remains an obsession for many Greek political analysts. For example, Zarkadis (1991) views the entire Macedonian issue in terms of the regional "balance of power." He warns that Turkey is aligning with and encouraging Slavo-Macedonian nationalists in order to become a regional superpower, a role he likens to that of Germany in the northern Balkans. He views the Turkish government's recent offer to open Ottoman archives on Macedonia to researchers as a Turco-Macedonian conspiracy meant to disseminate false information to the world.
This view of the Turkish conspiracy is shared by Konstandinos Vakalopoulos (1991). His article in the popular conservative daily Makedonia warns of a coming alliance against Greece among "the Skopians," the Bulgarians, and the Turks. He envisions a Turkish strategy to establish autonomous "zones" for various nationalities in the Balkans, thus providing Turkey with a footbridge to expand again to the doorsteps of Europe.
The role of the United States.
A number of Greek writers and scholars see a conspiratorial link between the United States and Greece's neigh¬bors. Many suspicions and accusations of this sort first surfaced in the wake of a U.S. Department of State report (1991) on human rights that criticized the treatment of ethnic minority Slavo-Macedonians in Greece. In the wave of anti-American sentiment that swept Greece following President Bush's visit in the summer of 1991, a number of articles appeared in newspapers sharply criticizing American aims and intentions in the Balkans.31 Nerantzis (1991) warns of a division of the Balkans into two spheres of influence: one in the developed north controlled by Germany and another in the underdeveloped south controlled by the United States. Questioning how the "Balkan pie" would be divided, he raises questions about American support for the Independent Orthodox Church of Skopje and about the visible Amer¬ican presence in Bulgaria, particularly in agriculture and in oil ex¬ploration.
The role of Greek scholars.
In addition to contemporary journalists and politicians, Greek scholars have continued to deny the existence of a Slavo-Macedonian ethnicity, contemporary as well as historical. Dan-forth (1990) notes that at the First International Congress of Mace¬donian Studies held in 1988 in Melbourne, Australia, not only were Slavo-Macedonians excluded from the meetings but the scholars who delivered papers and the politicians who were present uniformly at¬tempted to deny Slavo-Macedonians the right to identify themselves as "Macedonians," insisting that they were Greek.
The extremist and militant tone of most articles is alarming. It is striking that much of the rhetoric coming out of Greece on the issue has progressed markedly little beyond the simplistic and reductionist notions that inflamed the Balkan Crisis at the turn of the century.32 A great deal of the obfuscation surrounding the issue of "Macedonian" ethnicity has stemmed from misapplication of the categories of "na¬tional" or "nationality" to distinctions that are more accurately de¬scribed as "cultural" or "ethnic." Greek scholars have frequently ar¬gued from historical premises that are fundamentally misinformed. Some have insisted that since there neither is nor was a country called "Macedonia," there can be no "Macedonians."33 Many have viewed the Exarchate's schism as an ominous historical precedent, and have refused to acknowledge the existence of a "Macedonian" language for fear that new territorial claims will be made on Greece. Continuing to perceive the issue in terms of power and territorial struggles of regional nation-states, Greek authorities have remained in a "Balkan War ideology," often vilifying the cultural minorities inhabiting their northern territories —"blaming the victims," so to speak, for their con¬tinuing repression.
A reconsideration of ethnicity
Ethnicity, like "culture," is one of the most frequently discussed topics in anthropological literature, yet ironically it remains, again like
"culture," one of the most abstract concepts in contemporary theory. Greek scholars have erred in defining Slavo-Macedonians as cultural or ethnic Greeks because they frequently examine only overt cultural features of ethnicity, such as written language and religion. The ex¬istence of a written language is not a prerequisite lor ethnic identity. Obviously, simply because a language is unwritten does not mean it is unimportant; it merely indicates that there has been no centralized state mechanism or elite intelligentsia to create such a written lan¬guage.34 As Anderson maintains: " 'national print-languages' were the end products of rigorous intellectual activity and were central to the shaping of 19th century European nationalisms" (1983: 69). Yet, even today, many Greeks (scholars and laymen alike) regard Greek as the "high" language of the Balkans and Slavic or "Macedonian" as the "low" vernacular. It must be borne in mind that during the four hundred years of Ottoman occupation Greek was the written language not only of the priests but also of the tax-collectors, merchants, and administrators.35
According to Barth (1969), approaches to ethnicity based solely on language or religion are inadequate, for they tend to regard overt characteristics of ethnic group membership as "givens" and not as outcomes of other important (e.g., ecological, external) processes or factors. Most anthropological studies of ethnicity have followed Barth in maintaining that identity is not merely constructed by oneself but created through the process of how others conceive, perceive, and deal with one. Yet most Greek scholars do not regard ethnicity (or even nationality, for that matter) as a historical construct, and many fail to recognize the fundamental truth that reality—just like our cultural representations of "self" and "other" —is constructed.
Greek scholarship has apparently created a perception of the Slavs that is stereotypically "Oriental" (in Edward Said's sense of the term), stressing national differences between "Slavs" and "Greeks" while denying (even the possibility of) the existence of groups, in¬cluding Slavo-Macedonians, that lie between these two oppositional poles. Thus "Greeks" and "Slavs" have become "ideal-types" of ethnic-rum-national groups, not in the classical Weberian sense but as reified population-clusters that encompass and incorporate other Balkan populations, denying them an autonomous and independent existence of their own as cultural entities. Put bluntly, this academic racism delegitimatizes these "other" social or ethnic groups, denying or ne¬gating their cultural and historical validity. The "Greek" group, on the other hand, is an equally abstract social category whose very ex¬istence is based upon the "non-existence" of the component social groups that comprise the "Greek" nation.
Ethnicity is a social and cultural construct rooted in social eco¬nomics and in the cultural exchange of everyday life. Its analysis requires not only the close examination of the dialectical process of the conception and perception of identity; in addition, it requires the linkage of this process to material relationships and to social inter¬action. The Hellenization of Macedonia, perceived by Greek author¬ities as a necessary step toward the region's integration into the ex¬panding Greek state, was a nation-building process. In constructing Greek national identity among the populations of its northern terri¬tories, Greek authorities politicized local culture, viewing it as a com¬peting influence, a voice of cultural and thus political dissent. In the context of Greek Macedonia, nation-building has involved the gradual negation of ethnic identity and its transformation into a broader, more inclusive national identity and consciousness.
Summary
The politicization of "Macedonian" culture began as early as the Bulgarian schism of the 19th century.3'1 With visions of a "Greater Bulgaria," the Exarchate and Bulgarian national elites began to refer to the Slavic speaking inhabitants of Macedonia as "Bulgarians." The Greeks, in turn, referred to anyone who went with the Exarchate as a "Bulgarian" and to those who remained with the Greek-speaking Church as "Greeks." The imposition on the population of Macedonia of "national"-based distinctions by means of ecclesiastical or liturgical labels had little relevance to that population's cultural identity. Litur¬gical boundaries were often poorly defined: many people from the same village —in some cases even from the same family —went to the churches of different faiths, some walking distances of several kilo¬meters to do so.
The politicization of Slavo-Macedonian culture in Greece is in part a product of the transnational situation of Slavo-Macedonians today and the poorly defined boundaries that mark cultural exchange and ideational discourse in the area. The existence of the nearby former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a foreign power threatening to make territorial claims on the Greek nation-state, provides an ex¬ternal institutional base with which the Slavo-Macedonians of Greece could possibly identify and obtain ideological, financial, or material support. Yugoslav Macedonians, today engaged in their own struggles for independence, are actively constructing their own "myths of col¬lective identity," i.e., are propagating a national Macedonian con¬sciousness. These are matters of serious concern to the Greek authori¬ties, whose heightened sense of anxiety is understandable. There do appear to be certain historical parallels with the crisis at the turn of the century in which the Bulgarian Exarchate attempted to reorder material and cultural boundaries in Macedonia.
Greek authorities are in essence competing for the "national'1 orientation of the consciousness of Greece's Slavo-Macedonians. Yet the authorities' response to the crisis has had repercussions beyond those of which they seem aware. Greek nation-building in Macedonia has attempted to relegate Slavo-Macedonian ethnic culture to the status of "regional variation" within a national Greek culture. This marginalization denigrates Slavo-Macedonian culture, denying it an autonomous existence apart from the Greek nation. It leads to the destruction of any and all distinctive cultural traits or markers (such as language, names, dances, etc.) that may manifest such differences.
Some Fiorina activists, working with their own agenda of cultural survival, have reappropriated the ready-made nationalism of Yugoslav Macedonia as a statement of collectivity for their own cause. But others resist reenculturation by attempting to establish their own origin-myths of collectivity, tracing themselves back to the powerful symbol of Alexander the Great. Having no historical state, no glorious ancient civilization, no Parthenon, no Church or other historically visible marker or vestige of collective memory or identity with which to claim historical ethnic legitimacy,37 Slavo-Macedonians turn to Alexander. Yet the symbol is contested, for Greeks, too, lay claim to the Hellenized Alexander, their glorious ancestor, as "proof" that Macedonia has always been "Greek."38 Scores of archeological and paleolinguistic studies on both sides of the border have been directed toward this end. Yet, ironically, they misaddress the issue. The relative "Mace-donianness" or "Greekness" of Alexander the Great is of little rele¬vance to the case of contemporary Slavo-Macedonian culture and ethnicity. Given that Slavic speakers did not arrive in the Balkans until the sixth century A.D., it seems absurd to claim that Slavo-Macedonian is a modern reflex of the language of Alexander's Macedonians, or that the people of the Macedonian hinterland during his days were the direct ancestors of the region's present-day inhabitants.
Ironically, the confrontational approach of the Greek authorities to the Macedonian issue is itself generating and consolidating a com¬mon consciousness among that issue's "victims." Even more ironically, such consciousness is currently being transformed from ethnic into national consciousness, and from minority into secessionist conscious¬ness, by the very scholarly and political authorities of Greece who insist on perceiving and discussing the issue in such terms. The common national consciousness of "the Greeks" was forged out of a constructed collective memory or tradition of the tyranny ethnic Greeks suffered under Ottoman Turkish rule before independence. Since they were forbidden, as many claim, to speak their language, sing their songs, learn their ethnic or national interpretations of history, or practice their religion, their difficult conditions were not too unlike the pres¬sures and contradictions of Hellenization and reenculturation that confront the Slavic speakers of Greek Macedonia today.
The politicization of Slavo-Macedonian culture by the Greek authorities has been a double-edged sword: it has created the con¬tradictions that fuel tensions and unrest in the region now, and it has radicalized or politicized the consciousness of the local population. Perceived by the Greek authorities as little more than a pawn in in¬ternational political intrigue, Slavo-Macedonian culture —the lan¬guage, legends, folklore, songs, dances, and rituals of people —has become so sensitive a political issue that it can no longer be permitted to exist.
Negating Ethnic Identity in Greek Macedonia 03
Monday, 19. May 2008, 01:51:30
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
NOTES
Acknowledgments.
This paper was originally presented in October 1991 at the MGSA meetings in Gainesville, Florida. I wish to thank my fellow panelists and the audience there for helpful suggestions. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies for extensive, invaluable criticisms, and Loring Danforth, Michael Herzfeld, Kostas Kazazis, Adamantia Pollis, Susan Sutton, Joan Vincent, and Ricki Van Boeschoten for providing me with critical moral support. Finally, I remain indebted to Greg Ruf, not only for drawing the map but also for the altruistic and unconditional assistance he provided in all aspects of this work.
1 This paper was researched and written before the current crisis over the "Battle for the Name of Macedonia" reached the diplomatic and public international arenas. While it is an anthropologically informed critique of how ovei zealous national policies in Greece have sometimes affected the local culture of Slavic speaking inhabitants in Western Greek Macedonia, it does not pretend to participate in the debate over the construction of stipulated genealogies to "national ancestors" in the distant past, nor does it wish to advocate a particular position on the current international debate sur¬rounding diplomatic recognition of the newly independent state of former Yugoslav Macedonia.
- In most scholarly literature on the area, the term "Macedonian" is used to refer to the language spoken by the region's inhabitants in ancient times. The official Greek position today, however, maintains that the term "Macedonian" should refer only to the present-day Greek speakers of Northern Greece and their culture. On the other hand, authorities in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia now use the term "Macedonian" to refer to the present-day Slavic speaking population of the region, their language, and their culture. Each side claims sole legitimate use of the term and denies the other the right to use it. The language that the people I encountered spoke, however, was a Slavic language. Therefore, in order to avoid confusing the population, culture, and language of ancient Macedonia with that of the region's present-day Slavic-speaking inhabitants, in this paper I adopt the term "Slavo-Macedonian" to refer to the latter.
3 Probably this inscription was either in Church Slavonic or in Bulgarian.
4 Mavrogordatos (1983: 185-186) maintains that, by 1930, 90% of the 578,844 rural refugees had settled in Macedonia and Thrace.
5 Let me state emphatically that the bulk of the population of Greek Macedonia today is nothing less than Greek in national consciousness and political loyalty; that fact is indisputable and self-evident. What I am concerned with, rather, is the process of the construction of Greek national identity and the effects it has had on local culture and identity.
6 It is difficult to ascertain precise figures for the population of Slavo-Macedonians inhabiting the area today. Lithoksoou (1992: 43), citing official Greek government statistics, traces a decline in the number of Slavic speakers in the region from what he considers a conservative official high of roughly 82,000 in 1928 (following an exchange of populations with Bulgaria after World War I) to 41,000 in 1950 (after many of them had fled the country in the wake of the Civil War, 1947-1949). Since 1950, government census forms have dropped questions that would identify the principal language spoken by respondents. Based on unofficial data collected during the course of my field re¬search, I would estimate that approximately 80% of the population in the Fiorina district to be either Slavic speakers or descendants of Slavic-speaking families.
7 Similar protests for equal rights and improved living conditions continue among ethnic Muslim Turks living in Western Thrace. The complexities of their situation require detailed treatment beyond the scope of this paper.
H Few members and leaders of the Slavo-Macedonian and Turkish ethnic minority groups mention any intention of seceding from Greece. In fact, most argue adamantly that they consider themselves Greek citizens and have no desire to change that citi¬zenship or status.
9 For an extensive discussion of nations as "imagined communities," or as cultural artifacts produced since the late 18th century, see Anderson (1983).
10 The Ottoman administration defined nationality through the millet system, which classified the population of the Empire on the basis of religion. Millets were non-territorial jurisdictions, administered according to different regulations, offices, and procedures. While Muslims belonged to the Muslim millet, all Orthodox Christians belonged to the Rum millet (i.e., the Orthodox Christian millet) and were subject to the control, supervision, and administration of the Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul, which enjoyed a privileged and powerful position in the Ottoman Empire (Brailsford 190(3).
11 Many Greek scholars have harkened back to the "golden age" of Byzantium, drawing on present-day nationalist sentiment to support ambitious claims linking Mod¬ern Greek language, culture, and state organization to the Byzantines. But others, notably Charanis (1963), have questioned the extent to which the Byzantine Empire could be considered "Greek." At the turn of the century the geographer Wilkinson (1951: 80) listed a total of 22 different "Greek-speaking groups," including: Members of the Rum millet; Greek speakers; Hellenes; Pelasgo-Greeks; Muslim Greeks (or Greek Pomaks); Souliotes; Greek Orthodox Albanians; Albanians under Greek influence; Albanian-speaking Greeks; Tosks; Graeco-Albanians; "Hellenized Vlachs"; Greek Or¬thodox Vlachs; Graeco-Vlachs; Bulgarian Patriarchists; Graeco-Bulgarians; Bulgaro-phone/Slavophones; Bulgarian-speaking Greeks; Graeco-Macedonians; Macedonian Slavs under Greek influence; Turks of Greek Orthodox faith; and Greek Jews. To speak of a homogeneous Greek-speaking population in Macedonia is not only inade¬quate but wrong.
12 Michael Herzfeld (1982) examines how Greek cultural continuity was con¬structed by Greek scholars to defend the national identity of the "Greeks." Twentieth-century Greek folklore, he notes, was at the service of the new Greek state's mechanisms of legitimation. The elite intelligensia, at the head of a powerful and newly established state political economy, needed to construct a cultural identity that would shore up the economic foundations of their new kingdom.
1:1 A. Kyriakidou-Nestoros, his daughter, maintains (1983: 249-256) that Greek folklorists never followed the ethnographic method in the collection of materials, nor did they study "traditional" ways of life in close contact. Folklore in Greece, until recently, has been a philological science.
11 K. Vakalopoulos outlined his "ethnological map of Macedonia" in the 17 July 1988 issue of the conservative daily Kathimenni. Written for the general public, this article was intended to be the ultimate declaration on the Macedonian issue for all concerned.
ir> A. Vacalopoulos (1970: 2-3) believes that the "peaceful" Slavs came to Greece as peasants or shepherds and were Hellenized through religious conversion, military defeat, and exposure to various intellectual, political, and economic influences. He maintains that many Slav shepherds in search of winter quarters came into intense commercial and social interaction with Greek merchants inhabiting the Macedonian plains. By the time of the Ottoman "occupation" in the 14th century, the Slavs reportedly had become assimilated into the Greek way of life (1970: 5—12, et passim).
10 Through its influence at the Ottoman Porte, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate had the Bulgarian and the Serbian Orthodox Churches eliminated in 1765 and 1767, respectively (Friedman 1986: 289). Prior to the establishment of the Exarchate in 1870, all Christian Orthodox schools, townships, and churches in the Balkans had been under the jurisdiction of the Greek Ecumenical Patriarchate. Since at least 1840, "Bulgarians" had been attempting to use their native language(s) in churches and to appoint Bulgarian priests and bishops in predominately Slavic-speaking communities. The Greek Patri¬archate resisted, fearing to compromise its ecclesiastical and economic interests (Augustinos 1977: 19). With official recognition from the Porte, the Bulgarians gained legitimacy in their struggle for regional autonomy, taking control of educational, ad¬ministrative, and ecclesiastical institutions in Slavic-speaking communities (Perry 1988: 27). By 1872 a full schism had developed between the Bulgarian Exarchate and the Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul.
17 Tambiah (1989: 345) remarks that just as religion has social and political ap¬plications beyond the realm of personal belief and worship, so too does "language," serving not only as a mere communicative device but one with "implications for edu¬cational advantage, occupation, and historical legitimation of social precedence." Even today, for example, Slavic speakers in the Fiorina area claim that they are discriminated against as second-class citizens in civil service employment.
14 Augustinos (1977: 20) claims that this enabled the Exarchate to expand its interests outside the "nation" of Bulgaria.
''' Bulgaria recognized "Macedonian" as a "minority language" only in 1944-1946; Tito granted the language official status on 2 August 1944, when he recognized Mac¬edonia as a separate republic of Yugoslavia. Ironically, a Slavo-Macedonian primer was reportedly published in 1925 for distribution to schools in the region alongside Greek primers. That distribution was subsequently halted and the book suppressed, Slavo-Macedonians claim. Some Slavic speakers in Greek Macedonia claim that the EC cur¬rently subsidizes the Greek government for educational instruction in the Albanian and Vlach languages, as well as in the Pontic dialect of Greek, but that no classes in Slavo-Macedonian have been permitted.
20 It is of no small significance that terminology for Slavo-Macedonian kinship is different from that of Greek kinship. For example, it provides a separate classificatory term for maternal uncle (mother's brother), voujko, while Greek kinship terms do not distinguish between maternal and paternal uncles.
21 Iatrides (1981: 218) mentions that more than 4,000 soldiers of the leftist Dem¬ocratic Army were blockaded in Yugoslavia after being defeated by Nationalist troops, forced out of Greece, and trapped behind closed borders.
22 Protocol number 106841, issued on 29 December 1982, was a joint decision of the ministers of the Interior and Public Order, G. Yennimatas and Y. Skoularikis.
23 The Greek Communist Party (KKE), which until 1992 had (like other major political parties in Greece) denied the existence of a Slavo-Macedonian ethnic group, maintains that most of these refugees have nothing to do with nationalistic propaganda and should be permitted to return. I deal with this issue at length in another paper (Karakasidou 1991).
24 Village policemen in Greek Macedonia almost always were from outside the region. Before the Civil War, respondents claim, their village secretaries and presidents were also sent from southern Greece.
25 The Greek public also frequently refers to Yugoslavia as "Serbia."
26 Editorial, Makedomkd Themata, May-June 1991, p. 3.
27 The Socialist Republic of Macedonia was established on 30 April 1945.
28 She lists a number of factors to account for the success of "Skopian" propaganda, including (among other things) that the inhabitants of Greek Macedonia have a low mental and cultural level; that they are considered Greeks of secondary and tertiary importance; that some authorities question whether the inhabitants have Greek con¬sciousness; that the athletic teams of Macedonia are addressed by sports fans in southern Greece as Paliovulgan (goddamned Bulgarians); and that some state offices and some of the Greek public show no support, appreciation, or love for the people of Macedonia (Nomikou 1991).
29 Elsewhere, Lazaridis (1991b) argues against a looser confederation in Yugoslavia, warning that the "Skopians" would acquire their own flag and army. This, he reasons, would not only directly threaten Northern Greece but would aid the "separatists" in Cyprus. Former Greek ambassador Gregoriadis also sees dangers in granting autonomy, fearing that "opportunists" would seek an independent Macedonia and would coax Greek Macedonia to secede and join it. Once that happens, he warns, Western Thrace would secede and join Turkey (Gregoriades 1991).
30 When former PaSoK Minister of Foreign Affairs Papoulias visited Belgrade and met with a "Skopian" official, the New Democracy government reacted sharply, criti¬cizing him for not having first cleared his plans with current Foreign Minister Samaras. Even worse, he was accused of showing some "understanding" toward the "Macedo¬nians" {Makedonia, 21 July 1991).
31 The Greek media and government authorities were particularly displeased with what they perceived as the marked sympathy that Bush displayed toward Turkey, particularly in regard to resolving the Cyprus issue. Bush proposed a four-sided peace conference in which Greece, Turkey, Greek Cypriots, and Turkish Cypriots would meet together to try to find a solution.
52 I address this issue in greater detail in another paper (Karakasidou 1992), which focuses on the role that scholars and intellectuals have had in crafting public opinion on the "Macedonian Controversy" in Greece.
33 Such views ignore the existence of "stateless" ethnic minority groups or cultures and Vlach languages, as well as in the Pontic dialect of Greek, but that no classes in Slavo-Macedonian have been permitted.
20 It is of no small significance that terminology for Slavo-Macedonian kinship is different from that of Greek kinship. For example, it provides a separate classificatory term for maternal uncle (mother's brother), voujko, while Greek kinship terms do not distinguish between maternal and paternal uncles.
21 Iatrides (1981: 218) mentions that more than 4,000 soldiers of the leftist Dem¬ocratic Army were blockaded in Yugoslavia after being defeated by Nationalist troops, forced out of Greece, and trapped behind closed borders.
22 Protocol number 106841, issued on 29 December 1982, was a joint decision of the ministers of the Interior and Public Order, G. Yennimatas and Y. Skoularikis.
23 The Greek Communist Party (KKE), which until 1992 had (like other major political parties in Greece) denied the existence of a Slavo-Macedonian ethnic group, maintains that most of these refugees have nothing to do with nationalistic propaganda and should be permitted to return. I deal with this issue at length in another paper (Karakasidou 1991).
24 Village policemen in Greek Macedonia almost always were from outside the region. Before the Civil War, respondents claim, their village secretaries and presidents were also sent from southern Greece.
25 The Greek public also frequently refers to Yugoslavia as "Serbia."
26 Editorial, Makedomkd Themata, May-June 1991, p. 3.
27 The Socialist Republic of Macedonia was established on 30 April 1945.
28 She lists a number of factors to account for the success of "Skopian" propaganda, including (among other things) that the inhabitants of Greek Macedonia have a low mental and cultural level; that they are considered Greeks of secondary and tertiary importance; that some authorities question whether the inhabitants have Greek con¬sciousness; that the athletic teams of Macedonia are addressed by sports fans in southern Greece as Paliovulgan (goddamned Bulgarians); and that some state offices and some of the Greek public show no support, appreciation, or love for the people of Macedonia (Nomikou 1991).
29 Elsewhere, Lazaridis (1991b) argues against a looser confederation in Yugoslavia, warning that the "Skopians" would acquire their own flag and army. This, he reasons, would not only directly threaten Northern Greece but would aid the "separatists" in Cyprus. Former Greek ambassador Gregoriadis also sees dangers in granting autonomy, fearing that "opportunists" would seek an independent Macedonia and would coax Greek Macedonia to secede and join it. Once that happens, he warns, Western Thrace would secede and join Turkey (Gregoriades 1991).
30 When former PaSoK Minister of Foreign Affairs Papoulias visited Belgrade and met with a "Skopian" official, the New Democracy government reacted sharply, criti¬cizing him for not having first cleared his plans with current Foreign Minister Samaras. Even worse, he was accused of showing some "understanding" toward the "Macedo¬nians" {Makedonia, 21 July 1991).
31 The Greek media and government authorities were particularly displeased with what they perceived as the marked sympathy that Bush displayed toward Turkey, particularly in regard to resolving the Cyprus issue. Bush proposed a four-sided peace conference in which Greece, Turkey, Greek Cypriots, and Turkish Cypriots would meet together to try to find a solution.
52 I address this issue in greater detail in another paper (Karakasidou 1992), which focuses on the role that scholars and intellectuals have had in crafting public opinion on the "Macedonian Controversy" in Greece.
33 Such views ignore the existence of "stateless" ethnic minority groups or cultures in other nation-states, such as the Armenians, the Welsh and Scots, Native Americans, etc.
:ч For example, when Cyril and Methodius, two Greek missionaries who spread Christianity to the Slavs in the ninth century, translated the scriptures into Old Church Slavonic, they did so with the encouragement, support, and blessings of the Byzantine Empire, which had been losing the Balkan territories to the gradually advancing Slavs since the 7th century.
4:1 Slavic, on the other hand, was the language of mundane everyday interaction for most inhabitants of the Macedonian region. As Brailsford (1906: 86) noted at the turn of the century: "In Macedonia there is no lingua franca. .. . Greek is more serviceable as a polite or commercial language, but its day is over, and save in the south, it is only the older generation of the Slavs which can speak it. ... Slav (and particularly the Bulgarian dialect) is the one language with which no native of the northern and central districts [of Macedonia] can dispense."
m Tambiah (1989: 339) argues that ethnicity becomes politicized and that ethnic conflicts arise when the state is in crisis.
:'7 For example, Greek history books mark no reference to the Slavic Macedonian I linden Revolt against the Turks on 2 August 1903.
'лн Symbols are invented and appropriated by all concerned. Yugoslav Macedonia now adorns its national flag and mints coins emblazoned with the star from Philip II's Macedonian tomb, a symbol that most Greeks consider a rightful part of their own heritage. Danforth (1990) mentions that the same star symbol was used in the official program for the First International Congress of Macedonian Studies held in Melbourne in 1988. Outside the conference halls, he notes, a group of Slavo-Macedonian dem¬onstrators protested their exclusion from the proceedings, waving a red flag adorned with the same star.
