by Risto Stefov, rstefov @ hotmail.com, February 15, 2009
Amazingly after all that has been said about the artificial identity of the Modern Greeks, there are still Greeks out there who accuse me of „lying“ for pointing out the obvious. There are still Greeks out there who insist that all these authors from whom I take quotes for my articles are „simply crackpots“ who have something against Greece or perhaps are jealous of the „glorious Greek heritage“, as I am often accused of being!
In this article I will present the reader with testimonies from twenty different authors, all westerners and all in a mission to HELP the Modern Greeks justify their artificiality who in telling their story have inadvertently confessed to the Modern Greek falsehood.
If you think telling the truth is wrong and an awful thing to do when exposing your Greek falsehood then perhaps you can explain to me how you justify denying the Macedonians their identity generation after generation. Macedonians have been denied their ethnic identity, culture, language and heritage by Greeks since Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria acquired Macedonian lands by war in 1912, 1913. For my accusers, which is more wrong, to live a lie and deny others their true heritage or to tell the truth about you?
There is no denying that the Modern Greek nation is an artificial creation created by Western Philhellenes from the Slav, Vlach and Albanian immigrants who over the centuries came to live on those lands after the so-called „Ancient Greeks“ disappeared.
To put an end to the notion that this is somehow a conspiracy to „rob“ the Modern Greek nation of its heritage, in this article I will present quotes from twenty different authors who basically say that; Modern Greeks are NOT the descendants of the so-called „Ancient Greeks“ of 2,500 years ago but rather the descendants of the more recently arrived Slav, Vlach and Albanian immigrants.
(1) Now let us start with Edward Blaquiere, Esq. in his book „The Greek Revolution; its Origin and Progress“, on page 21 we read „Tyranny and want had driven some families, whose origin, like that of nearly all the peasants, who inhabit proper Greece, was Albanian, to take refuge on these desolate crags [the islands Hydra, Spezzia and Ipsara], where they built villages, and sought a precarious existence by fishing.“
(2) In the book „Greece and the Balkans Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment“ edited by Dimitris Tziovas on page 5 we read „In southern Albania many Orthodox Albanians and Vlachs were Hellenized during the 18th and 19th centuries.“ On page 6 we read „It should be stressed, however, that the Greeks as an ethnic community during this period included many Grecophone or Hellenized Vlachs, Serbs, or Orthodox Albanians.“ And on page 75 we read „For Kodrikas, and many others, it was language that determined who was a ‘Greek‘ for it constituted the ‘national existence‘ of the nation. But for the Phanariot Theodoros Negris, Serbs and Bulgarians were as true Greeks as any other Christian“.
(3) In J. P. Mahaffy’s book „Greek Pictures“ on pages 20 and 21 we read „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 (1821-31), 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.“
(4) Surprisingly even Nicholas G. L. Hammond the greatest Philhellene historian and author has admitted that the Modern Greeks are not what they seem. Nicholas G. L. Hammond in his book „Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas“ on page 57 writes „It was during this period [1206 to 1260] that the flow of immigrants from the western area began. It became a flood in the fourteenth century. They went as mercenaries, raiders and migrants. The great majority of them were speakers of Albanian, but others joined the movement. Whatever their language they were described by the Greek and Latin writers as ‘Albanoi‘ or ‘Albanitai‘ or ‘Albanenses‘ and the reason of this collective term can only be that they entered the Byzantine world through the district which the Byzantines knew as „Albanon‘. Thus the Vlach speaking Malakasii who invaded Thessaly in 1334 were described as ‘Albanoi‘ by Cantacuzenus 1.474 no less than the evidently Albanian-speaking ‘Albanensium gens‘ which raided Thessaly in 1325.
The southern movement of the tribes was on a very large scale. It was also rapid because towns and cities were bypassed (Dyrrachium for instance being captured c. 1368). It had two main effects. It took possession of Epirus Nova, the area inland of the coastal strip from Dyrrachium to Valona; and it sent streams of migrants into most parts of the Greek peninsula and some of the Aegean islands“.
On page 59 of Hammond’s book we read „But the Albanian raids continued and Acarnea was laid to waste. In 1341 the Emperor attached the offending Albanians ‘around Pogoniane and Libisda‘ (Lidisda), i.e. in the central part of northern Epirus; and then in 1355 he campaigned from Thessaly as far as the Aetolia and Arcanania and was killed in action (Cantacuzenus 3.319). These campaigns did not stop the flood. Albanians were serving as mercenaries in the Peloponnesus c. 1350, and they and their families were given land there to cultivate.
Other bands of Albanians and Vlachs invaded the Catalan principality of Boetia and Attica, and a great many Albanians settled there as peasant-farmers in 1368 and later years.
The penetration of the Greek mainland which we have described occurred during the hundreds or more years after 1325.“
Then on page 61 we read „Once in possession of northwestern Greece, the Albanians opened the way for other immigrants. Offshoots of Vlachs and Albanians entered Boetia, Attica and Euboea…“
(5) Keith R. Legg’s book „Politics in Modern Greece“ on page 48 we read „As early as the 18th century, these areas were described as ‘hotbeds of chronic insurgency‘. There were few Muslims here; the inhabitants, largely of Albanian stock, were only imperfectly assimilated into the Greek nation…“
Then on page 86 we read „At the time if independence, the range of local dialects was significant; a substantial portion of the population spoke Albanian“.
(6) In the „International Encyclopedia a Compendium of Human Knowledge“ edited by Richard Gleason Greene on page 201 we read „Overrun by the Vandals and Goths it [Morea, today’s Peloponnesus] became a prey, in the second half of the 8th c. to bands of Slavic invaders, who found it wasted by war and pestilence. Gradually however these barbarians were subdued and Grecianized by the Byzantine emperors. Nevertheless, the numerous names of places, rivers, etc, in the More of Slavic origin prove how firmly they had rooted themselves, and that the Moreotes are anything but pure Greeks.“
(7) In the book „Races of Europe a Sociological Study“ by William Z. Ripley Ph.D., published in 1910 on page 408 we read „Since the Christian era, as we have said, a successive downpour from the north into Greece has ensued. In the 6th century came the Avars and 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. A result of this is that Slavic names to-day occur all over the Peloponnesus in the open country where settlements were readily to be made. The most important immigration of all is that of the Albanians, who, from the 13th century until the advent of the Turks, incessantly overrun the land.“
(8) In the book „Greece in the 20th Century“ edited by Theodore A. Kouloumbis on page 24 we read „Primary school children were taught, in the 1880’s, that ‘Greeks [are] our kinsmen, of common descent, speaking the language we speak and professing the religion we profess‘, but this definition, it seems, was reserved for small children who could not possibly understand the intricate arguments of their parents on the question of Greek identity. What was essentially to understand at a tender age was that Modern Greeks descended from the Ancient Greeks. Grown up children, however, must have been no less confused than adults on the criteria for defining modern Greek identity. 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 being Hellenized with the years in terms of mores and customs, are now being assimilated into the Greeks“.
(9) In Alfred P. Schultz’s book „Race or Mongrel“ on page 92 we read „From the foregoing it is evident that but very little Hellenic blood is left in Greece, and that little is so thoroughly vitiated that its disappearance is but a question of time. No race inhabits Greece. The ‘Greeks‘ are descendants of races so different that their crossing can never produce anything else than human mongrels. Their ancestors were Greeks, Hellenized Asiatics and Byzantine Greeks (i.e. Hamitic-Semetic-Greek-Egyptian-Negroid mongrels), Slavs, Sicilians, Spaniards, Huns, Bulgarians, Walloons, Franks and Albanians.“
(10) In the book „Sailing from Byzantium“ by Colin Wells on page 183 we read „This revival also allowed the Byzantines to decolonize 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 of the Greek mainland, the cities, and the islands, by the tenth century the Slavs in Greece had been converted to Orthodox Christianity and thoroughly Hellenized. Today the only evidence of the Slav’s arrival is the presence of Slavic place names, some five-hundred or so of them, scattered charmingly throughout the Greek countryside.“
(11) In Alexandra Halkias’s book „The Empty Cradle of Democracy“ on page 59 we read „Through the end of the revolution in 1830, Greeks, including most of the 19th 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 a basis of a common language, history and consciousness. In effect, at this time, who ever 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 (Dakin 1972, 8).“
(12) In the book „Turkey in Europe“ by Sir Charles Eliot on page 267 we read „Constantinople and all of 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.“
(13) In the book „History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century“ by G. P. Gooch on pages 490 and 491 we read „General interest was first aroused by a controversy as to the racial derivation of the 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 Hellenes, he declares in his ‘History of Morea‘ was rooted 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 have ever existed. What the Slavs had begun the Albanians have completed. Scholars had been so busy with the Ancient Greeks that they had never inquired as to what happened to them. Leake had discovered a great number of Slavonic place names but he had drawn no conclusions. ‘I now lay the foundation of a new view of Greek history and of the whole peninsula‘. He recalls the invasions of the Huns, the Bulgars and the Slavs, and the second volume shows the Morea flooded by Albanian colonists and finally conquered by the Turks.“
(14) In the „Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science for the Year 1843“ Vol. XVI on page 246 we read „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 the Sclavonian enters very largely.“
(15) In Rennell Rodd’s book „The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece“ on page 17 we read „In the last year of the 15th century and the opening of the 16th, when the Morea was again the battle-field of Turks and Venetians, the occupants of the plains of Argos and of portions of Attica were practically exterminated, and Albanian colonists began to re-occupy the ruined lands.“
(16) In the book „In Greek Waters a Story of the Grecian War of Independence (1821-1827)“ by G. A. Henty published in 1893 on page 40 we read „With them [the modern Greeks] 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 who the descendants of the veritable Greeks of old are in a great minority. The majority are of Albanian and Suliot blood, races which even the Romans found untamable.“
(17) In the „Popular Science Monthly“ Volume LXXV, July to December 1919, edited by J. Mckeen Cattell on page 591 we read „The modern Greeks are largely of Slavic origin. They are not the descendants of the ancient Greeks. That noble race greatly mixed with barbarian blood during the middle ages, was completely destroyed in the course of the frequent uprisings against Turkish rule. Slavic immigrants gradually peopled the country.“
(18) In William St. Clair’s book „That Greece Might Still be Free“ on page 91 we read „The Albanians, some of whom were Christian and some Muslim, were torn by this dilemma, and when the need for decision became inescapable, they divided by religion and not by race. The Roman Catholic Greeks, who lived in the islands which had been under Venetian or Genoese rule, regarded themselves as a separate community. The Albanians of Hydra and Spetsae, many of whom could not even speak Greek, regarded themselves as Greek because their allegiance was to the Orthodox Church.“
(19) In the 1910 „The Encyclopedia Britannica“, eleventh edition, on page 465 we read „…in 1725 the Ottomans with a large and well disciplined army set themselves to recover the Morea, the Venetians were left without support from the Greeks. The peninsula was rapidly recaptured and by the peace of Passarowits (1718) again became a Turkish dependency. The gaps left about this time by the Greek population were largely made up by an immigration from Albania.“
(20) In the book „Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770-1945)“, Volume II, edited by Balasz Trencsenyi and Michal Kopecek, on page 141 we read „It is funny but also sad, to see a social gathering of different Greeks, but is to say Chiots, Cretans, Albanians, Byzantines, Orientals, Ionian islanders and others, where upon the one mixes in Turkish words, the other Italian ones, the other Albanian ones, and in the same gathering, while they are all Greek, they cannot understand each other without the use of a translation or an explanation of each word as it is uttered, with the gathering thus turning into a Babel.“
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.
Read the next part: PART 8