Australian position on Macedonia

[EgejskaMakedonia]

This is so infuriating. How can Rudd lower him self to such a despicable level. What does he really have against the Macedonians to be saying this type of thing. This is just unexceptionable by a FM and former leader of Australia. This comment by Rudd has well and truly established a one sided affair in the Macedonian and Athenian dispute as well as the Turkish and Athenian dispute.

Is it now appropriate to call for a protest? i think it is.

In regards to a protest, what if both the Macedonian and Turkish communities in Melbourne, for example, worked together to organise a rally.
Surely we have a common view on Greece, and this way the media coverage across the world and even the message is likely to be much stronger.
Not to mention the attendance numbers would be given a welcome boost.

EDIT: My bad, didn't see Onur's suggestion earlier. Great idea.

[Vangelovski]

Indigen sums up the problem very well - for as long as Macedonia's vassal politicians ACCEPT the FYROM terminology and continue the negotiations, countries like Australia will continue to refer to it as FYROM. Further, those countries that have recognised Macedonia by its state name on a bilateral basis, WILL call it whatever it agrees to with Greece when that final capitulation is made.

[Voltron]

I just checked from internet, there are about 170.000 Turks in in there and half of them are Turkish Cypriots who has been forced to migrate there between 1963-1974 because of Greek EOKA actions. Greeks even gave money to them to leave Cyprus for Australia.

Are you for real ? Turkey has been colonizing Cyprus with Kurds and all kinds of Asiatic settlers ! You have displaced the native Turkish Cypriots yourselves and you have the audacity to say it was done by EOKA ?

[lavce pelagonski]

George ther is no point in emailing him I sent him a letter when he became prime minister Im still waiting on his reply

[George S.]

Both Indigen & Vangelovski make some good points.

[Onur]

I can understand if the Australian Government has friendly relations with Greece for whatever reason however why would they tarnish relations with Macedonia and Turkey??

Simple question to answer.

It`s some kind of necessity to tarnish relations with Turkey and Macedonia if you wanna have friendly relations with Greece because Greek policy requires this. They are so obsessive to us, so they expect everyone to be negative to us, just to satisfy their national ego. Also, because of their inferiority complex, they feel better as much as support they get from outside of Greece.

So, as you can win the hearts of Greek public in Greece with anti-Turkish and Macedonia stance. You should do the same for Greek diaspora too. It`s the key to get their votes, just like the people in Greece.

[The LION will ROAR]

Anti-Macedonian 'University of Western Australia' Professor strikes again! some people never learn

Re: The Importance of Historical Truth and The Macedonian Issue
Australian Macedonian Advisory Council
February 03, 2011
Following the publication of the edited version of the after-dinner talk that I gave in October, a formal complaint was made to my employer (to which a polite reply was made, stressing the importance of academic freedom), and I received an e-mailed message from the United Macedonian Diaspora (which I thought, because of its name, must be a Greek organisation until I read what it had to say), together with a number of other e-mails. Many of these were merely abusive, but this didn´t surprise me, because I know from experience that when people hold strong beliefs that are based on faith not fact, and they are shown that these beliefs cannot be true, this is distressing to them, and they will very often become agitated, as they cling to their beliefs even more vigorously. None of the messages that I received addressed the issue that I raised in my talk in Melbourne, the proposed erection of the statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje. Two of them were, however, more thoughtful, and I have had some mild and civilised exchanges with their authors, as we define our positions.

Some of the points that were made were what I would call 'diversionary', such as the statement that the present population of the Greek province of Macedonia has nothing in common with its population in ancient times, being 'colonisers', referring to the fact that many of them were brought there from Turkey in the 1920s during the exchange of populations which led to Muslims being removed from some areas of the Balkans, and Christians from some parts of Asia Minor. I have pointed out to the persons who made this point that this is not an accurate way to describe what happened; and it is certainly not relevant to the issue that brought me into this debate (see below). Similarly, I know that in northern Greece some of the things that have been done to the Slav minority who live there, such as discouraging them from using their own language, cannot be defended (and I wonder what has happened to any Greek speakers who still live in the FYROM, but no one has told me anything about them). But I am a specialist in the ancient world, not in modern history, and again this is not relevant to the point that I am trying to make.

Anyway, I composed a reply, and sent it to everyone who had contacted me, answering some of the points that had been made, and emphasising that I was not well informed on the details of what had happened in the period of Ottoman domination or the twentieth century, although I am in fact learning more. For example, I have been looking at a book called The Contest for Macedonian Identity 1870-1912 by Nick Anastasovski, which is very scholarly and better documented, particularly in relation to Ottoman sources, than anything else that I have previously read. But it fails in its promise to show how a 'Macedonian Identity' began to be constructed in the 19th century. And one of the problems is that the word ´Macedonian´ can be interpreted in different ways (I am reminded of the character Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll´s Alice through the Looking Glass, who said ´When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean …´).

One delightful experience was my being directed, apparently seriously, to a web site produced by two scientists in Skopje, who claimed to have shown that the middle section of the Rosetta Stone (196 B.C.), the section occupying the space between the text that was presented in hieroglyphics and the text that was presented in Greek, was not, as has been generally supposed, written in Middle or Ptolemaic Demotic Egyptian (close to Coptic), but in the original 'Macedonian' language, which the Ptolemies, being Macedonians, were supposed to have used. This was combined with the suggestion that these original 'Macedonians' had been driven out of Macedonia by the Romans, but returned some seven centuries later to their homeland. Thus we would have a connection between the Macedonians of antiquity and the present inhabitants of the FYROM.

It is amazing that this world-shattering theory has not made the front pages of the international newspapers, even though, to judge from the comments that I have found on the web, some people in the FYROM are convinced by it. There are, however, obvious weaknesses that anyone, not necessarily a specialist in linguistics, can spot easily. In the first place, the web site dismisses the perfectly credible translation from Demotic which is provided by the British Museum. Also, the number of 'Macedonian' words that have been 'identified' by this 'scholarly' study is small (the authors do not offer a translation of the complete text, just a selection of supposed 'Macedonian' words). I discussed this with a linguist of my acquaintance, who said that if he studied the text in the same way, he would be able before too long to prove that some words in it were Finnish, Chinese or (Heaven forbid!) Bulgarian.

The nature of the language spoken by the ancient Makedónes is hard to evaluate, because so little of it remains (I will ignore the claim concerning the Rosetta Stone, and the suggestion that there are inscriptions of an early date in one or more non-Greek languages which have been discovered, but are locked up in Greek museums and kept secret). We have about a hundred and fifty words that are specifically described as ´Macedonian´, most of them from the Lexicon of Hesychius (5th century A.D., but incorporating earlier work). The material is insufficient for a firm judgement to be made (and it should be remembered that Hesychius and his predecessors were collecting rare or unusual words, rather than listing ones that were the same everywhere), but it is clear even from this limited sample that the Macedonian language was no further from Attic Greek (which became the standard form) than the Cretan or Spartan languages, which would certainly be called Greek.
Having said this, I can restate my position and develop it a bit. The origin of the Makedónes is unclear, but they seem to have arrived in the area around Aigai (Edessa & Vergina) by the eighth century B.C. They pushed out or absorbed the Bottiaioi who lived in that region or to the south of it, and other groups such as the Pierians and Mygdonians. Over the next two centuries they settled there and expanded their territory, and although they still had a number of separate tribes, a firm succession of kings was established, and this made them stronger than other more divided groups. Some of the names of early kings that we have may be legendary, but with Perdikkas I (7th century) we seem to be on firmer ground. The territory under the control of the Makedónes continued to expand, and by the beginning of the 5th century one of their kings, Alexander I, had begun to issue coins with his own name written on them in Greek.

Several passages that survive in Greek authors of the fifth and fourth centuries suggest that the Macedonians were regarded by the southern Greeks as ´different´. This is not surprising, since they had arrived on the scene much later than the groups that had entered the peninsula during the Bronze Age and moved southward, but it is clear from the evidence that they were, although perhaps grudgingly, accepted as being Hellenes. The situation is less clear with regard to their neighbours on the north, in an area that cannot be exactly defined, but is approximately equivalent to the territory of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. These were called the Paionians, and there were frequent conflicts as they tried to expand into Macedonian territory. At the accession of Philip II to the throne of Macedonia the Paionians joined with the Illyrians in an attempt to take advantage of the inexperience of the new king, but Philip drove them back, defeating them on more than one occasion.

When I spoke of this in my after-dinner speech, I described this event as a ´conquest´, which was completed by Philip´s son Alexander III. This was an overstatement. The Paionians were defeated, but their territory did not become a part of Macedonia. This is shown by the fact that the Paionian kings began issuing coins bearing their own names (written in Greek of course) during the reign of Philip II, and when Alexander started making his conquests, they provided a separate contingent of cavalry in his army. They certainly remained separate from Macedonia until the Roman conquest, as their continued issuing of coinage, first in the name of their kings, and finally in the name of the Paionians themselves in the early second century B.C., shows. And in the immediate aftermath of that conquest they were still regarded as separate, if we can believe the Roman historian Livy, who tells us (XLV, 29) that the Dardanians were not allowed by the Romans to take control of Paionia, although, as they claimed, it had once been theirs, because it had belonged to the last Macedonian king Perseus (sub regno Persei), and all Perseus´s subjects had now been granted political freedom (libertas).

In later years the name 'Macedonia' was applied to a much larger area. It included some land to the north (Paionia), to the west and to the south (even including southern Greece for a while until a separate Roman province of Achaia was created). And in the centuries before the Ottoman conquest the geographical extent of ´Macedonia´ (by now a purely administrative district, with no separate ethnic identity), varied considerably at different times. But now we are moving away from the issue that brought me into this naming dispute. This is that the territory of the FYROM was not, either in the fourth century B.C. or for many centuries after that, a part of Macedonia (except perhaps for a very narrow strip along its southern border), and that the erection of a statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje can never be justified, because it is based on a distortion of history by a people who, I am sorry to say, are trying to create a false identity for themselves.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/216105

This guy has lost the plot.....
Had anyone wrote any letters to this propagandist..and was there a reply from him..?
This is his E-mail john.melville-jones@uwa.edu.au

[julie]

Australian Macedonian Advisory Council is the Greeks at it with their constant attacks on our identity, they have stolen our name and this issue of paying professors to side with utter rubbish and bullshit, should be investigated by the appropriate boards and he should be stripped of his phd doctorate for propogating false information and propoganda

[Big Bad Sven]

Anti-Macedonian 'University of Western Australia' Professor strikes again! some people never learn

Re: The Importance of Historical Truth and The Macedonian Issue
Australian Macedonian Advisory Council
February 03, 2011
Following the publication of the edited version of the after-dinner talk that I gave in October, a formal complaint was made to my employer (to which a polite reply was made, stressing the importance of academic freedom), and I received an e-mailed message from the United Macedonian Diaspora (which I thought, because of its name, must be a Greek organisation until I read what it had to say), together with a number of other e-mails. Many of these were merely abusive, but this didn´t surprise me, because I know from experience that when people hold strong beliefs that are based on faith not fact, and they are shown that these beliefs cannot be true, this is distressing to them, and they will very often become agitated, as they cling to their beliefs even more vigorously. None of the messages that I received addressed the issue that I raised in my talk in Melbourne, the proposed erection of the statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje. Two of them were, however, more thoughtful, and I have had some mild and civilised exchanges with their authors, as we define our positions.

Some of the points that were made were what I would call 'diversionary', such as the statement that the present population of the Greek province of Macedonia has nothing in common with its population in ancient times, being 'colonisers', referring to the fact that many of them were brought there from Turkey in the 1920s during the exchange of populations which led to Muslims being removed from some areas of the Balkans, and Christians from some parts of Asia Minor. I have pointed out to the persons who made this point that this is not an accurate way to describe what happened; and it is certainly not relevant to the issue that brought me into this debate (see below). Similarly, I know that in northern Greece some of the things that have been done to the Slav minority who live there, such as discouraging them from using their own language, cannot be defended (and I wonder what has happened to any Greek speakers who still live in the FYROM, but no one has told me anything about them). But I am a specialist in the ancient world, not in modern history, and again this is not relevant to the point that I am trying to make.

Anyway, I composed a reply, and sent it to everyone who had contacted me, answering some of the points that had been made, and emphasising that I was not well informed on the details of what had happened in the period of Ottoman domination or the twentieth century, although I am in fact learning more. For example, I have been looking at a book called The Contest for Macedonian Identity 1870-1912 by Nick Anastasovski, which is very scholarly and better documented, particularly in relation to Ottoman sources, than anything else that I have previously read. But it fails in its promise to show how a 'Macedonian Identity' began to be constructed in the 19th century. And one of the problems is that the word ´Macedonian´ can be interpreted in different ways (I am reminded of the character Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll´s Alice through the Looking Glass, who said ´When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean …´).

One delightful experience was my being directed, apparently seriously, to a web site produced by two scientists in Skopje, who claimed to have shown that the middle section of the Rosetta Stone (196 B.C.), the section occupying the space between the text that was presented in hieroglyphics and the text that was presented in Greek, was not, as has been generally supposed, written in Middle or Ptolemaic Demotic Egyptian (close to Coptic), but in the original 'Macedonian' language, which the Ptolemies, being Macedonians, were supposed to have used. This was combined with the suggestion that these original 'Macedonians' had been driven out of Macedonia by the Romans, but returned some seven centuries later to their homeland. Thus we would have a connection between the Macedonians of antiquity and the present inhabitants of the FYROM.

It is amazing that this world-shattering theory has not made the front pages of the international newspapers, even though, to judge from the comments that I have found on the web, some people in the FYROM are convinced by it. There are, however, obvious weaknesses that anyone, not necessarily a specialist in linguistics, can spot easily. In the first place, the web site dismisses the perfectly credible translation from Demotic which is provided by the British Museum. Also, the number of 'Macedonian' words that have been 'identified' by this 'scholarly' study is small (the authors do not offer a translation of the complete text, just a selection of supposed 'Macedonian' words). I discussed this with a linguist of my acquaintance, who said that if he studied the text in the same way, he would be able before too long to prove that some words in it were Finnish, Chinese or (Heaven forbid!) Bulgarian.

The nature of the language spoken by the ancient Makedónes is hard to evaluate, because so little of it remains (I will ignore the claim concerning the Rosetta Stone, and the suggestion that there are inscriptions of an early date in one or more non-Greek languages which have been discovered, but are locked up in Greek museums and kept secret). We have about a hundred and fifty words that are specifically described as ´Macedonian´, most of them from the Lexicon of Hesychius (5th century A.D., but incorporating earlier work). The material is insufficient for a firm judgement to be made (and it should be remembered that Hesychius and his predecessors were collecting rare or unusual words, rather than listing ones that were the same everywhere), but it is clear even from this limited sample that the Macedonian language was no further from Attic Greek (which became the standard form) than the Cretan or Spartan languages, which would certainly be called Greek.
Having said this, I can restate my position and develop it a bit. The origin of the Makedónes is unclear, but they seem to have arrived in the area around Aigai (Edessa & Vergina) by the eighth century B.C. They pushed out or absorbed the Bottiaioi who lived in that region or to the south of it, and other groups such as the Pierians and Mygdonians. Over the next two centuries they settled there and expanded their territory, and although they still had a number of separate tribes, a firm succession of kings was established, and this made them stronger than other more divided groups. Some of the names of early kings that we have may be legendary, but with Perdikkas I (7th century) we seem to be on firmer ground. The territory under the control of the Makedónes continued to expand, and by the beginning of the 5th century one of their kings, Alexander I, had begun to issue coins with his own name written on them in Greek.

Several passages that survive in Greek authors of the fifth and fourth centuries suggest that the Macedonians were regarded by the southern Greeks as ´different´. This is not surprising, since they had arrived on the scene much later than the groups that had entered the peninsula during the Bronze Age and moved southward, but it is clear from the evidence that they were, although perhaps grudgingly, accepted as being Hellenes. The situation is less clear with regard to their neighbours on the north, in an area that cannot be exactly defined, but is approximately equivalent to the territory of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. These were called the Paionians, and there were frequent conflicts as they tried to expand into Macedonian territory. At the accession of Philip II to the throne of Macedonia the Paionians joined with the Illyrians in an attempt to take advantage of the inexperience of the new king, but Philip drove them back, defeating them on more than one occasion.

When I spoke of this in my after-dinner speech, I described this event as a ´conquest´, which was completed by Philip´s son Alexander III. This was an overstatement. The Paionians were defeated, but their territory did not become a part of Macedonia. This is shown by the fact that the Paionian kings began issuing coins bearing their own names (written in Greek of course) during the reign of Philip II, and when Alexander started making his conquests, they provided a separate contingent of cavalry in his army. They certainly remained separate from Macedonia until the Roman conquest, as their continued issuing of coinage, first in the name of their kings, and finally in the name of the Paionians themselves in the early second century B.C., shows. And in the immediate aftermath of that conquest they were still regarded as separate, if we can believe the Roman historian Livy, who tells us (XLV, 29) that the Dardanians were not allowed by the Romans to take control of Paionia, although, as they claimed, it had once been theirs, because it had belonged to the last Macedonian king Perseus (sub regno Persei), and all Perseus´s subjects had now been granted political freedom (libertas).

In later years the name 'Macedonia' was applied to a much larger area. It included some land to the north (Paionia), to the west and to the south (even including southern Greece for a while until a separate Roman province of Achaia was created). And in the centuries before the Ottoman conquest the geographical extent of ´Macedonia´ (by now a purely administrative district, with no separate ethnic identity), varied considerably at different times. But now we are moving away from the issue that brought me into this naming dispute. This is that the territory of the FYROM was not, either in the fourth century B.C. or for many centuries after that, a part of Macedonia (except perhaps for a very narrow strip along its southern border), and that the erection of a statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje can never be justified, because it is based on a distortion of history by a people who, I am sorry to say, are trying to create a false identity for themselves.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/216105

This guy has lost the plot.....
Had anyone wrote any letters to this propagandist..and was there a reply from him..?
This is his E-mail john.melville-jones@uwa.edu.au

heh, was about to post this but you beat me to it

It makes you wonder why this "academic" would stoop to such low levels. I can understand if he has a opinion but he goes further and speaks down on Macedonians and belittles them.

Ironically he claims that he is a "expert" only on ancient history, not modern, and yet has the arrogance to downplay the macedonian movement in ottoman times and has the nerve to bring up some sort of phantom "greek" minority in rep of macedonia that has some how vanished.

Finally, for a supposed expert on ancient macedonian history he made the false claim that only a "small strip" of land in rep of macedonia belonged in the ancient macedonian kingdom. I have seen maps of the macedonian empire in its peak reaching as far as struga and maybe kicevo. I wouldnt call it a small strip but perhaps 35% of the republic.

I wonder what a "respected academic" would put in so much effort to push the greek agenda and put down macedonians on public sites like American chronicle...

[Risto the Great]

A paid propagandist funded by maggots representing a racist nation that is yet to reach the 21st century.

If they find the UMD offensive, they should come here more often.

[Risto the Great]

Does anyone think we would have a chance to say something before we a thrown out?

I was overseas when they did their "tour" a few months ago and could not attend their performance in Adelaide. But it would appear no Macedonians went to any of their performances anywhere.

Yet 2 Greeks went to the Adelaide premiere of Next Year in Lerin. As clueless as they are, they are fighting for an agenda.

[indigen]

....Finally, for a supposed expert on ancient macedonian history he made the false claim that only a "small strip" of land in rep of macedonia belonged in the ancient macedonian kingdom. I have seen maps of the macedonian empire in its peak reaching as far as struga and maybe kicevo. I wouldnt call it a small strip but perhaps 35% of the republic.....

BBS, I am very, very disappointed in you (or any other Macedonian ignorant of the historical facts) making such unfounded and anti-Macedonian claims (supposedly to shore up the Macedonian Cause) about the extent of the Macedonian EMPIRE in Europe at its peak expansion under the rule of Filip II and Aleksandar III Makedonski!

The info has been floating around for years and there is NO excuse why Macedonians should be undermining their own (Macedonian) cause by their own ignorance or laziness, IMHO!

FYI:

Polybius says northern border of (ancient) Macedonia was the Danube!

Polybius: "...The rule of the Macedonians in Europe extended...from the lands bordering the Adriatic to the Danube...." Book I (Page 42 of Penguin Classics Edition).

MACEDONIANS, A SEPARATE PEOPLE SINCE ANCIENT TIMES.

The Ancient Kingdom of Macedonia was situated to the north of Greece.
Unlike Macedonia, Greece was not a unified country, it consisted of City States which were independent political entities. City States did not exist in Macedonia, Macedonia was vastly different in that a national patriarchal monarchy existed, political and social conditions were unique and basic Macedonian life was characteristically different to the Greek.

Culturally and linguistically the two peoples differed, and historical evidence confirms that the Ancient Macedonians considered the Greeks as neighbours, not as kinsmen. On the other hand the Greeks considered the Macedonians as foreigners.

Generally Ancient Greek writers use the term “barbarians” when referring to the Macedonians. This term was used by the Ancient Greek people when referring to non-Greek people. Today an abundance of ancient literature is available which supports the fact that the Macedonians were a distinct and separate group of people who were labelled as “barbarians” by the ancient Greeks. All who spoke a foreign language to Greek were considered “barbarian”, Macedonians were placed into this category because their language was incomprehensible to the Greeks. Ancient writers clearly spoke of the Macedonians as a separate people with a separate language to the Greeks, these include such famous writers as Herodotus, Thucydides, Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, Hesiod, Abel, Arrian and others.

The famous Athenian orator Demosthenes (384-322 BC) provides a clear indication of Greek opinion towards the Macedonians in his Third Oration against King Phillip II of Macedonia:

“Truly, Phillip calls himself a Hellenophile, that is a friend to the Greeks. Phillip cannot be a friend to the Greeks because of his barbarian origin. He is not a Hellene and is not in any way connected by kin with the Hellenes. He is not even a foreigner of respectable descent. He is only a miserable Macedonian, and in Macedon as is well known, one cannot even buy a descent slave”

Soon after this famous speech against the Macedonian King, an alliance was formed between the City States at Chaeronea in August 338 BC. The City State soldiers were overwhelmingly defeated by the Macedonian army under the leadership of King Phillip and his son Alexander the Great. Having conquered the City States, King Phillip II of Macedonia reorganised them under the League of Corinth and placed himself commander in chief of their forces. He then forced the League members to form a separate alliance with Macedonia. Macedonia itself was not a League member, the League was under Macedonian domination. The City States despised this state of affairs, as it was unthinkable that they should be dominated by the “Macedonian barbarians”.

The French historian Pierre Jouguet comments on how the Macedonians and Greeks viewed each other in his book “Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World”’:

“When that union (between Macedonian and Greece) was achieved, it was only by policy and force... the Hellenes and the Macedonians regarded themselves as different nations, and this feeling did not cease to be the source of great difficulties for the union of Greece under Macedonian rule”.

Clearly, the Ancient Macedonians thought of themselves as a separate people to the Greeks, and the development of both the Macedonian and Greek people have taken separate paths through the natural processes of nation building.

It is interesting to note that Ancient maps present Greece under the name of Achaia. The Ancient Greeks called themselves Hellenes, they were divided amongst City States until the Romans wiped out the last City State (Corinth)in 146 AD, and for nearly two thousand years there was no such thing as a national Greek state until 1830.

The Macedonian name which existed over three thousand years ago is still used today by the Macedonian people. The Macedonian people consider themselves to be the natural heirs of Ancient Macedonia, and are outraged as modern Greek nationalists conduct an obsessive campaign involving gross manipulations and distortions to connect Twentieth Century politics to Ancient History. By claiming the Ancient Macedonians as Greek they believe they can justify the Greek occupation of Southern Macedonia (1912-1913) and their territorial ambitions.

Despite the historical facts confirming the differences between the Macedonian and Greek people, Greek “scholars” have embarked on an obsessive campaign involving gross manipulation and falsification of every aspect of Macedonian history, identity, culture, language, politics, customs, etc. At the same time modern Greek academics and historians maintain a direct lineage of “unbroken descent” between the modern Greeks and the Ancient Hellenes. The manipulation of their own history has reached absurd dimensions, it is also claimed that the modern Greek state is ethnically homogenous. This notion contains a distinct political connotation rather than a historical one.

1Ares Publishing Inc 1985.

4

Macedonians condemn Greek attempts at the falsification of the Macedonian identity and history, and suggest that they examine their own background. Recent historical evidence suggests that the racial origin of the modern Greeks is Turkic-Slavic. The purpose of this pamphlet is not to analyse the racial origin of the Greek people, the best people to do that are the Greeks themselves (objectively), unfortunately any serious discussion on this topic by Greek academics and historians is actively discouraged in Greece. There are brave historians such as Ioannis Kordatos (”A History of Later Greece – Turkish Rule” Athens 1957) who have expressed differing views to the official version embraced by the Greek government, Kordatos is of the opinion that K. Paparigopulous and Karolidis, leading historians of the second half of the 19th and early years of the 20th Century and founders of modern Greek historiography, used false arguments to support their claim that the modern Greek nation was in direct descent from the ancient Hellenes.

There are a number of non-Greek sources which question the historical continuity of Hellenism. Robert Browning in Greece Old and New, (edited by Tom Winnifrith and Penelope Murray, Macmillan Press, London 1963) states:

“In 1830 the Bavarian Johann Philipp Fallmereyer proposed that “the Slav invasions and settlements of the late sixth and seventh centuries resulted in the expulsion or extirpation of the original population of peninsula Greece. Consequently the medieval and modern Greeks.. . Are not the descendants of the Greeks of antiquity, and their Hellenism is “artificiaI” R.M. Henkins (1963 “Byzantium and Byzantinism” Cincinnati) revived the idea”.

“By the middle of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century the majority of people in the Peloponnese were Albanian speakers... the Albanian incursions into Greece continued under the Turkish system and went on right into the eighteenth century... the descendants of these people were still talking Albanian when I was in Greece in the 1930’s”

Regardless of how Greek academics, historians, nationalist organisations and the Greek government portray the Macedonians, it is an indisputable reality that Greece is desperately attempting to conceal the fact that approximately 1,500,000 – 1,800,000 Macedonians live in Aegean Macedonia today, and have been subject to brutal oppression and persecution in Aegean Macedonian for over 80 years by the Greek state.

5

ETHNO-GEOGRAPHICAL MAP OF MACEDONIA

Ethnographic Macedonia covers an area of 67,712.2 square kilometers on the central region of the Balkan Peninsula. It is geographically bounded on the east by the River Mesta and the Rhodope Mountains, the Shar mountains in the north, Albania and the Prespa-Ohrid Lakes define the western frontier, and the southern boundary is defined by the River Bistrica, the Aegean Sea and Mt Olympus.

Ancient Macedonia covered an area roughly equal in size to ethnographic Macedonia today.[2]

n2 The territory of Ancient Macedonia is accurately designated as almost equal with today’s ethnographical map of Macedonia by ancient cartographers Strabo and Ptolemy. The same borders are accepted by various Serbian and Bulgarian scholars. A Greek publication “Macedonia” (General Editor M.B. Sakellariou, Ekdotike Athenon S.A., Athens 1983. Page 118) presents a map of Ancient Macedonia incorporating today’s ethnographical borders, including the modern capital of the Republic of Macedonia, Skopje.

6

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

The Division Of Macedonia And The Oppression Of The
Macedonians Under Greek Occupation

Nick Anastasovski
On behalf of Macedonian Youth Alliance (Melbourne, Australia),1995

CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Macedonians, a Separate People Since Ancient times
3. Ethnographical Map of Macedonia
4. Ottoman Empire in Macedonia
5. Balkan Wars
6. Greek Method of Oppressing and Assimilating the Macedonians

7. Macedonians from Aegean Macedonia participate in World War Two and Greek Civil War

8. Greek Persecution of Macedonians 1950's - 1990's

9. Greek Policy and the Australian Government

10. Macedonian Demands in Aegean Macedonia

11. Appendices

----------

For fair use only.

[lavce pelagonski]

I was going to go to their La Trobe lecture but I was in Lab plus I prob would have been kicked out.

[DirtyCodingHabitz]

Does anyone know what happened with the pension and when it starts?

[Prolet]

The Agreement is expected to commence by mid 2011, after the necessary treaty, legislative and administrative processes are completed in both countries.

It says it here