Albanians in Greece

[Spartan]

How does it come to be, a Macedonian follows Greek soccer?
This must be an interesting story...

Sorry to go off-topic mods
Move this to the football thread if you wish.

[The LION will ROAR]

Modern Greece and the Macedonian Heritage – Part 19 - Fifty authors can“t still all be wrong!

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/101938

Risto Stefov
May 10, 2009
There are some staunch Modern Greeks out there that still don“t get it! Being told that you are a "Greek" or pretending to be a Greek does not really make you a Greek, at least not the kind of Greek you think you are!

We have shown over and over again that "anyone" can become a Greek by accepting the "Greek indoctrination" and that is to learn to speak the Greek language, feel Greek and "pretend" to be a descendent of the so-called "Ancient Greeks". You can learn to speak Greek and feel Greek as much as you want but you can“t "pretend" to be something you are not! People should not "pretend" to be something they are not if they want to be taken seriously! Acting like you are the descendents of the so-called "Ancient Greeks", speaking their language and feeling like them does not make you the descendants of the Ancient Greeks! It would be to your advantage to not only learn "the truth" about yourselves but to either embrace it or accept to reject it. Modern Greeks are the descendents of the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs that immigrated to Greece during the 11th to the 14th centuries AD and all other people that subsequently settled in that region ever since.

The ancient Greeks that you think of and speak of so fondly died off even before Rome conquered Achaea (Greece proper) about two centuries before Christ. When the Romans walked into Athens they found a population made up mostly of slaves. These slaves became the new citizens of Achaea after they were freed by Rome. Unfortunately they too perished over time and that is precisely why Byzantine Emperors and later Ottoman Sultans had to repopulate Achaea first with Slav immigrants and later with Albanians and Vlachs.

Therefore the true ancestors of the Modern Greeks are the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs and all others that landed in Greece since the disappearance of the so-called ancient Greeks.

Here is evidence from fifty different authors that proves my point that Modern Greeks today are NOT the descendents of the "Ancient Greeks" and are the descendents of the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs.

1. "The [Greek] claim to southern Albania rests entirely on the assumption that the majority of the population is Greek. The Greeks are stated to number 120,000 and Albanians 80,000. But who are the “Greeks“? At least five sixths of them, if not more are Christian Albanians of the Orthodox faith, Albanians in sentiment and language, who because they acknowledge the Patriarch of Constantinople are declared to be Greek in point of “national consciousness“." ("The Nineteenth Century and After XIX-XX a Monthly Review", founded by James Knowles, Vol. LXXXVI, July-December 1919, page 645.)

2. "Did the Greeks constitute a race apart from the Albanians the Slavs and the Vlachs? Yes and no. High school students were told that the “other races“, i.e. the Slavs the Albanians and the Vlachs “having been Hellenized with the years in terms of mores and customs, are now being assimilated into the Greeks“." ("Greece in the 20th Century", Editors Theodore A. Couloumbis, Theodore Kariots, Fotini Bellou, page 24.)

3. "The Turkish village which formally clustered around the base of the Acropolis [old Athens] has not disappeared: it forms a whole quarter of the town.

An immense majority of the population in this quarter is composed of Albanians." ("Greece and the Greeks of the Present Day", by Edmund About, page 160.)

4. "Through the end of the revolution in 1830, Greeks, including most of the nineteenth-century nationalists, seemed to have had a vague but firm sense of continuity from ancient to modern Greece, though this was not articulated in racial terms but on the basis of a common language, history and consciousness. In effect at this time, whoever called themselves a Greek was a Greek. It is because of this that many Greek-speaking Albanians, Slavs, Rumanians and Vlachs were easily assimilated and indeed became important players in Greek patriotism at the time." ("The Empty Cradle of Democracy", by Alexandra Halkias, page 59.)

5. "The first Greek who had a plan for insurrection and for a liberated Greece was Rhigas of Valestino.

Rhigas was the author of poems, revolutionary proclamations and a constitution…

In this document he spoke of a sovereign people of the proposed state as including “without distinction of religion and language – Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, Turks and every other race“.

It seems that in their minds the distinction between “Greek“ and “Orthodox“ was still blurred." ("Appleton“s Annual Cyclopedia and register of important events 1901", Third Series Volume VI, page 113.)

6. "There cannot be an Athenian alive today who can trace a direct line of descent from classical times to the present day without leaving Athens. Because of numerous and protracted foreign occupations, true Athenians were a relatively small minority even in the Age of Pericles. In a later period, the city was suffering from severe depopulation and was re-stocked with Albanians. At the time of Greek independence in 1834, Athens was a miserable village with a population of only 6,000." ("Insight Guides Athens Greece Series", page 42.)

7. "It is one of a group made famous in the Greek revolution of 1821 by the bravery of its Albanian settlers, in defense of a country which they had never adopted for their own till this moment of danger came.

They brought to it moreover, the hoarded wealth of many years. Albanian captains, Albanian ships and Albanian gold became the strength of the Greek and the dread of the Turk. The successful close of the revolution found them as firmly allied with the Greek nationality as they have been previously alien to it, and there are now no names more honoured and beloved in Athens, no families more influential in its polite circles, than those of the Albanian leaders in the war of 1821, the Tombazis, the Miaulis the Condouriottis." ("The Atlantic Monthly: A magazine of literature, science, art and politics Vol. XLIX, January 1882, page 31.)

8. "Among the numerous islands of the Egian, arise several barren rocks, some of which are however gifted by nature with small and commodious heavens. Of this number are Hydra, Spezzia and Ipsara, the first two close to the Eastern shore of the Peloponnesus, and the latter not far from Scio, on the Asiatic coast. Tyranny and Want had driven some families, whose origin, like that of nearly all the peasants, who inhabited proper Greece, was Albanian, to take refuge on these desolate crags, where they built villages and sought a precarious existence by fishing." ("The Greek Revolution; in origin and progress", by Edward Blaquiere Esq., page 21.)

9. "In reality however, just before the Greek war of independence, most Greeks still referred to themselves as “Romans. Vlachavas, the priest rebel leader who rose against the Ottomans, declared, “A Romneos I was born a Romneos I will die." ("Bloodlines from the Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism", by Vamik Volkan, page 121..

10. "Constantinople and all continental Greece were for centuries ruled and occupied by the Romans, and during many subsequent centuries invaded and colonized by Slavs. The Crusades and the Latin conquest brought a large influx of western Europeans, commonly called Franks, and, in later times, extensive Albanian settlements were made in Greek districts. Clearly, the modern Greek must be of very mixed blood." ("Turkey in Europe" by Sir Charles Elliot, page 267.)

11. "But it has been argued that since the modern day Greeks are not the descendents of the ancient Greeks: “The Star of Vergina is not a Greek symbol, except in the sense that it happens to have been found in the territory of the present-day Greek state…“." ("Experimenting with Democracy Regime change in the Balkans", edited by Geoffrey Pridham and Tom Gallagher, page 271.)

12. "Contemporary historians state the Emperor Basilius also was a Sclavonian; many cities bearing Sclavonian appellations still exist in Greece, as, for instance, Platza, Stratza, Lutzana,…" ("The Foreign Quarterly Review Vol. XXVI", published in October M. DCCC. XL., 1841, page 73.)

13. "By the fourteenth century Orthodox Christian Arvanites had made their way into the Greek thema of the Byzantine Empire, which largely comprised the land that now constitutes Greece. They first came to Attica as early as 1883…They did not complete their immigration until 1759, when Sultan Murat III offered them land in Athens…Thus the Arvanites were already inhabiting Athens when the city became the capital of Greece in 1834." ("Fragments of Death Fables of Identity An Athenian Anthropography" by Nani Panourgia, page 27.)

14. "I have already said, and I will repeat it, that not one-fifth of the present population can with justice be called Greeks. The remainder are Slavonians, Albanians and Turks, with a slight infusion of Venetian blood." ("Travels in Greece and Russia", by Bayard Tailor, 1872, page 262.)

15. "It should be stressed, however, that the Greeks as an ethnic community during this period [1840“s] included many Grecophone or Hellenized Vlachs, Serbs or Orthodox Albanians." ("Greece and the Balkans Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment", edited by Dimitris Tziovas, page6.)

16. "All Greek soldiers are required to be able to read and write, and if a conscript on joining has not acquired those rudiments of education, he is put to school. Not withstanding, the educational efforts of the government, as many as 30 percent proven fifteen years or so ago to be completely illiterate, while not more than 25 per cent had advanced beyond the “three R“s“. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that these conscripts included both Albanians from the settlements in Attica and other parts of the Kingdom and pastoral Koutso-Vlachs, all of whom habitually speak their own dialects and learn Greek only as a foreign tongue." ("Greece of the Hellenes", by Lucy M. J. Garnett, 1914, pages 33 and 34.)

17. "I could speak Turkish, and the Macedonian dialect, besides my own Greek tongue, and as a curious boy in the holidays I had been here and there, wishing to know more of the world round me and the people who lived in other villages than mine.

Being neither Turkish nor Greek, we called them Bulgarian, but their language is not Bulgarian, but the Macedonian dialect, and I found lovable people among them, honest, hospitable and kind." ("When I was a Boy in Greece" by George Demetrios, pages 131 and 132.)

18. "The migration of the Albanians is the best attested and in many ways the most instructive of migrations into Greece….

We had difficulty staying because they were rather suspicious of us, but we stayed with a man who talked Greek as his main language, although he talked to his wife in Albanian…

The ancestors of these people probably came to the Epidaurus in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but they were still talking Albanian as their mother tongue in 1930….

Albanian was the language they talked among themselves, but they could also talk Greek. This was their second language although they lived in Greece….

The one in Epirus which was still Albanian in its customs and its language had probably been there since about 1400…

A group of 10,000 Albanians with their families and their flocks appeared there, and asked if they could be admitted to the Peloponnesus. They were accepted by Theodore, who was the principle ruler of the Peloponnesus…" ("Greece Old and New", by Nicholas Hammond, edited by Tom Winnifrith and Penelope Murray, Pages 39 to 44.)

19. "…so, in the Middle Ages, these Albanian mountaineers have brought both war like spirit, bright costume, and beauty of person, to refresh the Hellenic race. There are still, even in Attica, districts where Albanian is the common language; there are Albanian names famous in Greek annals, especially in the great war of independence (1821-1831) and even among the sailors of Hydra, so famed for their commercial enterprise and their deeds of war, the chief families were Albanian in origin." ("Greek Pictures drawn with pen and pencil" by J. P. Mahaffy, M.A. D.D., 1890, pages 20 and 21.)

20. "Groups of men in stately Albanian costume, with their grand walk and graceful air, stalk up and down with eastern impassibility, price an article, call for a “fotia“ (brazier of coals for lighting cigarettes) , at the cafés, or converse in the strange patois of Greece about the last conclusion of the “vouli“ or house of delegates." ("Greek Vignettes a sail in the Greek Seas, Summer of 1877", by James Albert Herrison, page 148.)

21. "In the 1770“s a fiery Orthodox preacher, the monk Kosmas of Aetolia, tried to stem the tide of mass conversions to Islam in the Northern Greek lands by founding Greek schools in a score of villages in Thessaly, Epirus and Macedonia, where the language had long been abandoned for Albanian, Vlach or Slav, and obliged peasants to speak only Greek." ("Greece the Modern Sequel from 1821 to the Present", by John S. Koliopoulos and Thanos M. Veremis, page 159.)

22. "…following the alleged discovery of Slavic buildings by the German excavator at Olympia. The claims were answered by Paparrigopoulos himself, by reinstating his 1843 position that there was indeed a Slavic presence in the Peloponnesus in the Middle Ages, but that the Greeks need not worry because the Slavs were culturally absorbed…" ("The Nation and its Ruins", by Yannis Hamilakis, page 115.)

23. "In 1358 the Albanians overran Epirus, Acarnania and Anatolia and established two principalities under their leaders…

Naupactas fell into their control in 1378…

Other Albanians and Vlachs invaded the Catalan principality of Boeotia and Attica, and a great many Albanians settled there as peasant-farmers in 1368 and later….

The penetration of the Greek mainland which we have described occurred during the hundred or more years after 1325." ("Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas", by Nicholas G. L. Hammond, page 59.)

24. "When arriving by airplane at Athens, one lands at the new airport at Spata. Spata is a town situated in the Messogia region that bears and Arvanite name that means “axe“ or “sword“ (in Greek “spaps“, spaya from which derives the Albanian Spata). The term “Arvanite“ is the medieval equivalent of “Albanian“. It is retained today for the descendants of the Albanian tribes that migrated to the Greek lands during the period covering two centuries, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth." ("Hellenism Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity", edited by Katerina Zacharia, page 230.)
25. "With them it would be a resurrection, accomplished, no doubt, after vast pains and many troubles, the more so since the Greeks are a composite people among whom the descendents of the veritable Greeks of old are in great minority. The majority are of Albanian and Suliot blood, races which even the Romans found untamable." ("In Greek Waters: a story of the Grecian War of Independence (1821-1827), by G. A. Henty, 1893, page 40.)

26. "Where are we to look for the descendents of the Greeks of old? Travelers tell us that, as late as the sixteenth century, Athens was but a castle with a small village; and that Sparta, divided by two tribes of the Slavi, the Ezeriti and the Milingi, had not only lost her ancient name, but it was impossible to recognize the site in which she had stood of old." ("History of the Island of Corfu" by Henry Jervis-White Jervis ESQ., page 250.)

27. "General interest was first aroused by a controversy as to the racial derivation of modern Greeks. The war of Independence had won the sympathy of Europe; and it was a rude shock both to Greece and to her champions when Fallmerayer announced that her inhabitants were virtually Slavs. The race of the Hellenes he declared in his “History of the Morea“ was routed out, and Athens was unoccupied from the sixth to the tenth century. Only its literature and a few ruins survived to tell that the Greek people had ever existed. What the Slavs had began the Albanians completed." ("History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century", by G. P. Gooch, 1918, page 491.)

28. "There were few Muslims here; the inhabitants largely of Albanian stock, were only imperfectly assimilated into the Greek nation…" ("Politics in Modern Greece", by Keith R. Legg, page 48.)

"The term “Greek“ differentiates the language spoken by inhabitants of modern Greece from the languages of the surrounding countries; but there is disagreement on what the Greek language was, is, or should be. At the time of independence, the range of local dialects was significant; substantial portions of the population spoke Albanian." ("Politics in Modern Greece", by Keith R. Legg, page 86.)

29. "…followed by violence, recourse was had to arms, and the two elder brothers united against Vely, the offspring of a slave; who being forced to expatriate himself, embraced the perilous profession of those Albanian knights errant, more commonly known by the appellation of kleftes or brigands." ("The Life of Ali Pasha of Jannina, 1823, page 26.)

30. "There is the case of Karamanlides, a predominantly Turkish-speaking Christian Orthodox people, who were forced to go to Greece although they did not necessarily identify “ethnically“ with the Greeks. At the time of the exchange they numbered as many as 400,000." ("Mediating the Nation News, Audiences and the Politics of Identity", Mirca Madianou, page 31.)

31, "Morea…as Fallmerayer traces it back to the Slavic word “more“, the sea which nearly encircles the Morea. The Morea forms the most southern part of the Kingdom of Greece and is divided into the monarchies of Argolis, Corinth, Lakonis, Messenia, Archadia, Achaea and Elis.

Overrun by the Goths and Vandals, it became prey, in the second half of the 8th c. to bands of Slavic invaders who found it wasted by war and pestilence." ("International Cyclopedia a Compendium of Human Knowledge", American Editor-in-Chief Richard Gleason Green, 1890, page 204.)

32. "This point is made in almost all publications on Albanian nationalism (e.g. Skendi 1967 and 1980). In the nineteenth century, the Greek historian Constantinos Paparrigopoulos considered the Albanians a “race“ that could be acculturated into Hellenism. His viewpoint was greatly influenced by the considerable Albanian contribution to the Greek war of independence (1821-1828)." ("Nationalism Globalization and Orthodoxy" by Victor Roudometof, page 156.)

33. "Rhigas of Valentino….author of poems, revolutionary proclamations and a constitution…

In this document he spoke of a sovereign people of the proposed state as including “without distinction of religion and language – Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, Turks and every other race“." ("Nations and States", by Hugh Seton-Watson, page 113.)

34. "As of 2002 more than 98,000 foreign pupils were enrolled in Greek schools, accounting for almost 9 percent of the overall school population. As regards nationality, 72 percent are from Albania.

Clearly, Albanians are not unknown to Greeks and the new relationships emerging from the contemporary migratory context can be seen as superimposing themselves into a pre-existing trans-Balkan context." ("The New Albanian Migration", edited by Russell King, Nicola Mai and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, page 155.)

35 "Next to them in this respect are the modern Greeks, who, for the most part, are of Sclavonian origin, and, where they are not purely Sclavonian, are a cross-breed in which Sclavonian enters very largely." ("The Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science for the year 1843", Vol. XIV, page 246.)

36. "The modern Greeks are largely of Slavic origin. They are not the descendents of the ancient Greeks. That noble race, greatly mixed with barbarian blood during the middle ages, was almost completely destroyed in the course of the frequent uprisings against Turkish rule. Slavic immigrants gradually repopulated the country." ("The Popular Science Monthly", edited by J. McKeen Cattell", Volume LXXV, July to December 1909, page 591.)

37. "There was little interest as to the nationality of the rayahs while Turkish rule was strong. They were nearly all Christians of the Byzantine type, those in Europe at least, and were hence regarded as one people, for oriental theocracy cannot conceive of nationality apart from religion. They themselves knew the differences in their origins and in such traditions as they had: some were Slavs, some Vlachs and some Albanians…" ("Political Science Quarterly" edited by the faculty of science of Columbia University, Volume twenty-third, 1908, page 307.)

38. "Since the Christian era, as we have said, a successive downpour of foreigners from the north into Greece has ensued. In the sixth century came the Avars and the Slavs, bringing death and disaster. A more potent and lasting influence upon the country was probably produced by the slower and more peaceful infiltration of the Slavs into Thessaly and Epirus from the end of the seventh century onward.

The most important immigration of all is probably that of the Albanians, who, from the thirteenth century until the advent of the Turks incessantly overran the land." ("The Races of Europe a Sociological Study", by William Z. Ripley PhD, 1910, page 408.)

39. "When the Macedonians became rulers of Greece, Athens had twenty-one thousand citizens, ten thousand resident aliens and four-hundred thousand slaves." ("Race or Mongrel", by Alfred P. Schultz, page 86.)

"The resident aliens were mainly Aryan-Hemitic-Semetic-Egyptian-Negroid mongrels." ("Race or Mongrel", by Alfred P. Schultz, page 87.)

"In the course of time the Hellenic blood was corrupted to a still greater extent. In 146 BC the Romans conquered Greece…When Mummius took Corinth…All the men were killed, the women and children were sold into slavery. Later the Goths invaded Greece…laid waste the land, and expelled or exterminated the inhabitants." ("Race or Mongrel", by Alfred P. Schultz, pages 88 and 89.)

"The only difference between modern Greeks and the other Balkanacs lies in the fact that the environment of the modern Greeks is the environment of the Hellenes. The environment, however, has no power whatsoever to change the mongrel into a race, and the Greeks have not been changed by it." ("Race or Mongrel", by Alfred P. Schultz, page 93.)

40. "The ethnographic record certainly shows that Rhigas could have identified as both Vlach and Greek, and even preferred one over another in different circumstances. The Koutsovlach contribution to Greek independence is well attested." ("Modern Greece a Cultural Poetics", by Vangelis Calotychos, page 44.)

"He consequently never traveled to Greece to implement the second part of his plan. Like many Philhellenes and Diaspora figures Rhigas never did set foot in Greece, which was fitting for one whose image of the place bore many characteristics of a European discourse located and produced outside of the Greek mainland." ("Modern Greece a Cultural Poetics", by Vangelis Calotychos, page 47.)

41. "In the last year of the 15th century, and the opening years of the 16th, when the Morea was again the battlefield of the Turks and Venetians, the occupants of the plain of Argos and portions of Attica were practically exterminated, and Albanian colonists began to reoccupy the lands." ("The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece", by Rennell Rodd, 1892, page 17.)

42. "Modern Greece is so flimsy and fragile, that it goes to pieces entirely when confronted with the roughest fragment of the old. But there is very little of it, and if you choose you may see exactly what the Greeks of the 5th century saw, and, the people of Athens are, of course, no more Athenian than I am." ("In Byron“s Shadow Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination", by David Roessel, page 163.)

43. "This revival also allowed the Byzantines to re-colonize the Greek mainland. The success of that effort would prove crucial to the survival of Greek culture in future centuries, after the other lands had fallen away. Having overrun nearly all the Greek mainland, the cities, and the islands by the tenth century the Slavs in Greece have been converted to Orthodox Christianity and thoroughly Hellenized." ("Sailing from Byzantium How a Lost Empire Shaped the World", by Colin Wells, page 184.)

44. "The Vlachs, on the contrary, descendents of the Romanized people of the Balkan peninsula, live in considerable numbers in the mountains of northern and central Greece." ("The Scottish Geographical Magazine", volume XIII, 1897, page 370.)

45. "Europe“s affinity with ancient Greece left the newborn nation of Greece in an awkward double bind. Identifying ancient Greece as the “childhood of Europe“ Winkelmann gave the patrimony of Greece to western Europe, leaving only more modern sights of heritage to the modern Greeks. Michael Herzfeld suggests that “the west supported the Greeks on their implicit assumption that the Greeks would reciprocally accept the role of living ancestors of European civilization“." ("Possessors and Possessed", by Wendy M. K. Shaw, page 66.)

46. "It is simply not plausible to suggest that the bulk of Greek speaking Roman citizens in the Middle Ages, let alone the former Turkish subjects of 19th century Greece, “lived like, ancient Greeks." ("Macedonia and Greece the Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation", by John Shea, page 95.)

47. "Not less remarkable than the small size of Hellas was the small size of the Hellenes themselves. But it is much more easy to trace the boundaries of the one upon the modern map than it is to trace the blood of the other in the bodies of the modern inhabitants.

We have no accurate record of the proportions of free citizens who alone constituted the true Hellenes, but they were at most a small minority among the large population of helots and slaves." ("The Nineteenth Century a Monthly Review", edited by James Knowles, Vol. VI, July-December 1879, page 932.)

48. "The Albanians of Hydra and Spatsae, many of whom could not even speak Greek, regarded themselves as Greek because their allegiance was with the Orthodox Church." ("That Greece Might Still be Free", by William St. Clair, page 9.)

49. "Here is the ultimate Greek tragedy: that of a country forced to treat everything familiar at the time of the nation-state“s foundation as “foreign“ while importing a culture largely invented – or at least – redesigned by German classicists of the late eighteenth early nineteenth centuries. For many decades, and almost without interruption, Greeks were forced to put aside music, art and language that were deemed too tainted by the “oriental“ influences of Ottoman, Arab, Slavic and Albanian culture; to forget the partially Albanian roots of Athens and its environs…" ("The Body Impolitic" by Michael Herzfeld, page 9.)

50. "The philhellenes – the word means “the admirers of the Greeks“ – who began to lobby for Greek freedom were struck by the contrast between the idea of ancient Greek freedom and the servitude of the modern Greeks, who were usually assumed to be direct descendents of Pericles and company. Philhellenes generally moved at a distance from reality: they were concerned only with the myth of Athens and were capable of ignoring anything which tended to tarnish the glamour." ("Athens from Ancient Ideal to Modern City", by Robin Waterfield, page 296.)

Given that the Modern Greeks are NOT the descendents of any "ancient people" as they pretend to be, then how do they justify the invasion, occupation, partition and annexation of Macedonian territories? How do they justify telling the Macedonians what they can and can“t call themselves? Why are these imposters and charlatans still being taken seriously? But, as long as we pay attention to them and argue with them, they will continue to argue back and to "pretend" that they are the descendents of the so-called Ancient Greeks.

For those who are still not convinced that the Modern Greek identity is an artificial creation, please continue to read this series of articles.

Author“s note:

Dear Macedonians, one way to defend ourselves from the Greek onslaught and gain back our identity and dignity is to fight back to the level to which the Greeks have reduced us; that is to attack their identity as they have attacked ours. We need prove nothing to them except to expose them as the artificial identity they truly are and to uncover their design to wipe us out in order to usurp our Macedonian heritage.

To be Continued.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Well done Risto, good compilation.

[Pelister]

Still one of my favourite. It cuts to the chase.

49. "Here is the ultimate Greek tragedy: that of a country forced to treat everything familiar at the time of the nation-state“s foundation as “foreign“ while importing a culture largely invented – or at least – redesigned by German classicists of the late eighteenth early nineteenth centuries. For many decades, and almost without interruption, Greeks were forced to put aside music, art and language that were deemed too tainted by the “oriental“ influences of Ottoman, Arab, Slavic and Albanian culture; to forget the partially Albanian roots of Athens and its environs…" ("The Body Impolitic" by Michael Herzfeld, page 9.)

[Risto the Great]

To be fair, it is a very bitter pill for many modern Greeks to swallow.
How could they honestly accept that the education system that gave them a sense of belonging to their modern nation was flawed and replete with lies?

Even Macedonians I know who were educated in the Greek schooling system find some of this stuff so hard to accept. The idea of Hellenic continuity is such a romantic myth. I can understand why the world wants to believe it exists. But being a Macedonian, I simply cannot entertain the idea of letting a myth of epic proportions (Hellenic continuity) get in the way of my identity.

[osiris]

exactly rtg, given the fact that classical greece was also created to be something so much more than it really was, a type of perfect arayan culture of supermen, why wouldnt the modern greece want to consider themselves their decendents.
but as my father always points out imagine if modern greece was as successful as italy, they would be even more insufferable, the wannabbe hellenes.

[TrueMacedonian]

If modern 'greece' was never created there would have been an independent Macedonia complete and without later parts like 'Vardar, Pirin, Aegean, and Mala Prespa'.

[TrueMacedonian]

YouTube - THE ALBANIAN CULTURE OF MODERN GREECE!

[Daskalot]

Athens populated by many Arvanites in the 19th century!





Source: "Capitalizes: Webster’s Quotations, Facts and Phrases" By Icon Group International, Inc., page 170.


Why do many Greeks claim an unbroken line to Antiquity when no such exists?

[TrueMacedonian]

And if we examine what these Albanians claim to be descendents of from the 16th century then we know the modern "greek" is in trouble with trying to find a link to antiquity.

[TrueMacedonian]

Interesting timeline of Athens;


Athens: A History, From Ancient Ideal To Modern City By Robin Waterfield

[Risto the Great]

Sounds like the boy scouts would sack Athens to earn a badge.

[osiris]

EllA re rtg they are not albanians they are arvaniti, they are grik albanians like grik macedonians, they are all from the north to they south east and the west all griks

NO ALBANIANS REALLY GREEKS LIKE THE COFFEE AND THE EASTER

[TrueMacedonian]

page 383

[Risto the Great]

Albanians in Greece

And about Albanians, my people. I have no clue about any Albanian who report Macedonians to the Greek authorities for speaking Macedonian. As far as I know, there are no Albanian compact villages in what is Aegean Macedonia (there are just a few villages in Fllorinė or as you call Lerinė). I think you're making a little mistake because it's not fair to prejudge all the people for two-three individuals. You cannot blame all of Albanians (who are traditionally anti-Greek) with some Albanian emmigrants there...maybe the reason why they reported (!?) to the Greek authorities was because they wanted to show some 'loyalty' to the 'Greek' authorities in hope to find some jobs or not to be banished from labor. Do you realize what I'am saying? Albanians (in Greece) have no better treat than Macedonians have. Albanians are assimilated, their language (Arvanitika) in some regions is dying fast, there are no schools in Arvanitika, no political rights, no recognize of their national identity.

Albanians by their nature are friendly and they always supported other people who share the same destiny. You know Albanians did their best to support Macedonian revolutionaries during Krusheva's Uprising. Albanians fought valiantly side with Macedonians against Ottoman troops. And Macedonians appreciated this...and that's why in Krusheva's short-lived Assembly Albanians had 40% of parlamentary seats. Later, during 1913's Anti-Serbian revolt Albanians fought together with Macedonians of Dibra.

Epirot, I would like to discuss this further here if you do not mind.