The Greek colonization of Macedonia since 1913!

[Risto the Great]

Land from the indigenous "Greeks" was expropriated where landholdings were considered to be excessive. Sorry, if there were indigenous Greeks there, they must have stolen the land from Macedonians 15 years earlier. More likely it was Macedonians that had to give up their lands for the imported christian Turks.

Hence the AMHRC court case.

[Onur]

Btw, don't think that Turcophone Christians only came from Anatolia("Asia minor" in Greek article).

From Russia 11.435 (6359 males and 5076 females). Of these, 5214 (2828 males and 2386 females) and came before 6221 (3531 males and 2690 females) after the Asia Minor Catastrophe.

From the Caucasus 47.091 (24.410 males and 22,681 females). Of these, 32,421 (17,003 males and 15,418 females) came before and 14 670 (7407 males and 7263 females) after the Asia Minor Catastrophe.

It says Russia and Caucasus in the Greek article but these ~82.000 people came from north of Blacksea, Crimea to today`s Georgia, Azerbaijan. In 19th century, these people called as "Urums" but today the scholars usually calls them "Graeco-Tatars". These were Tatar Turkish speaking Christians who were totally alien to Greek language. Actually the term "Graeco-Tatars" is kinda weird because Tatar people had no relation whatsoever with the Greeks throughout the history. Only relation between them was; these Urums was the member of Istanbul patriarchy because they were Christians. That was it, nothing else!

After Russian-Turkish war at 1877, Russians invaded whole Crimea, Ukraine, Georgia and surroundings. After that, they expelled 100.000s of Tatars by force, both Christians(Urums) and Muslim Tatars because all of them was Turkish speaking people. Most of them migrated to Anatolia and thats when the first Tatars came to today`s Turkey. Some of them gone to Aegean Macedonia as the article states.

After the 1924 population exchange, the assimilation process undergone and they became descendants of ancient Greeks like all other immigrants of Greece!

[Coastal]

First of all i d like to greet the forum..since this is my first post here

I ll contribute my 2 cents for this topic.
The following is a charter of the population of the Greek part of Macedonia in 1925:


Unfortunately i didnt find a translated in English version.
The numbers almost agree with the above estimations -

The Greek Refugees seem to constitute 44.15% (607.000) of the total population.
Local Greeks of Macedonia (listed simply as "Greeks" ) are counted to 480.000 -35%.

The 3 following categories are listed as "Slavophones ex Patriarchics" (76.100 -5.53%) ,"Slavophones ex Exarchics" (97.800-7.11%) and "Slavophones under migration to Bulgaria" (11.000)


Then come the Vlachs 34.500 "Hellenizontes"(=Greek feeling) -2.5% ,and 11.300 "Rumazinontes"(=Romanian feeling) -0.8%

65.000 Jews and 1.800 Albanians.


Sources are listed below.

[Coastal]

After Russian-Turkish war at 1877, Russians invaded whole Crimea, Ukraine, Georgia and surroundings. After that, they expelled 100.000s of Tatars by force, both Christians(Urums) and Muslim Tatars because all of them was Turkish speaking people. Most of them migrated to Anatolia and thats when the first Tatars came to today`s Turkey. Some of them gone to Aegean Macedonia as the article states.

After the 1924 population exchange, the assimilation process undergone and they became descendants of ancient Greeks like all other immigrants of Greece!

From Russia ,means exactly this : "from Russia"-not from Anatolia .

You speak about some Tatar or Caucasian ppl who migrated from Russian territory to Anatolia.
(I have a Turkish friend who lives in Souther Turkey but descends from Russian part of the Black Sea.)

The Greek refugees from Russia at that period were at the most Greeks who were expelled -themselves,or at least not further back than their parents- some years before from Trebizond,Samsous,and other parts of Pontus by the Ottoman empire.
The expulsions begun in the late 19th century ,and the most were driven out during the 1st WW -1914-1918.
So..they moved from southern Black Sea ,were their ancestors lived for centuries..to the Northern Black Sea (Russia)

From Russia ,they migrated to Greece after the Communist Revolution and the consequent civil war (1917-1923)

These are the 11.500 people mentioned -nothing to do with some kind of Tatars.

[Orfej]

First of all i d like to greet the forum..since this is my first post here

I ll contribute my 2 cents for this topic.
The following is a charter of the population of the Greek part of Macedonia in 1925:


Unfortunately i didnt find a translated in English version.
The numbers almost agree with the above estimations -

The Greek Refugees seem to constitute 44.15% (607.000) of the total population.
Local Greeks of Macedonia (listed simply as "Greeks" ) are counted to 480.000 -35%.

The 3 following categories are listed as "Slavophones ex Patriarchics" (76.100 -5.53%) ,"Slavophones ex Exarchics" (97.800-7.11%) and "Slavophones under migration to Bulgaria" (11.000)


Then come the Vlachs 34.500 "Hellenizontes"(=Greek feeling) -2.5% ,and 11.300 "Rumazinontes"(=Romanian feeling) -0.8%

65.000 Jews and 1.800 Albanians.


Sources are listed below.

On another thread Mr Coastal was trying to convince everyone that he was not relying on data collected by nationalists( like the Bulgarian Kanchov), but here we see him presenting data collected from Greek officials about the ethnicity of the people living in their recently annexed territory of Macedonia. I’m sure that he thinks that these Greek officials were not subjective in their presentations and that the data reflects the real situation at the time. Of course if one looks at the statistics at the time, the overall opinion is that the number of Greek speakers doesn’t amount to more then 10% of the population in Macedonia, which in numbers is around 200 000 – 250 000 people. The nationalistic Greeks managed to inflate those number to 480 000(not that it was their first time, some Greeks have inflated them to 600 000)! That’s double from the real numbers! Kanchov was surely subjective and counted less Greek speakers, but he was not so ridiculous to do what these Greek nationalists did. I don’t even want to start about the background of those ``Greek speakers`` in the past.
One more thing – I’m really interested to know how did the Greek authorities knew which Vlachs were pro-Greek and which were pro-Romanian in 1925? Did they went from door to door and asked?

[Daskalot]

On another thread Mr Coastal was trying to convince everyone that he was not relying on data collected by nationalists( like the Bulgarian Kanchov), but here we see him presenting data collected from Greek officials about the ethnicity of the people living in their recently annexed territory of Macedonia. I’m sure that he thinks that these Greek officials were not subjective in their presentations and that the data reflects the real situation at the time. Of course if one looks at the statistics at the time, the overall opinion is that the number of Greek speakers doesn’t amount to more then 10% of the population in Macedonia, which in numbers is around 200 000 – 250 000 people. The nationalistic Greeks managed to inflate those number to 480 000(not that it was their first time, some Greeks have inflated them to 600 000)! That’s double from the real numbers! Kanchov was surely subjective and counted less Greek speakers, but he was not so ridiculous to do what these Greek nationalists did. I don’t even want to start about the background of those ``Greek speakers`` in the past.
One more thing – I’m really interested to know how did the Greek authorities knew which Vlachs were pro-Greek and which were pro-Romanian in 1925? Did they went from door to door and asked?

Good observation Orfej, it will be most interesting to read Coastal's reply.
What you say is true, why should we take the Greek numbers as verbatim??

[Coastal]

On another thread Mr Coastal was trying to convince everyone that he was not relying on data collected by nationalists( like the Bulgarian Kanchov), but here we see him presenting data collected from Greek officials about the ethnicity of the people living in their recently annexed territory of Macedonia. I’m sure that he thinks that these Greek officials were not subjective in their presentations and that the data reflects the real situation at the time.

Orfej,your considerations and scepticism are not baseless at all!
One would expect from the Greek side to make the same fabrication in the data which were published .But these data were NOT to be widely known.
Kanchov published his work ,in order to prove in the World that Macedonia was really Bulgarian..just before the breakout of the Balkan wars,in an era of great antagonism for this land.
On the other hand the data above come from a secret "Summary statistics of the population " by the General Administration Macedonia.
It was not published in 1925..it was a report from the administration to the government.

So yes.I believe it is more reliable.

The official Greek census published in 1928 ,3 years later, counts only 81.000 speakers of "makedonoslavonic".
That's far away from the 162.506 total of the above report.

Of course if one looks at the statistics at the time, the overall opinion is that the number of Greek speakers doesn’t amount to more then 10% of the population in Macedonia, which in numbers is around 200 000 – 250 000 people.

Even Ivanof -another Bulgarian's government tool- gives for 1910 (18 years ago) the number of 260.857 Greeks (Greek speakers only).
He excludes parts of Pieria,Grevena and Thassos island (all inhabited exclusively by Greeks) and of course he lowers the Greek numbers.

One more thing – I’m really interested to know how did the Greek authorities knew which Vlachs were pro-Greek and which were pro-Romanian in 1925? Did they went from door to door and asked?

pro-Roumanians attended Romanian schools and churches.

[Orfej]

Orfej,your considerations and scepticism are not baseless at all!
One would expect from the Greek side to make the same fabrication in the data which were published .But these data were NOT to be widely known.
Kanchov published his work ,in order to prove in the World that Macedonia was really Bulgarian..just before the breakout of the Balkan wars,in an era of great antagonism for this land.
On the other hand the data above come from a secret "Summary statistics of the population " by the General Administration Macedonia.
It was not published in 1925..it was a report from the administration to the government.

So yes.I believe it is more reliable.

Please spare me from the crap. This statistics was nothing new, just another attempt to justify the already acquired territory. Furthermore it’s a reflection of Colokotronis( the Greek equivalent to Kanchov) statistics of Macedonia. He claimed that there are 480 000 Greeks in Macedonia. The truth be told Colokotronis was closer to the truth since he counted all the Patriarchists – regardless of speech, as Greeks. So he counted the 200 000 – 250 000 Greek speakers plus the Patriarchist Slavic and Vlach speakers and he came to the number of 480 000 Greeks( he surely inflated it a bit) On the other hand this joke of a statistical summary done by the General Administration claims that all the `Greeks` included in Colokotronis statistics were infact Greek – speakers. A joke indeed. Maybe it was better that they didn’t published the work, it would have probably caused a laughter among the intellectuals familiar with the situation in Macedonia.

The official Greek census published in 1928 ,3 years later, counts only 81.000 speakers of "makedonoslavonic".
That's far away from the 162.506 total of the above report.

Don’t worry, all of this speaks volumes about the reliability of the statistics given by either Greek historians or Greek officials

Even Ivanof -another Bulgarian's government tool- gives for 1910 (18 years ago) the number of 260.857 Greeks (Greek speakers only).
He excludes parts of Pieria,Grevena and Thassos island (all inhabited exclusively by Greeks) and of course he lowers the Greek numbers.

I don’t know about 1910, but I know that in 1914 in the Carnegie commission inquiry he counted 237 000 Greeks – and by Greeks he meant Greek speakers. In Aegean Macedonia they were even less cause there were some small pockets of Greek speakers living in towns in Vardar and Pirin Macedonia. And Kanchov may not have been perfect in his statistics, but he surely was the closest of all. You may not like the methodology he used – counting ethnic identity by mother tongue and you may argue that he was biased(as I said he surely deflated the number of Greek speakers a bit), still his statistics of the region remains unmatched. No one used such a detailed statistical analysis including in his work almost all the villages and towns across Macedonia.

pro-Roumanians attended Romanian schools and churches.

There were Romanian churches and schools in Greece in 1925? Really?

[Orfej]

Good observation Orfej, it will be most interesting to read Coastal's reply.
What you say is true, why should we take the Greek numbers as verbatim??

The Greek numbers are the last we want to take into consideration. They constantly changed the way they numbered the `Greeks`. In the beginning stage they counted them as according to membership in the Patriarchate and they counted them at 480 000. Later, totally out of their mind, they transferred all those members- a big part of whom were Slavic and Vlach speakers, to mean Greek speakers. So that’s how we have a number of 480 000 Greek speakers. To be less suspicious they also added some 76 000 Slavic Patriarchists and 34 500 Vlach Patriarchist. That would come to a total of 590 000 Patriarchist(480 000 + 34 500 + 76 000), while they themselves had counted that the Christian population in Aegean Macedonia was around 600 000(Colokotronis). That would mean that there were only 10 000 Exarchate members and none members of any other churches in Aegean Macedonia. It’s like they thought we wouldn’t notice their moves.
Add the constant deflation of numbers of Slavic speakers in their papers from 260 000 (before the Balkan wars) to something around 56 000 after the civil war (while in total there were no more the 80 000 expelled in that period), and you will understand their hilarious approach.
I would also want to mention the constant change of names that they used to describe this population in their borders. From `Bulgarians`, to `Voulgarizontes`, `to Macedonoslavic`, `Macedonian` , for today to have `Slavophone Greeks` as their official terminology. Ridiculous doesn’t it?

[Coastal]

I would also want to mention the constant change of names that they used to describe this population in their borders. From `Bulgarians`, to `Voulgarizontes`, `to Macedonoslavic`, `Macedonian` , for today to have `Slavophone Greeks` as their official terminology. Ridiculous doesn’t it?

Orfej ..Greeks were not the only ones to use different names about these populations.
Since you seem to have done some research by yourself do you believe that many others used the terminology -Macedonians- to describe the population?

You mentioned the Carnegie report. They have found you say ,237000 Greeks. Did they find any Macedonians?
Can you explain why not? Were they biased in favor of the Bulgarians? Why?

I am not questioning your ethnicity today-it would be ridiculous for me to do so..but since you are so critical towards the Greeks...shouldn't you at least be suspicious about that?

[Orfej]

Orfej ..Greeks were not the only ones to use different names about these populations.
Since you seem to have done some research by yourself do you believe that many others used the terminology -Macedonians- to describe the population?

You mentioned the Carnegie report. They have found you say ,237000 Greeks. Did they find any Macedonians?
Can you explain why not? Were they biased in favor of the Bulgarians? Why?

Don’t attempt to turn this subject on it’s head. It’s title `The Greek colonization of Macedonia since 1913` is clear enough for you to know that the questions you asked should be addressed on a different threat. Open it yourself or try to find one that speaks on that subject. Until then, try to focus on the big picture, not on a marginal part of my post which was just an extension of my thoughts.

I am not questioning your ethnicity today-it would be ridiculous for me to do so..but since you are so critical towards the Greeks...shouldn't you at least be suspicious about that?

How interesting, you think that you don’t question my ethnicity? Let me explain it to you as simple as i can. My ethnicity is my identity. The name Macedonia and Macedonian is part of my identity. Everyone that doesn’t recognize me as such (Macedonian) questions my ethnicity. Now you may recognize me as such, but your country and most of your people doesn’t. In the end, as i mentioned, open a different threat and we can discuss it there.

[Coastal]

Don’t attempt to turn this subject on it’s head. It’s title `The Greek colonization of Macedonia since 1913` is clear enough for you to know that the questions you asked should be addressed on a different threat. Open it yourself or try to find one that speaks on that subject. Until then, try to focus on the big picture, not on a marginal part of my post which was just an extension of my thoughts.



How interesting, you think that you don’t question my ethnicity? Let me explain it to you as simple as i can. My ethnicity is my identity. The name Macedonia and Macedonian is part of my identity. Everyone that doesn’t recognize me as such (Macedonian) questions my ethnicity. Now you may recognize me as such, but your country and most of your people doesn’t. In the end, as i mentioned, open a different threat and we can discuss it there.

Orfej,as i wrote before i don't doubt about your ethnicity,and i don't question it-therefor i don't intend to open a thread about it or any similar.
Of course,this does not mean that i believe someone should falsify the sources .
Whether we like them or not they are written and they cannot change.
I cannot for ex. magically turn Kanchov's listing from Bulgarians to Macedonians.
And the same goes for the overwhelming majority of scholars and institutes of the time,including the Carnegie comission.

------------

To the topic.
"Colonisation of Greek Macedonia" is an out of reality term.

Why?
1st)The Greek state didn't choose the Population exchange with Turkey.

2nd) Where the refugees were supposed to settle?
From Greek Macedonia ,left some 480.000-500.000 Turks.(out of 550.000 total)
Settled 630.000 Greeks. (out of 1.300.000 total)

3rd)Look the above map.
Florina region-the district with by far the highest percentage of Macedonians together with Kastoria (also high in numbers) receive by far the least refugees in Macedonia region!!
Kavala and Drama receive much more. Why? Because they had great numbers of Turks who left.

[Daskalot]

To the topic.
"Colonisation of Greek Macedonia" is an out of reality term.

No it is not, it is the very term your very own GOVERNMENT used, see here:

Source: see page two(2) of this thread.

Why?
1st)The Greek state didn't choose the Population exchange with Turkey.

Are you telling us that it was enforced by an outside power, ie global community?

2nd) Where the refugees were supposed to settle?
From Greek Macedonia ,left some 480.000-500.000 Turks.(out of 550.000 total)
Settled 630.000 Greeks. (out of 1.300.000 total)

Of course they were settled in the lands where there was no Greek majority, thus making them Greek from then on.

3rd)Look the above map.
Florina region-the district with by far the highest percentage of Macedonians together with Kastoria (also high in numbers) receive by far the least refugees in Macedonia region!!
Kavala and Drama receive much more. Why? Because they had great numbers of Turks who left.

I would not define all people who were forced to leave their homes as Turks, but rather as Muslims. The evicted Muslims were of many ethnicities, among them were also Muslim Macedonians and the Muslim Valaades whom were more "Greek" from a linguistical point of view than the Baptized Turks form the Karaman region.

[Onur]

To the topic.
"Colonisation of Greek Macedonia" is an out of reality term.

Why?
1st)The Greek state didn't choose the Population exchange with Turkey.

This is what Greek propaganda tells you but it`s not the truth. Read my post about this issue and learn who asked for population exchange and why;

http://www.macedoniantruth.org/forum/showthread.php?p=47836#post47836

Look what Venizelos said to the newspapers at October 1922, just days after the last Greek soldier kicked out from Izmir at September 1922. A year before the Lausanne treaty of population exchange;




For him, it was a necessity to create a stable and "Greek" Macedonia and i believe he was right. I don't think Greece would be able to keep Aegean Macedonia inside it`s borders today if he wouldn't settle close to million immigrants there at 1924. The population in Greece before the 1924`s exchange simply wasn't enough to keep and control all the vast territories with Albanian and Macedonian speaking people living on it.

[Coastal]

For him, it was a necessity to create a stable and "Greek" Macedonia and i believe he was right. I don't think Greece would be able to keep Aegean Macedonia inside it`s borders today if he wouldn't settle close to million immigrants there at 1924. The population in Greece before the 1924`s exchange simply wasn't enough to keep and control all the vast territories with Albanian and Macedonian speaking people living on it.

I fail to see how in any way the above picture confirms that Greece demanded an Exchange.

Any human being with common sense would think that since 500 thousand Turks were exchanged with 1.300+ thousand Greeks ...those who lost from this ,were the Greeks.

Now what are you trying to tell me...that the Greek state could not "keep in control" some 150-200 maximum Macedonian speakers ,of which half of them claimed Greek nationality,and fought the Bulgarian's exarchate.

That's why 1,5 MILLION Greeks should leave Smyrna,Eastern Thrace,Western Asia Minor,Pontus were their ancestors had been living some 2.000 (two thousand) years before your arrival.
They should leave the wealthy "Giaur-Izmir" their neoclassical houses,the reach land of their forfathers...and climb up the rocky and infertile soil of Drama and Florina ,to live in mud-built huts.

What a brilliant theory!