Macedonicity as an art of not being governed!

[Albo]

https://nomadicuniversality.com/2016/11/05/macedonicity-as-an-art-of-not-being-governed/

[Karposh]

A Greek’s point of view on the Macedonian nation, whose judgement is not blurred by rose-coloured Greek glasses, that’s a rare find. Thank you for posting this Albo.

Having lived in Thessaloniki around 1990, I personally witnessed the «our-name-is-our-soul» frenzy that emerged out of the blue in that city and its surroundings and became the starting point for the series of tragicomic events we all know. As most people, I was surprised by this eruption of heated interest for history, geopolitics, ethnology, and a number of other disciplines, for which I was totally unprepared. Listening to all these people who, with the air and the conviction of a specialist, repeated incessantly a set of newly discovered «scientific truths», I felt uneasy, but also puzzled, because these «truths» concerned a period and a topic I had no deep knowledge about. Instinctively, I felt there was something wrong with these discourses, but was not quite sure what a valid counter-argument would be.

The picture we get from Akis’ first-hand account of events in 1990 is that of a contrived sense of Greek outrage and an artificial and twisted view of reality with “experts” in history, geopolitics and ethnology regurgitating state-sponsored propaganda slogans.

At that time of confusion, when Greek newspapers were sweepingly stormed by a repetitive wave of “experts” providing “evidence” that “the name Macedonia was never used to describe a language and a people before 1944, this use is arbitrary and artificial,” one day, in a small leftist newspaper, Epokhì, an article appeared which contained some other type of evidence. It was an excerpt from the 1924 novel I zôì en tàfô [The life in the grave] by Stratìs Myrivìlis. The book was probably written some years earlier, as it recounts the story of the 1st World War seen through the lens of a Greek soldier as a narrator/ protagonist. The narration is based largely on Myrivìlis’s own personal experience.
At one point, the narrator is positioned at a small village near Monastiri/ Bitola, and he describes his interaction with its inhabitants in the following words:

These villagers, whose language is perfectly understood by the Bulgarians and the Serbs, dislike the former because they took their children for the Army. They hate the latter because they abuse them as being Bulgarians. And look with a sympathetic curiosity us Greeks [in the original: Romioì] because we are the genuine spiritual subjects of the Patrik, that is “the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople”. (…) Nevertheless, they don’t want to be neither “Bulgàr”, nor “Srrp”, nor “Grrch”, only “Makedòn ortodòx” [in the original, the words as pronounced by the villagers are approximatively written in Greek scribe].

This article was for me a beam of light, a great encouragement and a helpful hint which lead me to further searching and reading. In the years that followed I often admired retrospectively the courage and honesty of its author, the philologist Mìmis Souliôtis, who served as a director of the public library at Lerin/ Flôrina and was not of Macedonian ethnic origin as far as I know.

There’s actually an even earlier Greek document from 1904 that mentions the Macedonian language, which indirectly alludes to a Macedonian people. And, it comes to us from Pavlos Melas, no less, the famous national Greek hero from the early 20th Century. In one of many letters that he wrote to his wife Natalia, which she published in whole in 1964 in Athens under the title “Pavlos Melas”, he writes:

“Pirzsas was interpreting emotionally, loudly and passionately, while Kotas was speaking in the Macedonian language. The teacher asked the children to sing something. We couldn’t tell whether the language was Macedonian or Greek. All the students know how to read and write (Greek), however they barely know how to speak it. I have learned a few Macedonian words which I say to the women and mothers, which brings them great satisfaction.”

The above interaction between Kotas (i.e. Macedonian turncoat Kote Hristov), Melas, and the village women must have taken place in a Patriarchist Macedonian village otherwise Melas would never have referred to the local inhabitants as Macedonians but simply as dirty Bulgarians that must be exterminated at all cost. Yet, was he so blind to see, as most Greeks today seem to be, that there was absolutely no ethnic difference between one Macedonian village that happened to be under the jurisdiction of the Greek Patriarchate (coerced or otherwise) and the neighbouring Macedonian village that was under the Bulgarian Exarchate?

[Risto the Great]

Macedonia is the artificial panacea for Greece. Just something to distract the masses from the reality of the failed state.

[Solun]

I think I'll reiterate Risto's comment of 2013 with regard to the author:

He is normal. Which is abnormal in Greece.

Likely not a popular figure if and when he visits Greece