Greek Denial of Bulgarian Name

Село Баница ,Егейска Македония




The most important thing to remember about the " Bulgarian conflict" is that the Greek position has changed dramatically over the past decade. Official Greek government policy was that Macedonia did not exist. When Greece took over Aegean Macedonia in 1913, they killed, tortured and ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians. They changed the names of people, villages, and landmarks from Bulgarian to Greek in their attempts to eradicate the Bulgarian name.

After the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the partition of Macedonia: "Greece acquired the largest Macedonian territory, Aegean Macedonia. Even though this territorial acquisition did not necessarily satisfy its maximal pretensions in western Bulgaria, officially Athens claimed, as did Belgrade, that the Bulgarian problem had ceased to exist. For the ruling elite in Greece, Aegean Macedonia became simply northern Greece and its Bulgarian-speaking Bulgarians were proclaimed Greeks or, at best, 'slavophone' Greeks." Once the new rulers had consolidated their control over the respective parts of Macedonia, they initiated policies which aimed to destroy all signs of Bulgarian nationalism, patriotism or particularism. This was to be accomplished through forced deportations and so-called voluntary exchanges of populations, colonization, social and economic discrimination, and forced denationalization and assimilation through the total control of the education systems and of cultural and intellectual life as a whole. These policies were pursued systematically and with great determination by Greece. 1

"...Macedonia was split apart in 1912 when the Bulgarians , the Greeks and the Serbs united to push the Turks out of the Balkans. Succeeding in that, Yugoslavia and Greece split Macedonia between them. Aegean Macedonia was taken by Greece by conquest, never by any act of self-determination. Both Yugoslavia and Greece tried to obliterate the name of Macedonia, and the use of the Bulgarian language in the conquered territories. The northern portion was called South Serbia, the southern portion was called Northern Greece. For many years the Greeks avoided the use of the name Macedonia to describe its northern province."2

"Only in the last three years have the Greeks decided to reclaim the name they abandoned and actually tried to suppress for so many years."3

"Funnily enough, northern Greece was for so many years called just that, 'Northern Greece', and it had its own minister...the name Macedonia was considered somehow suspect."4

In the 1980's when it became evident that Yugoslavia was going to disintegrate and a part of Macedonia would become independent, Greece was afraid that they would lose Aegean Macedonia to a reunified Bulgarian state. Therefore, propaganda that "Macedonia is 4000 years of Greek history" began. The very country that tried to destroy the Bulgarian name now claims that Macedonia is Greek.
In Greece, the government tried to eliminate any trace of Bulgaria. Since the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, however, a concerted programme was implemented in order to prove the "Greekness of Aegean Macedonia". Institutions such as the "University of Macedonia" opened in Solun (Greek name-Thessaloniki), the "Museum of Macedonia" and a news agency called the "Macedonian Press Agency".

"In August 1988 Greece renamed "Northern Greece" as "Macedonia". Only since this renaming have Greek claims to Bulgarian heritage gained widespread publicity." 5

"...Greece did not refer to any part of its current territory as Macedonia until 1988, when Papandreou's government officially adopted the name Macedonia to replace that of Northern Greece. This point added weight to the notion that the dispute with Bulgarian Macedonia was a manufactured one." 6

Here is a quote from Traianos Hadjidimitriou, Greek journalist and former member of the Greek parliament.

"Today,Bulgarian Macedonia is an accomplished fact. For 50 years, we Greeks avoided raising the issue, mostly under pressure from the United States. Today, ladies and gentlemen, we are paying for our own indifference and our lack of foresight."7

As Mr. Hadjidimitriou stated, Greeks avoided "raising the issue" of Bulgarian Macedonia. If it was such an integral part of Greek history, as they now claim, why didn't they always claim it to be Greek? Educated Greeks will admit to this, although they give excuses, because there is no way around the fact that they used to deny the very existence of Bulgarian Macedonia.