Macedonia by N. Martis - 1

MACEDONIA by Nikolaos Martis - 1

THE AUTHOR

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

by Mr. Nikolaos Martis,
author of the book "MACEDONIA"

This book with a text of 23 pages reveals the following:

1. The creation of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1944 by the Communist Regime of the former State of Yugoslavia was aimed to harm Greece. This fact was denounced by various Governments and dignitaries of the United States of America (pag. 1 & 2).
2. The dispute between Greece and Skopje (F.Y.R.O.M.) is not just a simple dispute for a name (pag. 3-16).
3. Those who call the citizens of F.Y.R.O.M., "Macedonians" are led to absurdities and willfully reward self-evident frauds (pag. 16-21).
4. Documents regarding above captioned subject are included in the rest 92 pages of the book.

Detailed diachronical development of the History of Macedonia, her falsification, facts and documents with photos from archaeological sites and churches in Macedonia can be found in the Book "The Falsification of Macedonian History" written by the same author which was awarded by the National Academy of Greece and so far translated in 7 languages.

ADDRESSED TO THE INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC COMMUNITY

The so-called "Macedonian Question", is in fact a great political and historical fraud that was deliberately fabricated by the Communists in 1944 in order to wrest Greek Macedonia from Greece and absorb it into the Communist bloc, thus breaking up the West's eastern flank and gaining control of the north Aegean seacoast.

The political motives behind the creation of this spurious Republic have been rejected by:

1. The U.S. Roosevelt Administration which was quick to assess the true motives for setting up a "Macedonian" State and issued clear directives denouncing it. This is an excerpt from a circular by Secretary of State Stettinius (See Document 1 Circular Airgram #868.014/26 Dec. 1944)

"This Government considers talk of Macedonian "nation", Macedonian "Fatherland", or Macedonian "national consciousness" to be unjustified demagoguery representing no ethnic nor political reality, and sees in its present revival a possible cloak for aggressive intentions against Greece. The approved policy of this Government is to oppose any revival of the Macedonian issue as related to Greece".

2. The Truman Administration, by means of the Truman Doctrine and the help of the American taxpayers, along with the sacrifices of the Greek people, the blood of hundreds of thousands of Greek dead and wounded, saved Greek Macedonia from the Communist threat.

President George Bush acknowledged these sacrifices before the Greek Parliament in 1991, by stating that Greece single handedly put a stop to Soviet expansionism at that terrible time.

3. President Bill Clinton on October 2 1992, before the elections, confirming his predecessor's stance he stated: "The United States position must be clear. If the southernmost former Yugoslav Republic wishes to receive American recognition, it must first accept the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, satisfy its neighbors and the world community that its intentions are peaceful and abide by the European Community's decision which rejects the use of the name Macedonia. A Clinton Administration will stand by these principles and ensure that Greece's legitimate concerns are met".

4. On June 19 1992, at a Managers Conference in Paris, Dr. Henry Kissinger made a statement about Greece's demand that Skopje should not be allowed to use the name "Macedonia". He said "I believe that Greece is right to object and I agree with Athens. The reason is that I know History which is not the case with most of the others including most in the Government and Administration in Washington. The strength of the Greek case is that of the History which must say that Athens have not used so far with success" (See Document No 2).

5. Newspapers of international repute, such as "The New York Times", espoused similar positions. Note, for example, the following article published on July 16 1946: "During the occupation... a combined effort was made to wrest Macedonia from Greece - an effort that allegedly continues, although in altered form... The main conspiratorial activity in Macedonia today appears to be directed from Skopje" (See Document No 3).

The Macedonian Question, is more than a mere squabble over a name. It is a well-designed scheme for annexing the northern Greek provinces of Macedonia and Thrace. It started during the inter-war period, by the decisions of the Comintern and the Balkan communist parties seeking to establish a united (Macedonian and Thracian) State. Subsequently it was Tito, in 1944, who tried to establish such a State within Yugoslavia. He changed the name of Southern Serbia (which had been known as Vardashka since 1913) to "Macedonia" and then proceeded to establish, out of the Slavs of the region (Bulgarians and Serbs), a new Slavic nation inappropriately called "Macedonian" (See Document No 4).

To transform this theoretical concept into a political reality Tito:

Concocted in 1944 a "Macedonian government" as a first step to the setting up of a Socialist Republic of Macedonia".

Dubbed the local Slavonic dialect "Macedonian language". A special committee worked for years to turn this dialect into the "official Macedonian language".

IV. In 1968 the "Macedonian Church" came into being irregularly, by a government coup. As a result, it was not recognized as a formal Church by any Orthodox Patriarchs or by the Vatican.

Thus, politicians and historians collaborated:

a. to usurp the name, the emblems, and the history of Macedonia;
b. to set in motion expansionist aspirations, by renaming Greek Macedonia as "Aegean Macedonia", i.e. part of a united Macedonia and issued maps limiting Greece's northern frontiers to Mount Olympus;
c. to allege the existence of a "Macedonian minority" in Greece.

Their theoretical basis for these claims was based on the assertion that:

a. The ancient Macedonians, Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, etc. were not Greeks (an allegation which is repeated in the recent FYROM's school textbooks for 1992-3). See also attached extracts from the book of Evangelos Kofos "The vision of Greater Macedonia" (See Document No 5).
b. After the arrival of Slavic tribes in the Balkans in the 6th century AD those Slavs, that managed to reach the Byzantine Provinces of Ancient Macedonia, intermarried with the local non-Greek Macedonians and thus they formed a new ethnic group, the "Slavo Macedonians" who subsequently were simply referred to as "Macedonians".

World history does not record a similar case of usurpation of a people's name and history by another group of people.

Lack of the slightest credibility on the part of the pseudo-Macedonian "nation" of Skopje is furthermore revealed by the single fact that Skopje's Bulgarians and Serbs discovered only after 1944 that back in the sixth century they had been transformed from Slavs into Macedonians.

To claim that the Ancient Macedonians were not Greeks, however, and to use the term "Slav" with reference to the creation of the "Macedonian nation" is a trick.

The "Macedonian Nation" does not, nor did it ever exist. The Macedonians were Greeks, they spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods (who were inhabiting the Macedonian mountain of Olympus) and performed the same sacrifices, in the same sanctuaries as all the other Greeks.

The Macedonians, together with the rest of Greeks, possess according to Herodotus, the kind and constituent element that composed a nation:

"And next the kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech, and the shrines of gods and the sacrifices that we have in common and the likeness of our way of life" Herodotus, History VIII, 144,2 (Loeb, A.D. Godley).

The Greek identity of the Ancient Macedonians and their name is attested, among other sources, by:

a. the Hebrew sources (the Bible, the book of Maccabees, the Talmud as well as the Jewish writers Josephus, Philo Judaeus and others (doc. 6, p. 44-45).
b. the New Testament:
- Paul the Apostle, was summoned to Macedonia by a Macedonian in the form of a vision speaking to him in Greek (Act Apost. XVI 9,10)
- The Apostles Paul and Silas met Greek men and women in Thessaloniki and Beroea (Act Apost. XVII 4, 12).
c. works by various classical authors, including
- Hesiod

"And she conceived and bore to Zeus who delights in the thunderbolttwo sons, Magnes and Macedon, rejoicing in horses, who dwell round-about Pieria and Olympus", Hesiod, Catalogues of Women and Eoiae 3 (Loeb, H.G. Evelyn-White).

- Strabo

"Macedonia, of course, is a part of Greece". Strabo, VII, Frg. 9 (Loeb, H.L. Jones)

- Herodotus

"The Peloponnesians that were with the fleet were... the Lacedaemonians ... the Corinthians... the Sicyonians... the Epidaurians... the Troezenians... the people of Hermione there; all these, except the people of Hermione, were of Dorian and Macedonian stock and had last come from Erineus and Pindus and the Dryopian region". Herodotus VIII, 43 (Loeb. A.D. Godley).

"For in the days of king Deucalion it inhabited the land of Phthiotis, then in the time of Dorus son of Helen the country called Histiaean, under Ossa and Olympus; driven by the Cadmeans from this Histiaean country it settled about Pindus in the parts called Macedonian; thence again it migrated to Dryopia, and at last came from Dryopia into Peloponnesus, where it took the name of Dorian". Herodotus I, 56, 3 (Loeb, A.D. Godley).

"Tell your king who sent you how his Greek viceroy of Macedonia has received you hospitably... " Herodotus V, 20, 4 (Loeb, A.D. Godley)

"For I myself am by ancient descent a Greek, and I would not willingly see Hellas change her freedom for slavery". Herodotus IX, 45, 2 (Loeb, A.D. Godley)

"Now that these descendants of Perdiccas are Greeks, as they themselves say, I myself chance to know" Herodotus V, 22, 1 (Loeb, A.D. Godley)

- Helanicius
- Polybius

"This is a sworn treaty made between us, Hannibal.. and Xenophanes the Athenian... in the presence of all the gods who possess Macedonia and the rest of Greece". The Histories of Polybius, VII, 9, 4 (Loeb, W. R. Paton)

"How highly should we honour the Macedonians, who for the greater part of their lives never cease from fighting with the barbarians for the sake of the security of Greece? For who is not aware that Greece would have constantly stood in the greater danger, had we not been fenced by the Macedonians and the honorable ambition of their kings?" The Histories of Polybius, IX, 35, 2 (Loeb, W.R. Paton)

- Isocrates

"... all men will be grateful to you: the Hellenes for your kindness to them and the rest of the nations, if by your hands they are delivered from barbaric despotism and are brought under the protection of Hellas". Isocrates, To Philip, 154 (Loeb, G. Norlin)

"It is your privilege, as one who has been blessed with untrammeled freedom, to consider all Hellas your fatherland, as did the founder of your race". Isocrates, To Philip, 127 (Loeb, G. Norlin)

"Argos is the land of your fathers". Isocrates, To Philip, XII, 32 (Loeb, G. Norlin),

- and Titus Livius

"Aetolians, Acarnanians, Macedonians, men of the same language" T. Livius XXXI, 29, 15 (Loeb, E.T. Sage),

- Thucydides

"Three brothers of the lineage of Temenus came as banished men from Argos to Illyria, Gauanes and Aeropos and Perdiccas". Herodotus VIII, 137, l (Loeb, A.P. Godley)

"The country by the sea which is now called Macedonia... Alexander, the father of Perdiccas, and his forefathers, who were originally Temenidae from Argos" Thucydides 99,3 (Loeb, C F Smith)

- and Arrian

"He sent to Athens three hundred Persian panoplies to be set up to Athena in the acropolis; he ordered this inscription to be attached: Alexander son of Philip and the Greeks, except the Lacedaemonians, set up these spoils from the barbarians dwelling in Asia", Arrian I, 16, 7 (Loeb, P. A. Brunt)

"Your ancestors invaded Macedonia and the rest of Greece and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury;... I have been appointed hegemon of the Greeks... "Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander II, 14, 4 (Loeb, P. A. Brunt);

d. the fact that the Macedonians took part in the Amphictyonies and the Olympic Games

"They say that these were the clans collected by Amphiktyon himself in the Greek assembly... `The Macedonians managed to join and the entire Phocian race... In my day there were thirty members: six each from Nikopolis, Macedonia, and Thessaly...". Pausanias, Phokis VIII 2&4 (Loeb, W. Jones)

"But Alexander proving himself to be an Argive, he was judged to be a Greek; so he contended in the furlong race and ran a dead heat for the first place". Herodotus V, 22, 2 (Loeb, A. D. Godley)

"Belistiche, a woman from the coast of Macedonia, won with the pair of foals.. at the hundred and twenty-ninth Olympics". Pausanias, Eleia VIII, 11 (Loeb, W. Jones - H. A. Ormerod);

e. the archaeological sites of Dion, Vergina, Pella, Beroea, Amphipolis, etc., which have yielded 70,000 finds and thousands of Greek inscriptions from Macedonia and the East (See the Kuwait inscriptions in Document No 7)

f. the four ancient theaters in Macedonia (at Dion, Vergina, Philippi, and Thassos). It is a well-known fact that only the ancient Greeks had theaters. The theater of Dion hosted the first performance (before an audience of Greek-speaking Macedonians, of course) of Euripides world-famous tragedy Bacchae, which he wrote at Pella of Macedonia. Euripides died and was buried in Macedonia

"Euripides himself went t' King Aschelausaus and lies buried in Macedonia" Pausanias, Attica II, 2 (Loeb, W. Jones);

g. as shown on a map published in the December 1 949 issue of the National Geographic Magazine, the Romans, who conquered Macedonia, considered it a Greek province. Indeed, in Roman times coins minted in Macedonia depicted ancient Macedonian symbols with Greek inscriptions. (See Document No 8)
h. A study by the German writer Sigrid Dull, concerning the gods that were worshipped during Roman times in ancient Macedonia which was occupied by the Serbs and the Bulgarians in 1913, reveals that the gods that were worshipped were gods of Olympus. The German author writes further that all the inscriptions are Greek and that seldom does one encounter idioms that are not encountered in the rest are no inscriptions in any other language except in Greek and Latin in ancient Macedonia which was occupied in 1913 by Serbia and Bulgaria.

(Continues)