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Modern Greeks are not descended from the Ancient Hellenes
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Recent claims by the Greek Government and Greek nationalist
organizations to the heritage of Macedonia are based on two false
assertions: that the ancient Macedonians were an ancient Hellenic
tribe, and that the modern Greek people are direct descendants of
the ancient Hellenic people.
Historical evidence supports neither claim: there is a great body
of scholarship that indicates that the ancient Macedonians were a
separate and unrelated tribal group from the ancient Hellenes.
Another voluminous body of evidence proves the modern Greeks are
not the descendants of the classical Hellenes as they assert. In
fact they are a mixed race, the great majority of whom are
descended from slaves, Romans, Slavs, Albanians, Turks, Vlachs,
Arvanites, Pomaks, and many other ethnic groups.
Some of the evidence against the Greek assertion that they are
descended from the classical Hellenes is quoted below. The
weakness of the Greek assertions indicates that their claim to
Macedonia is based not on historical fact or cultural heritage
but on contemporary nationalism and territorial expansionism.
Historically, the Greek claim to the Macedonian heritage is
recent. Greece annexed half of the territory of Macedonia in
1913. Until 1988 it offically referred to this new province as
"Northern Greece". In August 1988 it renamed it as "Macedonia".
It is only since this renaming that Greek claims to Macedonian
heritage have gained widespread publicity.
***
"For certain areas of the Greek mainland and many of the islands
the names of some fifteen pre-Greek peoples are preserved in
ancient traditions, together with a number of other references."
MB Sakellariou, Macedonia, 4000 years of Greek History, page 23.
"Among these Celts, if the word is to have any significance, I
should reckon not only most of the inhabitants of France - but
the Aquitanians are Iberian aborigines - and many nations of
Germany and the Balkans, but even the Archaen Greeks, who had
established themselves for some time in the Upper Danube valley
before pushing southward into Greece. Yes, the Greeks are
comparative new comers to Greece. They displaced the native
Pelasgians, who derive their culture from Crete, and brought new
Gods with them, the chief among these being Apollo. This happened
not long before the Trojan War; the Dorian Greeks came still
later - eighty years after the Trojan War. Other Celts of the
same race invaded France and Italy at about the same time, and
the Latin language is derived from their speech. It was then,
too, that the first Celtic invasion of Britain took place. These
Celts, whose langauge is akin to primitive Latin, were called
Goidels - a tall, sandy-haired, big limbed, boastful, excitable
but noble race, gifted in all the arts, including fine weaving
and metal work, music and poetry; they still survive, in Northern
Britain, in the same state of civilization as has been
immortalized for the Greeks, now so greatly changed, in the
verses of Homer."
Tiberius Claudius, Roman Emperor and historian, 10 BC - 54 AD, in
Claudius the God, by Robert Graves.
"Slavery was a natural form of exploitation in the ancient
Mediterranean; and, though we have no precise figures, it is
likely that the number of slaves in Attica was roughly equal to
the number of free inhabitants, or around 100,000 ... Like all
Greek states, Sparta had a populatiton of slaves, but her slave
problem was unique both because of the sheer numbers involved and
because most of them, the helots, who approximated more closely
to medieval serfs than to chattel slaves of an ordinary Greek
type, were of a single nationality, Messenians. Because these
Messenian helots all spoke Greek (unlike, for instance, Athens'
slaves who were a wide racial mix and had no common language in
which to articulate discontent), and had a national
self-consciousness, they posed special problems of security for
their Spartan masters, whose numbers were constantly on the
decline."
The Oxford History of the Classical World, Oxford University
Press, 1986.
A man called Theophilus, the brother of one of Piso's creditors,
had just been condemned for forgery by a vote of the City
Assembly. Piso asked as a personal favour that the man should be
pardoned, but his request was refused, which made Piso very
angry: if Theophilus had been pardoned, the brother would have
certainly cancelled the debt. He made a violent speech in which
he said that the latter-day Athenians had no right to identify
themselves with the great Athenians of the days of Pericles,
Demosthenes, Aeschylus, Plato. The ancient Athenians had been
extirpated by repeated wars and massacres and these were mere
mongrels, degenerates, and the descendents of slaves. He said
that any Roman who flattered them as if they were the legitimate
heirs of those ancient heroes was lowering the dignity of the
Roman name."
Tiberius Claudius, Roman Emperor and historian, 10 BC - 54 AD, in
I Claudius, by Robert Graves.
"The Corinthians, the last Ancient Greek city-state, had been
wiped out in 146 by the Romans. No Greek state emerged from this
date until 1830 ... Root cause of the problem is the neurotic
nature of Greek nationalism, in its wilful confusion of modern
politics and ancient history. It is claimed that their "unbroken
descent" from Plato, Aristotle and Demosthenes sets them apart.
Theirs is a higher civilzation, a higher destiny. But over the
thousands of years, there was no such thing as a national Greek
state."
The Rising Sun of the Balkans: The Republic of Macedonia,
International Affairs Agency Research Centre, Instanbul, 1993.
"The most usual ideological abuse of history is based on
anachronism rather than lies. Greek nationalism refused Macedonia
even the right to its name on the grounds that all Macedonia is
essentially Greek and part of a Greek-nation state, presumably
ever since the father of Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia,
became ruler of the Greek lands on the Balkan peninsula. Like
everything about Macedonia, this is far from a purely academic
matter, but it takes a lot of courage for a Greek intellectual to
say that, historically speaking, it is nonsense. There was no
Greek nation-State or any other single political entity for the
Greeks in the fourth century BC; the Macedonian empire was
nothing like the Greek or any other modern nation-State, and in
any case it is highly probable that the ancient Greeks regarded
the Macedonian rulers, as they did their later Roman rulers, as
barbarians and not as Greeks, though they were doubtless too
ppolite or cautious to say so."
Eric Hobsbawn, Fact, Fiction and Historical Revisionism, New York
Review of Books, reprinted in The Australian, December 8, 1993.
"The pure Greeks had been disappeared from the scene of history
after the occupation of Corinth by the Romans in 146. In the 6th
and 8th centuries the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs had immigrated
as far south as the Pelopponnesian peninsula and even some Aegean
islands and settled there. Slavs settled in Epiros, Thessaly,
Roumeli and the Pelopponnesian pensinula, Albanians in Athens,
Corinth, Mani, Thessaly and Aegean islands, Vlachs in Thessaly,
Roumeli, Seven Islands (the Ionian islands) and Aegean islands."
The Greek historian Paparigopoulos.
"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 artificial". RH
Jenkins (1963 'Byzantium and Byzantinism', Cincinnati) revived
the idea."
Robert Browning, Greece Old and New, edited by Tom Winnifrith and
Penelope Murray, The Macmillan Press, London, 1963.
"There was a widely held belief in Western historiography until
recently in the premise that at the core of Western civilization
lies the civilization of the "Ancient Greeks", and today's Greeks
(modern Greeks) are generally considered to be the successors of
the "Ancient Greeks". Martin Barnal has demonstrated the
groundlessness of this premise in the first volume of his
breakthrough 4-volume work "The Black Athena, Afro-Asiatic Roots
of Classical Civilization, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece"."
The Rising Sun of the Balkans: The Republic of Macedonia,
International Affairs Agency Research Centre, Instanbul, 1993.
"...educated persons of high Byzantine age, though intensely
proud of their Hellenic culture, tended to indifference towards
their racial antecedents. They had become quite accustomed to the
situation in which the Empire had become, since late Roman times,
an ethnic mixture on an enormous scale."
Nicholas Cheetham, Mediaeval Greece, Yale University Press, 1981.
"The composition of their (Greek) blood-stream is a matter I
would rather leave to the chemists. The ancient Greeks were,
after all, of very mixed ancestry; and there can be no doubt that
the Byzantine Greeks, both before and after the Slav occupation,
were even more heterogenous."
Professor Nicol, Studies in Late Byzantine History and
Prosopography, 1986.
"Greek scholarship passes over with an underestimation the
historic fact of the migration of peoples which fundamentally
redrew the ethnic map of Europe, and especially of the Balkans,
during the early Byzantine period. Macedonia has been represented
as a buffer protecting Hellenism from the waves of the barbarians
throughout the centuries. The Slavonic element in Greece is
either denied or minimized and it is well known that the
Byzantine historian Constantine Porphyrogenitus openly says that
the whole of Hellas had been Slavicized. It is likewise a known
fact that the Slavonic tribes of the Ezerites and the Milingi
were independent in the Peloponnese in the 7th and 8th centuries
and did not pay tribute to Byzantium ... Demelios Georgakas notes
that even today in the Peloponnese no matter in which direction
one moves one cannot go three miles without encountering a
Slavonic place-name ... It is very unscholarly to speak of a
homogenization of just one nation in these regions of the
Balkans."
Macedonia and Its Relations With Greece, page 14, Council for
Research into South-Eastern Europe of the Macedonian Academy of
Sciences and Arts, 1993.
"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
descendents of these people were still talking Albanian when I
was in Greece in the 1930s."
Nicholas Hammond, Greece Old and New, edited by Tom Winnifrith
and Penelope Murray, The Macmillan Press, London, 1963.
"Greece calls Southern Albania as "Northern Epirus", implying its
alleged links with its "Southern Epirus" province, where there is
a substantial Albanian Orthodox population, the presence of which
Greece tries to conceal, while laying claims on the territories
of its neighbours...
While Albania accepts the presence of an ethnic Greek minority in
the Orthodox minority population in southern Albania, Greece does
not accept the presence of the Albanian minority within its
borders. Albania brought the situation of the ethnic Albanian
minority in Greece to the agenda of the CSCE Human Dimension
Meeting in Moscow in September 1991...
Another example of the racist attitude of Greece towards its
neighbours is the pressure exerted by Greeks on the Albanians
coming to that country in order to find a job. They are pressured
to become Orthodox Christian and change their names to Greek ones
in order to be employed. Greece in this way tries to assimilate
the Albanian immigrants in time."
Greece in the NATO and the EC, and the Relations of Greece with
its Neighbours, International Affairs Agency, Instanbul, 1993.
"The first Greek to suggest that the Vlachs living in these
passes (crossing the Pindus Mountains) were the linear
descendants of Roman soldiers was M Chrysochoos. His book ...
(is) full of misplaced patriotism in insisting that these Romans
were in some way Greeks."
Tom Winnifrith, Greece Old and New, edited by Tom Winnifrith and
Penelope Murray, The Macmillan Press, London, 1963.
"Rumania's interest in the Vlach minority in Northern Greece,
which was dormant after World War II, seems to have resurfaced
after the sweeping changes in the Balkans. The Rumanian Balkan
History Professor Motiu, when talking about the Rumanians living
out of the borders of Rumania, has said that the Vlachs, which
were of Rumanian origin and who comprise 7-8 per cent of the
population of Greece, numbered 700 to 800 thousands ...
There are no population statistics regarding the Vlach minority
since the Greek census of 1951. The census of 1935 and 1951
recorded 19,703 and 39,855 Vlachs respectively. Emigre Vlach
sources claim a figure of 600,000. Greece does not recognize the
presence of a Vlach minority."
Greece in the NATO and the EC, and the Relations of Greece with
its Neighbours, International Affairs Agency, Instanbul, 1993.
"Greece, while denying the presence of ethnic and religious
minorities within its borders, tries to convince the world that
the Orthodox people living in its neighbouring countries are
ethnic Greeks. But this is not true. In Cyprus, the Southern
Cypriot Orthodox whom Greece presents to the world as Greek
Cypriots, are not ethnic Greeks."
Greece in the NATO and the EC, and the Relations of Greece with
its Neighbours, International Affairs Agency, Instanbul, 1993.
"The controversy centres on a book about Cyprus written by
[German archaeologist Franz] Maier in 1964 ... According to the
socialist MP, Maier had also described the Turkish Cypriots as a
"people" and not a minority, and argued that Greek Cypriots and
Greeks were not really racially Greek but a mixture.
In a charged atmosphere, [chairman of the interim committee of
the University of Cyprus, Nelly] Tsouyiopoulou, who had
recommended his inclusion, countered that Maier's book was
pro-Hellenic, and had done much to help inform the German
speaking world about the island."
The Cyprus Weekly, March 5, 1992.
[The Cypriot sociologist Andreas] "Panayiotou said Cypriots were
not Greek, but were a synthesis of Greek, Turkish and other
elements; he described Greek army officers serving on the island
"mercenaries" and advocated that the Cypriot dialect should
become the island's official language. He also argued that
Christains and Muslims in Cyprus had fought common fights."
The Cyprus Weekly, April 10, 1992.
"Oh, we had not come to Athens unmindful that debunkers like Mark
Twain had thought modern Greeks a libel on the ancients..."
Exiles in the Aegean, Bert Birtles, 1938.
"I did hope that my friend Anthos Lycavghis would have rung me up
to inquire about Auberon Waugh, who wrote in The Daily Telegraph
that the Greeks of today, with hairy popos, flat noses and bushy
eyebrows, are clearly a race of Turkish descent and have nothing
to do with the Greeks of antiquity sculpted on the Elgin
marbles."
George Lanitis, The Cyprus Weekly, May 1, 1992.
[In the 19th Century] "Greece basked in Victorian favour.
Nevertheless its inhabitants were regarded with vague suspicion
in academic circles, especially as their connection with
antiquity was thought not quite genuine. They were, in Robert
Byron's words "discounted as the unmoral refuse of medieval Slav
migrations, sullying the land of their birth with the fury of
their politics and the malformation of their small brown bodies."
Nicholas Cheetham, Mediaeval Greece, Yale University Press, 1981.
"Thus Greek lands were heavily populated with a variety of
non-Greek peoples, especially Slavs, Albanians, and Vlachs, so
much so that by the time they were eventually assimilated, the
ethnic links between modern Greeks and ancient Greeks were
dramatically thinned. We have a situation in which a majority of
the population has non-Greek antecedents."
Dr John Shea, The Real Macedonians, 1992.
"When the great war comes, Macedonia will become Greek or
Bulgarian according to who wins. If it is taken by the Bulgarians
they will make the population Slavs. If we take it, we will make
them all Greeks."
Harilaos Trikoupis (Greek prime minister 1882 - 1895), History of
the Greek People, Volume 14, page 18, Athens Publishing House.
"A thousand Greek and Serbian publicists began to fill the world
with their shouting about the essentially Greek or Serbian
character of the populations of their different spheres. The
Serbs gave the unhappy Macedonians twenty four hours to renounce
their nationality and proclaim themselves Serbs, and the Greeks
did the same. Refusal meant murder or expulsion. Greek and
Serbian colonists were poured into the occupied country...The
Greek newspapers began to talk about a Macedonia peopled entirely
with Greeks - and they explained the fact that no one spoke Greek
by calling the people "Bulgarophone" Greeks...the Greek army
entered villages where no one spoke their language. "What do you
mean by speaking Bulgarian?" cried the officers. "This is Greece
and you must speak Greek"."
John Reed, The War in Eastern Europe, 1916, discussing the
partition of Macedonia after the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.
"Prominent members of the Greek parliament expressed nostalgia
for the simple old times when E Venizelos of Greece [former prime
minister] and N Pasic of Serbia, after the Balkan wars, in 1913,
agreed on the Greek-Serbian (later Yugoslav) frontier so that to
the north there would be only Serbs and to the south only Greeks,
and no "Macedonians" on either side."
Macedonia, Its People and History, Stoyan Pribichevich, The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982.
"Since 1961, no Greek census has carried details of minorities.
This is because successive Greek governments, a la mode
japonaise, subscribe to a myth of homogeneity. Today, the
historical refusal to acknowledge ethnic or cultural plurality
has transmogrified into a refusal to accept political dissent in
relation to these ethnic or cultural questions. The most bizarre
example is that of schoolboy Michael Papadakis, sentenced to a
year in prison for handing out leaflets with these resounding
words: "Alexander the Great was a war criminal. Macedonia belongs
to its people. There are no races, we are all of mixed descent"."
Editorial, The Times, London, August 1993.
"Modern Greek identity is based on an unshakeable conviction that
the Greek State is ethnically homogenous. This belief, as we
shall see, has entailed repeated and official denial of the
existence of minorities which are not of "pure" Hellenic origin.
"The obsession with Greek racial identity involves the distortion
of the history of the thousands of years when there was no such
thing as a Greek nation state. The early Slav invasions which
reached far into the Peloponnese and left Slav-speaking
settlements well into the fifteenth century are conveniently
ignored. So too is the fact that in the early nineteenth century
the population of Athens was 24 per cent Albanian, 32 per cent
Turkish and only 44 per cent Greek. In the early twentieth
century, Salonika was sixty per cent Spanish-Jewish, 18 per cent
Turkish and only 18 per cent Greek."
Simon Mcllwaine, The Strange Case of the Invisible Minorities
-Institutional Racism in the Greek State, International Society
for Human Rights, British Section, Dec 1993.
"I subsequently secured back issues of Athens and Salonika
newspapers which confirmed imposition of the Greek language oaths
on the three villages. The oaths were taken in the summer of
1959, collectively and in public, before representatives of the
Church, the government, the police and the army. The
"Slavophones" swore en masse that from then on they would never
again speak Slav among themselves, only Greek. For instance, the
Athens Vima of July 8, 1959, said in part, "The Macedonian Slav
language should have been abolished earlier. But it is still not
too late, and this should be emphasized and used as an example
for other Greeks inhabiting Macedonia and still using that
language." According to the Salonika Hellenikos Vorras of July 8,
1959, the collective public oath ran as follows: "Before God and
man, as faithful successors of the ancient Greeks, we swear that
in the future, voluntarily, at no place and at no time shall we
use the Slav language dialect."
Macedonia, Its People and History, Stoyan Pribichevich, The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982.
"In retrospect it is clear to me that my 12 years of Greek
schooling, mainly in the 1970s, conspired to instil in me
precisely one attitude: an almost unshakeable belief in the
purity and unity of the Greek people, language and
culture...Belief in the continuity of Greece against all odds was
enabled also by the method of withholding information and sealing
off interpretive paths. We had, as children, neither the capacity
nor the inclination to explore disunities and "impurities"."
Dr Alexander Zaharopoulos, Greece a Land of Heroes - and
Distortions, Sydney Morning Herald, March 23, 1994
"What is the word for this obsessive Greek pseudo-relationship
with their country's past (they even have a magazine, Ellenismos,
devoted to the subject)? It is not quite pretentiousness. There
is too much passion for that.
"No, the Greeks, the ancient ones, had a word for the modern
Greek condition: paranoia. We must accept that Mr Andreas
Papandreou (Greek prime minister) and the current EC presidency
are the sole legitimate heirs of Pericles, Demosthenes and
Aristides the Just. The world must nod dumbly at the proposition
that in the veins of the modern Greek, with his dark glasses,
car-phone and phantom olive groves attracting EC subsidies, there
courses the blood of Achilles. And their paranoid nationalism is
heightened by the tenuousness of that claim.
"In the 1830s an Austrian classicist called JJ Fallmereyer made a
study of the south Slav migrations and concluded not just that
most Greeks are Slavs, but that not a drop of pure Greek blood
was to be found in the modern Greek. In Athens, needless to say,
his name is not much heard.
"Greece has been ruthless in erasing traces of ethnic diversity.
The village of Marathon, scene of the great victory in 490 BC,
the same Marathon where Byron looked out for an hour alone and
dreamt that Greece might still be free, was, early last century,
almost entirely Albanian."
The desperation with which the Greeks claim a monopoly of a
classical past, in which we all have a share, should be the clue:
the Greeks today are a mixture of Slavs, Turks, Greeks, Bulgars,
Albanians, Vlachs, Jews and Gypsies."
Editorial, The Sunday Telegraph, London, March 27, 1994.
"...national symbols are often modern creations which do not
reflect the reality of the circumstances they purport to
represent. Tradition can be invented. Modern Greece, for example,
is a relatively new creation and bears little resemblence to the
ancient Greece which is the source of much of its symbolism."
Making Macedonia, Jeremy Moon, Department of Political Science,
University of Western Australia, March 1994.
"Greece objects to the Star of Vergina on the Macedonian flag,
but the Star of Vergina is not a Greek symbol, except in the
sense that it happens to have been found on the territory of the
present-day Greek state. While in Greece, Mr Kennett (the
Victorian premier) repeatedly indicated his acceptance of the
nationalistic myth that the present-day Greeks are the sole heirs
to the ancient Greek heritage."
"The modern-day "Greeks" are not descended from the ancient
Greeks. They appropriated ancient Greek cultural symbols because
they happen to live in more or less the same part of the world as
the ancient Greeks did...Most of the 19th-Century "Greeks" not
only did not call themselves Hellenes (it was the intellectual
nationalists that taught them to do that), they did not even
speak Greek, but rather Albanian, Slavonic or Vlach dialects (as
the Melbourne anthropologist Roger Just pointed out in his
celebrated article "Triumph of the Ethnos" in 1989). The English
poet Byron never got over the shock when he came to Greece
expecting to find the tall, blond, blue-eyed heroes of antiquity.
Most modern-day Greeks look rather different."
Professor Peter Hill, Levelling the Levendis, The Age, April 20,
1994.
"On 10 December [1992] Christos Sideropoulos and Anastasios (or
Tasos) Boulis will stand trial for comments they made in an
interview with a Greek magazine Ena in March 1992 about their
ethnic identity as Macedonians and the Greek Government's foreign
policy. The two men are charged with spreading false rumours
about the non-Greekness of Macedonia and the existence of a
Macedonian minority on Greek territory which is not officially
recognized and with instigating conflict among Greek citizens by
differentiating between the speakers of a Slavic language and
Greeks. If convicted they face possible terms of imprisonment of
up to several years and heavy fines.
Amnesty International, Greece: Violations of the Right to Freedom
of Expression, November 1992.
"There are a million Macedonian speakers [in Greece]. We are
entitled to rights, to associations, schools, churches,
traditions ... I have a Macedonian ethnic consciousness ... I
belong to an ethnic minority which isn't recognized by my State."
Christos Sideropoulos, Macedonian Human Rights Campaigner, Ena
Magazine, March 1992.
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