History and Anthropology

ISSN: 0275-7206 (Print) 1477-2612 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ghan20

Parliamentary politics as an integration

mechanism: The Slavic-speaking inhabitants of
interwar (1922–1940) Western Greek Macedonia

Raymondos Alvanos

To cite this article: Raymondos Alvanos (2019): Parliamentary politics as an integration

mechanism: The Slavic-speaking inhabitants of interwar (1922–1940) Western Greek Macedonia,
History and Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2019.1639051

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2019.1639051

Published online: 25 Jul 2019.

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HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2019.1639051

Parliamentary politics as an integration mechanism: The

Slavic-speaking inhabitants of interwar (1922–1940) Western
Greek Macedonia
Raymondos Alvanos

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article is a case study on how Parliamentary politics could Slavic-speakers; Macedonia;
operate in favour of the integration of ethnic minorities into the parliamentary democracy;
nation-state. The incorporation of the largest part of the region of Greece; identities;
nationalism; national
Macedonia into the Greek State after the Balkan Wars (1912–1913)
integration
led to radical changes in the lives of the Slavic-speaking villagers
of Greece (‘Slavic-speakers’ is a term used in this paper so as to
describe the inhabitants of Macedonia who had a Slavic language
as their mother tongue. Often, in the Greek newspapers of the
time the language was referred to as Macedonian or local
Macedonian. It was similar to the Bulgarian language but could
also be understood in Serbia). Up to 1936, local politicians’
approach of peaceful integration through prosperity and fair
administration prevailed but in 1936, parliamentary democracy
was abolished and ceased to function as a mechanism for
integrating Slavic-speaking villagers into Greek society.

Introduction
The study of Greece’s assimilationist policies towards its Slavic-speaking inhabitants has
attracted many scholars (indicatively, Kofos 1964; Mavrogordatos 1983, 2017; Gounaris
1993; Karakasidou 1993; Varda 1993; Michailidis 1996, 2001, 2003; Carabott 1997; Kosto-
poulos 2000, 2003a, 2003b; Van Boeschoten 2000; Cowan 2001; Robou-Levidi 2016). The
disintegration of Yugoslavia and the independence of the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia in 1991 acted as a strong incentive for research into the history of the inhabi-
tants of Greek Macedonia, particularly as FYROM claimed them as their fellow countrymen.
In this paper, I consider the area of Western Greek Macedonia where a significant number
of Slavic-speakers resided and their interaction with the Greek state during the inter-war
years (1922–1940).
This study argues that the interaction of the Slavic-speaking people with the local poli-
ticians has had a significant positive impact on their integration into the newly expanded
Greek nation-state. Hence, parliamentary politics may have this positive side of bringing
about cohesion where groups of people threatened of social exclusion are concerned.
However, what were the desires of the Slavic-speaking people themselves? What were
their aspirations? Were they hostile towards the Greek nation and the Greek state? How
was their identity formed and on what parameters was it based?

CONTACT Raymondos Alvanos raymond@otenet.gr Department of Communication and Digital Media, University
of Western Macedonia, Fourka, Kastoria 52100, Greece
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 R. ALVANOS

In this article, identity is viewed as a process rather than as a fixed state of reality. Iden-
tity is a socially constructed, variable definition of self or other, whose existence and
meaning is continuously negotiated, revised and revitalized (Danforth 2000, 87). Identities
are shaped or structured by powerful political, economic, social and cultural forces, the
most important of which inevitably involve the hegemonic power of the state. In this
context, state policy acquired crucial importance in the formation of national identities
(Van Boeschoten 2000, 30). State policies, the ideologies that legitimate them and the
institutions and organizations that realize them all influence the process of identity for-
mation, as individuals are socialized and become citizens of particular states. States
have the power and the resources to determine what choices are available to people
and what the rewards or the sanctions will be when they exercise these choices and
adopt specific identities (Danforth 2000, 88).
Having this in mind I focus here on the interaction between the Greek state and its
Slavic-speaking citizens. I argue that the representative institutions of the parliamentary
democratic regime worked as a mechanism of incorporation for the Slavic-speaking villa-
gers into Greek society. Local politicians would make every effort to integrate them into
the Greek state and society, with the same rights as other Greeks. Their own political
success depended on their voters’ integration and the successful advancement of
Slavic-speaking villagers’ demands towards the administrative state authorities. The 4
August 1936 was a turning point, as Metaxas’ dictatorship was established and the state
policy towards Slavic-speaking people abruptly changed. As there were no local politicians
to support and protect them, strict assimilationist policies prevailed.
This article is based, to a great extent, on primary sources, such as the politician Filipos
Dragoumis’ archive, the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle Archive and the local press
of the period (especially useful were the local newspapers Kastoria, Elenchos, Dytiki Make-
donia and Ethnos). These sources were supplemented by the critical use of the rich second-
ary bibliography. Using content analysis as the main methodological tool, I focused on
information related to how Slavic-speaking people interrelated with politics and politicians
in their effort to use representative institutions to their benefit. For the purposes of this
essay, the following United Nations definitions were adopted. Integration (ensomatosi) is
‘a process by which diverse elements are combined into a unity while retaining their
basic identity’. There is no insistence upon uniformity or the elimination of all differences;
assimilation (afomoiosi):
a process aiming to produce a homogeneous society by getting minority groups to discard
their own culture in favour of the dominant one. There is a willingness on the part of the domi-
nant group to accept members of other groups but this is contingent, as a contidio sine qua
non, upon their accepting its culture. (Carabott 1997, 73)

Hard times: 1903–1922

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Slavic-speaking inhabitants of Macedonia, who
were the majority of the Christian population in the region, lived mainly in small villages
and would work cultivating the land, mostly as tenants on the estates of Ottoman beys or
as small landowners. The recognition of the independent exarchate church by the sultan in
1870 and the establishment of the state of Bulgaria in 1878 created a new reality in the
region. If the inhabitants of a village wanted to, they could apply to the Ottoman
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 3

authorities for permission to change their religious affiliation and, from the patriarchate
church, move to the exarchate church, have an exarchist priest and hold their church ser-
vices in the Bulgarian language. The expansion of national ideologies led to a breach in the
Christian population (Rum millet) of the Ottoman Empire and to the beginning of national
rivalries (Konortas 1998).
Following the events of 1878, the states of Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia each started
financing schools and churches in a bid to win over the hearts, minds and tongues of
Macedonia’s Orthodox masses. The Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbs were joined in this
struggle by Romanian-backed Vlachs, Albanians and Jews, as well as the Ottomans, who
wished to ensure the loyalty of their Muslim subjects. Nevertheless, the main battle was
between Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia for the allegiance of the majority Christian Orthodox
population (Brooks 2015). Whereas, up to that time, the Slavic-speaking villagers had been
treated with contempt by the Greek inhabitants of the towns (Skopetea 1993), they now
started to become the subject of unprecedented attention. Their feelings and national
identity acquired an exchange value and, as one would expect, they tried to use the antag-
onism of the Balkan states to their own advantage. Thus the Slavic-speaking people were
separated into patriarchists and exarchists who, at that time, were closer to political parties
than to different national groups (Gounaris 1993, 1995). However, the most important
issue for the Slavic-speaking people was not to which nation they would belong but
how they could acquire their own land. The success of the Internal Macedonian Revolu-
tionary Organisation (IMRO), which led to the Ilinden uprising on 20 July 1903, resulted
from the fact that they succeeded in convincing a significant proportion of the Slavic-
speaking villagers that they could claim the right to own the land they cultivated (Karavi-
das 1978). The reports from the Greek consulates in Macedonia at that time highlighted
the immense significance which villagers placed on the land issue. The detachment of a
rather large number of Slavic-speakers from the patriarchate to the exarchate was due,
according to these reports, to the fact that Bulgarian propaganda succeeded in ‘planting’
Bulgarian ideas in the population and rendering them fascinated with the dream of the
distribution of the beys’ manors (Karavas 2010).
During the period of the ‘Macedonian Struggle’ (Makedonikos Agonas) from 1903 to
1908, violence and insecurity escalated and intensified in the region, as Greek armed
groups were organized in the mountainous regions of Macedonia to face the opposing
Bulgarian armed groups in their struggle for expansion of their national influence. Then,
some of the local Slavic-speaking people chose to support the Greek national camp
and, as a result, they were scornfully called Grekomani by their opponents. All Greek Mace-
donians (whether Greek- or Slavic-speaking) who fought the Bulgarian armed bands were
called Makedonomachi. They were to become a political elite with large influence, very
important jurisdiction and significant personal benefits in the following years (Gounaris
1990). It was not the Macedonian Struggle, though, that finally decided the fate of Mace-
donia but the Balkan wars which awarded the bulk of the region to Greece. During the
wars, some of the Slavic-speakers who had been exposed as Bulgarians migrated to Bul-
garia. Major difficulties and widespread insecurity continued in the following years as the
region was to become the Macedonian front of the First World War. Despite the end of the
Great War, the Asia Minor campaign meant another three very difficult years for every resi-
dent in Greece. Almost all the young men in the region were recruited and sent to fight in
Asia Minor. To avoid conscription, some of them deserted or migrated to Bulgaria.
4 R. ALVANOS

The Slavic-speakers had the option of migration, after World War I, as a result of the
Treaty of Neuilly, which was signed on 27 November 1919 and included a special contract
regulating the process of the exchange of populations between Greece and Bulgaria.
Accordingly, people in Bulgaria who claimed to have Greek origins and residents of
Greece who declared Bulgarian origins had the right to emigrate. The criterion for the
exchange was whether people were willing to go. What can be seen here (as was also
the case during the Macedonian struggle) is that individual choice was of paramount
importance, as was the choice of where the people themselves wanted to live. Yet,
there was an important restriction. People could only choose one national identity. This
was an era when, for the commissioners of the League of Nations, ‘dual nationality was
thought just as tragic as statelessness’ (Cowan 2008, 347). Despite the voluntary nature
of the exchange, in practice most of the 66,000 Slavic-speakers (the majority of whom
were from Eastern Macedonia and Thrace) who migrated to Bulgaria were forced
(especially after 1922) to leave Greece, in the same way that the Greeks who left Bulgaria
were pressed to do so (Barker 1980; Mavrogordatos 2017).
The 1928 census showed that 81,984 residents of Greece spoke a Slavic language and
were considered to be ‘Slavic-speaking or bilingual residents of Greece who had a Greek
national consciousness’ (Angelopoulos 1979, 20). However, in reality, many avoided
declaring that they had Slavic as their mother tongue, probably because they wanted
to live without problems in the Greek national state. Contemporary witnesses estimated
that there were about 200,000 Slavic-speakers in Greece (Mavrogordatos 1983; Divani
1995). A more accurate number was obtained after confidential statistics were collected
by the General Administration of Macedonia in early 1925 – i.e. after the period for submit-
ting a migration declaration had come to an end. According to these statistics, in Greek
Macedonia there were 76,098 former patriarchist Slavic-speakers and 97,636 former exar-
chist Slavic-speakers, of whom 11,228 were to migrate to Bulgaria. So the number of
former exarchists would be limited to 86,408. The number of Slavic-speakers was therefore
162,506 people, who were concentrated mainly in the Florina and Pella prefectures.
Almost half of the total Slavic-speaking population lived in Western Macedonia, 69 per
cent of whom were former exarchists. Slavic-speakers accounted for 11 per cent of the
total population of Macedonia and made up 27 per cent of Western Macedonia, 8 per
cent of Central Macedonia and 6 per cent of Eastern Macedonia (Michailidis 2003).

The ‘liberation of the peasants’

The dream that all the peasants had clung to for centuries was finally made a reality by the
Greek state after the defeat by the Turks and the disaster of 1922. The return to their vil-
lages of those who had fought in the war played a catalytic role in the change to the own-
ership regime. The need for the agricultural rehabilitation of these men, combined with
the arrival of the refugees, gave a decisive boost to the decision for appropriation of
large land properties by the state. Slavic-speaking tenants finally became smallholder
farmers in the years 1923–1925 when, according to a local newspaper – Kastoria – on
23 September 1923, the ‘liberation of the peasants’ became a reality. Not much research
has been done on the importance of the agrarian reform and the changes it brought to
the lives of all villagers living in the so-called ‘New Lands’ (i.e. areas which were incorpor-
ated into the Greek state after the Balkan wars and the First World War). In the context of
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 5

this paper, I examine how the land reform affected the Slavic-speaking villagers and par-
ticularly how the appropriation of land was associated with their relation with the Greek
state and Greek society in general.
To the Greek Prime Minister and leader of Komma Fileleftheron (Liberal Party), Elefther-
ios Kyriacou Venizelos, the rehabilitation of those who had been landless was an ‘act of
utmost national political importance’. As he remarked in an election speech in Patra in
1920:
In these New Lands we have many people of liquid national consciousness (υδαρούς εθνικής
συνειδήσεως), who will definitively turn towards whichever state solves the Agricultural issue
which is of such importance to them. (Kontogiorgi 1998, 210)

Venizelos was proved right, as the allocation of lands to Slavic-speakers was indeed a
crucial factor that prevented the Slavic minority from adopting a hostile attitude against
the Greek state. Nevertheless, the situation was far from idyllic. The arrival of refugees
led to intense (occasionally bloody) conflicts between locals and refugees and greatly
reduced the expected profits. The clash between them persisted and, indeed, became
worse during the interwar years because the final distribution of land was continuously
delayed. This prolonged the uncertainty and the need for the villagers to have a more
intense connection with the political structures of the Greek state (Vergopoulos 1975; Kar-
avidas 1978; Alvanos 2015).
The majority of Slavic-speaking villagers joined the People’s Party (Laiko Komma – also
known as Antivenizelist), the other main Greek party, during the interwar years. The rivalry
of the politicians of the two main political parties of the interwar years – Laiko Komma and
Venizelos’ Komma Fileleftheron or Liberal Party – to win over the votes of the Slavic-speak-
ing villagers proved to be to the benefit of the latter, who were trying to exploit it in their
favour.
Under the centralized nation-state (where many of the decisions concerning the lives of
the population of the region were taken in Athens), politicians of both political parties
acquired particularly important roles. They were called upon to use their access to the
state and the control they exerted in government and state institutions in order to
meet the demands of the villagers.
The way in which the political system was gradually developing in the region is
reflected in the local press. For example, it is worth mentioning the case of the pro-Veni-
zelos newspaper Kastoria, which functioned as an organ to promote local demands. There
is a large number of reports showing how local politicians communicated landless villa-
gers’ demands for land to the state authorities and intervened to ensure that these
demands were met. A typical example of this is an article in Kastoria (10 August 1924),
pointing out that the Venizelist politician of Komma Fileleftheron, Kyros, ‘was acting on
behalf of the landless villagers in Korisos’. The newspaper then sent a clear message to
all landless villagers: ‘All communities should submit lists of landless villagers and send
these lists to Mr Kyros’. Throughout the interwar period, the land question was the
main issue in the political arena which was directly related to the villagers’ lives. All
farmers, both locals and refugees, were ‘hostages’ of the political system, as they had
either bought Muslim land through irregular transactions or had been allotted land
from expropriated estates. The land boundaries were not fixed and could be modified
depending on changes in political power. The question of how many acres (and what
6 R. ALVANOS

quality) of land the villagers would eventually own after the land was distributed with its
final title deeds was a very good reason for them to take an interest in politics and to want
to see ‘their own people’ in power.
In this context, we can understand villagers’ unprecedented interest in politics, which
can be seen in a local Florina newspaper, Elenchos, on 8 October, before the elections
of November 1926:
We can see this phenomenon, which was not common in the past, in connection with the pre-
election movement. While in the past citizens in general, and especially the villagers, were
indifferent, and candidates had to campaign even on the day before the election, after
entire teams had gone to each village to engage the voters and generate interest, we can
already see the opposite happening now. Villagers from all the villages, either alone or in
groups, are coming into the town asking when the election will happen, who the candidates
will be, the parties, etc.

Politicians as intermediaries
The quality of the relations between often illiterate villagers – who were unfamiliar with
state bureaucracy – and politicians, is vividly demonstrated in the newspaper Elenchos
tis Florinas, which stated on 18 January 1929:
In Sklithro a farmer, when presented to the Commission which was to decide on his disputed
land, was so stressed that, instead of showing the contracts he had, he showed the Commis-
sion something like a lease. The committee took his fields from him. However, when he spoke
to the MP, Mr. Modis, the farmer was confident enough to tell him the whole story and to ask
him to intervene … (Fotiadis 2004, 254)

Therefore, it was the MP whom locals trusted and with whom they felt that they could
talk of their problems. Even if they never needed his help, they knew he would be there
for them, ready to help them and to act as a mediator between them and the hostile and
faceless state administration. Each politician was the head of an unofficial organization, a
political mechanism constituted of individual liaisons in the villages (κομματάρχες) who
were present in the everyday lives of people. These local leading figures had deep
knowledge of the local societies and were indispensable to the politicians as they
were connecting them to individual voters. Usually they were persons of higher social
status – grocers, millers, merchants, owners of coffee-shops etc. In many cases, they
were elected municipality councillors. In Western Macedonia, these local political
agents connected the villagers with their MPs and to the political system in general.
Many had fought in the Macedonian Struggle as Makedonomachoi, so there was no
doubt about their Greek identity.
The issue of land may have been extremely important but it was not the only reason
why the villagers became interested in social matters and politics. The development of
the centralized nation-state also meant that the state intervened in many areas of the
villagers’ lives. As the latter were relatively inexperienced in these new procedures, they
needed the right people to mediate between them and those in central state auth-
orities. These intermediaries were the political parties’ candidates and their local
agents (κομματάρχες). For instance, before the elections of 1928, ‘hundreds of
people, if not thousands’ visited all the candidates standing for all the parties and
asked them to mediate for them in their cases, which had been created by the ‘poor
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 7

administration and bureaucracy. Each villager lodged his complaint and asked that an
injustice which had been perpetrated by the civil service be righted’ (Kastoria, 2 Sep-
tember 1928).
An important issue for which the villagers requested the assistance of politicians was
the release of villagers who were in prison for being in debt to the bank. All villagers
who were allotted land were indebted to banks; thus they often needed the intervention
of politicians. For instance, Minister Valalas mediated several times in order farmers be
released from prison where they had been due to their debts (Kastoria, 4 September
and 23 October 1932, and 28 September 1930). Other local issues that concerned the vil-
lagers were (among others) effectively combating robbery, increasing the frequency of
trains, connecting many villages with telephone lines, building new schools, and bringing
about the enactment of the law on pensions for First World War victims (Elenchos, 30
October 1926).
Similar requests were made by residents of the prefecture when Laiko Komma (Peoples’
Party) came to power in 1933. This can be seen in the Prefect of Florina’s notebook, which
is preserved in the Filipos Dragoumis Archives (Αρχείο Φίλιππου Δραγούμη), hereafter FDA,
and which also describes the politician’s actions (FDA 18.2/123):
Applications for schools to be built or for roads to be built or improved, complaints against
teachers (I wrote to their supervisor), complaints by residents of Kato Ydrousa “about the
tax on slaughtering animals” (I told them that I would make recommendations to the admin-
istrator and I did so), an application by the local residents of Kelli about their need of wood (I
forwarded the matter to the general administration and the issue will be settled), disability
claims or claims from the war-wounded for financial aid, a request from the villagers of
Agios Bartholomaios for a priest to be appointed as they did not have one, complaints
from people stating that they are forced to go to Bulgaria as people who should be exchanged
(I wrote to the police so that they can remain, at least temporarily) etc.

This archival material provides ample evidence of the communication between the citi-
zens and the politicians. One example which is worth mentioning is the letter from the
members of the municipal council of the village of Mesopotamia, dated 31 May 1933. It
contains a list of requests asking the politicians to render possible, among other things,
the following: the replacement of certain policemen, the allocation of a doctor, the
National Bank’s returning the nearby forest and the adjacent pasture to the community,
loans to be made to the homeless refugees in the community etc. (FDA 18.3/187).
Another example characteristic of the ‘paternal’ relationship between politicians and villa-
gers is the letter dated 7 February 1933 from the villagers of Ambelokipi to Filipos Dragou-
mis, stating that 50 families had nowhere to graze their animals because their pastures had
been taken away: ‘Woe be to us poor people. Take pity on us Father and turn to look after
us as we are in great danger … ’ (FDA 18.3/195). There are also a great number of letters
sent by villagers or local agents to Dragoumis, making various requests – mainly transfers
or the dismissal of officials. MP Tsontos Vardas sent a letter, dated 12 February 1932, which,
among other requests, asks for ‘our extremely Greek village Kostarazi to be connected by
telephone with Kastoria and Chroupista’ and that ‘the Venizelists Giparis and Papageor-
giou, who are Valalas’ blind instruments, be replaced as soon as possible’ (FDA 18.3/
147). Another letter from a local political agent, Ioannis Zografos, dated 14 December
1933, congratulates Dragoumis for achieving so many incoming funds to the area for
work placements at kindergartens, in the police etc. Yet he stresses that Dragoumis
8 R. ALVANOS

must ‘give binding instructions for friends of the party to be appointed, particularly in the
regions where he is a party candidate, so that he can politically benefit from these appoint-
ments’ (FDA 18.3/225).

How the representatives of state administration viewed the Slavic-

speakers
The fact that a significant number of villagers did not speak Greek caused indignation to
government officials who arrived in the region. Most saw their appointment in ‘this
corner of Greece’ as a negative transfer and were often aggressive or hostile to the
Slavic-speaking minority. There are many reports by Greek military or police officers, tea-
chers, prefects and other government officials on the situation in Western Macedonia at
the time. All of them criticize the Greek government for its policy (or lack of policy) in
the region and call for intensified efforts to assimilate the Slavic-speakers (Lithoxoou
1992; Varda 1993; Skordilis 1994). These reports do not condemn behaviour associated
with any criminal offences. Instead, they emphasize the fact that the Slavic language was
flourishing in the area, which they considered unacceptable in an era of nation-states
and especially in the Balkan region. Most of these reports supported the imposition
of sanctions that would force everyone to speak Greek. As communist ideology was
criminalized at the time, reports demanded that the language of the Slavic-speakers
be criminalized too. This criminalization was associated with preventive measures
which needed to be taken (in the opinion of the reports’ authors) to protect the
Greek national state.
These reports were the results of the contact between government officials and the
Slavic-speaking villagers. The Greek officials were educated in the Greek education
system with its fundamental value of a romantic nationalism that equates language
with ethnicity. As Christina Varda (1993, 157) noted, the officials of the state adminis-
tration, who were usually from southern Greece, ‘viewed all the area’s inhabitants with sus-
picion as if they were Bulgarians. Whoever spoke Bulgarian, was Bulgarian (in the view of
the officials). They all spoke Bulgarian, so therefore they were all Bulgarians and worthy of
suspicion’. The authors of these reports often pointed to the danger of neighbouring
countries, especially Bulgaria, which claimed the Slavic-speakers as Bulgarians and did
not hide the country’s ambition of redrawing the boundaries. The majority of soldiers
and policemen were suspicious and distrustful of the Slavic-speaking villagers and kept
them under surveillance, especially if they had relatives in America, where Bulgarian pro-
paganda was flourishing (Mandatzis 1997). Reports from government officials and other
local residents which proposed measures for the assimilation of Slavic-speakers were
usually alarmist because they primarily sought to exploit the existence of linguistic min-
orities to promote the personal, social and professional careers of their authors. All the rel-
evant formal and informal Greek nationalist bodies in the region (teachers, soldiers,
policemen, etc.) supported scaremongering tactics and promoted the need to assimilate
Slavic-speakers in the hope of satisfying their personal ambitions by playing a leading role
in this effort. The Prefect of Florina, Pavlos Kalligas, stated that it was reasonable for the
military authorities to be more suspicious than the political authorities. However, Kalligas
stresses the fact that the former have a personal interest in the assimilation process and
that the political authorities should be ‘cautious about them’.1
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 9

This huge body of reports and references emphasized the need to take immediate
measures to violently repress the cultural differences of the Slavic-speakers. Actually,
these reports are themselves considered to be evidence of the persecution of the
Slavic-speaking minority (Kostopoulos 2000); however, the reality of the 1930s in Greek
Macedonia was rather complicated. Nationalist teachers, policemen, soldiers and other
state agents had to deal with local politicians who had their own reasons for emphasizing
the need for a different approach in the treatment of Slavic-speakers.

How the politicians viewed Slavic-speakers

What, however, was the stance taken by the politicians in relation to their Slavic-speak-
ing voters? It will be easier to find the answer to this question if we look at the views
of a very successful politician in the region, Simos Liubis, who used to have an exten-
sive political network in Slavic-speaking villages, thus achieving an impressively high
number of votes at a time when his party (Metaxas’ ‘Freethinkers Party’) was flounder-
ing in the rest of Greece. His spectacular electoral success in the 1928 elections is a
good example of this, as he received 32.31 per cent of the vote in the Kastoria con-
stituency while, across Greece, the ‘Freethinkers Party’ only obtained 5 per cent. In a
letter he sent to the Governor General of Macedonia on 22 May 1927 concerning
the non-installation of the new community councils (at that time there were proposals
that many elected councillors should not be ratified because they were former Exar-
chists) he wrote:
I cannot guarantee that all of them [Slavic-speakers] feel Greek. But I think that the surest way
to turn these people towards Bulgaria is the distrust which is shown towards them and our
contempt for their elected leaders. As we are not throwing them out (of Greece) we must
not discriminate against them. They must all be appointed, but we should monitor them to
see if they do anything unlawful, although I am sure that with administrative equality their
psychological assimilation will be complete and speedy. [quoted by Liubis on an article he
published in Dytiki Macedonia on 22 March 1931]

Thomas Valalas, brother of (Venizelist MP and Liubis’ rival) Ioannis Valalas, noted in his
journal (Kastoria, 14 December 1924) that Bulgaria had created the Macedonian issue
out of nothing and that the Greek government’s only answer should be to have an admin-
istrative system in which Slavic-speakers ‘should never be so dissatisfied, even for a
moment, as to look in other directions, away from the Greek authorities’. Thus, Valalas
emphasizes something that was expressed by the majority of local residents (both
Greek- and Slavic-speaking) throughout the interwar period – i.e. that ‘Macedonia will
not be saved by the diplomats, but by her governors’. Similar views were held by most
of the politicians of both main political parties that were active in the regions where popu-
lations of Slavic-speakers resided. The anti-Venizelist politician from Laiko Komma
(People’s Party), Filipos Dragoumis, who was assigned the highest administrative position
as Governor of Macedonia, also shared the same views (Dragoumis 1949). Dragoumis,
along with another well-known politician of the Pella prefecture, Sotirios Gotzamanis,
was in favour of decentralization, with more administrative power given to the region
of Macedonia. They also proclaimed that public servants in Macedonia should be born
in the area. In 1935 they dropped the slogan ‘Macedonia for the Macedonians’ – perceived
as an act of treason by their political opponents as it was the slogan of IMRO at the
10 R. ALVANOS

beginning of the century. Yet the truth was that they were both nationalist politicians who
were trying to win more votes by promoting the demand of many local Greek Macedo-
nians (Slavic- and Greek-speakers alike) for more autonomy for the region without any
change in the Greek frontiers (Michailidis 2001).

Parliamentary politics as an integrating mechanism

The threat that the refugees represented to the interests of the locals had the effect of
reducing the importance of the older rift between Exarchists and Patriarchists. The
Slavic-speaking locals had to form a united front to deal with the new situation and the
Greek Makedonomachi – i.e. those fighting the Bulgarian armed bands at the beginning
of the century, many of whom were also politicians – played a key role in this; the majority
of the Slavic-speakers rallied around them in order to maximize the benefits of being
incorporated into the nation-state.
The most impressive example is that of Vasiliada (Zagorichani) where, in 1905,
Tsontos Vardas and his gang executed 62 inhabitants of the village, which was to be
punished because it supported the Bulgarian bands (Petsivas 1994). In 1933 the same
Tsontos Vardas was voted in by 70 per cent of the people of Vasiliada, undoubtedly
including some relatives of his very victims (Alvanos 2005). We cannot be sure what
Tsontos Vardas and other politicians had said to the villagers and what means they
used to obtain their vote. Mavrogordatos (2017), drawing on Venizelists’ political
archives, maintains that Antivenizelist politicians of Laiko Komma (People’s Party) even
promised minority rights to the Slavic-speakers. Although something like this is some-
what unlikely, as the Laiko Comma politicians were fervent nationalists, it seems that
promises (rather than threats) were the main political marketing tool of the time. This
assertion is also based on archive material. As, under a parliamentary democracy, poli-
ticians needed the villagers’ support, they were trying to attract the latters’ votes by
attempting to solve their problems. A typical example of this can be found in a letter
written by a local political agent and former Macedonian fighter, Petros Pyrzas, to his
friend, Filipos Dragoumis, in August 1931. He notes that there will probably be
sudden elections soon, as their political opponents, Venizelist MP Valalas and Senator
Christidis, ‘went from Korestia to Konomplati and were asking the villagers if they had
any complaints’ (FDA 104.4/93).
The politicians’ interest in the villagers did not only manifest itself at election time. The
local newspaper reported that Senator Christidis toured Korestia (after the senatorial elec-
tions) to see what effect the Great Depression had had on the villagers’ situation (Kastoria,
9 April 1930). Pyrzas sent a letter to Dragoumis (FDA 104.4/82), dated 24 May 1931, inform-
ing him that the Prefect of Florina, Kalligas, was showing particular interest in the region as
he had turned ‘the prefecture into his own political bureau’ because he probably wanted
to be elected here. He ends his letter by saying that ‘Kalligas’ behaviour makes me think
that soon we will have elections’. It is worth noting that Pyrzas was wrong on both points,
as Kalligas never stood for election in the region and the elections were held only one and
a half years later, in September 1932. It seems that politicians were aware that it was
necessary to build a close and long-term relationship of trust and mutual support with
the villagers, as their support could not be taken for granted. A characteristic illustration
of this was when the anti-Venizelist Prefect of Kozani had to go to the Slavic-speaking
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 11

village of Rakita (Olympiada) in Eordaia to dissuade 63 local villagers who ‘had made a
statement and said that they were now members of Fileleftheri (i.e. pro-Venizelos Liberals)’.
The mission was a success as, once the Prefect had ‘implored them to sign a new state-
ment’, they all celebrated and drank together (Kastoria, 27 May 1934). Similarly,
F. Pichion, president of the People’s Political Association of the Kastoria District, wrote
to Dragoumis in December 1932, notifying him that ‘lots of people are crowding into
the People’s Party (Laiko Komma) office asking for everything you could possibly
imagine’ (FDA 18.3/141). Actually, the Filipos Dragoumis archive abounds with letters
with hundreds of requests from local residents, especially from the period when he was
Governor General of Macedonia. Behind every demand lay the threat that he would
lose the support of the voters if he did not meet their requests. For instance, in July
1933, representatives of the People’s Party of Argos Orestiko sent him a long list of
demands, together with the warning that, if they were not met, ‘we will not try to convince
voters to vote for you again’ (FDA 18.3/197).
Almost all politicians and political parties aimed to integrate Slavic-speakers into the
Greek nation. This objective was connected with their political aspirations and their
efforts to attract Slavic-speaking voters and their careers depended on whether this inte-
gration took place. It would only happen if politicians pushed for Slavic-speakers to be
treated as equal Greek citizens in a well-governed state. This was their main promise on
their tours of the villages and was the reason behind all other promises – to build
roads, bridges, etc. Perhaps the most important thing was the sense of trust created by
the close personal relationship between the politicians, their local agents (κομματάρχες)
and the villagers, which stood in contrast to what was actually happening between the
villagers and state officials. The fact that local politicians were working for the benefit of
the Slavic-speakers did not mean that they were less nationalist than the state officials
who were writing reports calling for direct and violent assimilation policies. Both poli-
ticians and state officials were nationalists in the sense that they both wanted cultural
homogeneity in the region, based on the dominant language and culture – which was,
of course, Greek. The difference was that the local politicians were not attempting to
enforce this homogeneity ‘from above’ by the imposition of state policy but as a result
of the choices made by the Slavic-speakers themselves. They hoped that the Slavic-speak-
ers (as was already the case with other ethnic groups – the Arvanites and the Vlachs) would
gradually recognize that acquiring the Greek language and culture and becoming part of
the Greek nation would benefit them.
Therefore the personal political networks that the local politicians had developed
worked in favour of the integration of the distinct Slavic-speaking cultural group into
the nation-state. The political system of parliamentary democracy functioned as a
means of smoothing tensions created by the Slavic-speakers’ inclusion in the nation-
state and as a mechanism for their integration into Greek society.

The policy of the Greek state towards Slavic-speakers

The period 1925–1936 was characterized by the prevalence of views of those involved in
local politics. Their calls for a transfer of funds to the region precisely because of ‘its great
national importance’ seem to have been answered. According to one Florina newspaper
report:
12 R. ALVANOS

Tens of millions have been spent in the region on schools, railways, bridges, roads, settle-
ments, compensation and all kinds of public welfare projects, which are too many to count.
And people think that these have been funded by the taxes paid in the region! But the
state’s revenue from the region is so insignificant that the Treasurer asks Athens to send
money every time he has to pay the district officials. And that is a fact! (Ethnos, 14 and 17 Sep-
tember 1932)

In fact, the Prefect of Florina, Kalligas, managed to obtain from Venizelos in November 1929 a
promise of an additional 11 million drachmas of funding, an extremely large sum at the time.
The arguments used by Kalligas to obtain this financial support for the region were based on
the existence of Slavic-speakers, the majority of whom, according to him, had an ‘elastic con-
science’. Again, in his words, their ‘psychological and linguistic assimilation’ could be achieved
merely by the state’s active interest in the region ‘even at the expense of the other Greek
regions’ (Kalligas report). Additionally, the police authorities, who occasionally created pro-
blems for the villagers, could be kept in check by both local politicians and Prefects who
believed in the Slavic-speakers’ assimilation through prosperity, not oppression.
The Prefect of Florina, who took office in December 1932, appears to have been an
exception to this way of thinking. According to a letter sent to Dragoumis by members
of the People’s Party in Florina, the new prefect was causing ‘great damage to our party
and to Greek administration in this area’. For example, when he went with MP Dalipis
to the village of Boufi, he found the villagers celebrating the feast of St Nicholas in accord-
ance with the old calendar. Seeing this, the Prefect attacked the villagers in an ‘improper
manner’, telling them that, with him in office, they would have to celebrate according to
the new calendar, otherwise he would ‘use violence to bring them into line with the
church’. The letter notes that his behaviour made a very bad impression on the villagers
– at a time when ‘the Government is trying to give people relative freedom on this
matter’. The same thing happened in Ammochori, and his reputation ‘spread everywhere
at lightening speed’. The letter closes thus: ‘In view of the above, we would ask, in God’s
name, that you have him transferred. If he remains, he will cause great damage to the
Greek administration in the area … ’ (FDA 18.2/118). The fact that this Prefect (by the
name of Rantis) did not stay more than three months in the region exemplifies how
local politicians were addressing people’s complaints to the central authorities and
finding solutions. In addition, it demonstrates the power of the local politicians and the
prevalence of their views as opposed to those of the nationalistic state agents. This is
demonstrated by several examples where, thanks to local politicians’ mediation, the per-
secution of Slavic-speakers, who were classified as Bulgarians by local police, was stopped.
For instance, according to military officer Fessopoulos, a lawyer from Kastoria wrote a
report in March 1936 in which he stated that the police displaced two well-known Bulgar-
ian agents but local politicians intervened and they were set free (Skordilis 1994).
Another example of politicians’ prevalence over the nationalists is the alarmist-nation-
alist report drawn up by a lawyer, Angelopoulos, who lived in Agios Germanos in Florina.
Angelopoulos sent the report to Filipos Dragoumis in December 1930 and denounced the
role of the local politicians, whom he presented as working for the Bulgarians, as the ‘sole
purpose of politicians is to be elected, something which depends on the masses and the
masses are Bulgarian’. The report states that, in 1928, the security committee of the Florina
Prefecture aimed to remove two ‘recognized agents of the Bulgarian revolutionary com-
mittee from the province of Sorovits’. However, after intervention by local politicians
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 13

‘they were released to continue their work’ (FDA 104.1/12α, dated 12 October 1930). The
above summarizes the confrontation between the military/police and local politicians on
how to deal with Slavic-speaking residents, especially those who had previously declared
themselves to be Bulgarians. On the one hand, the police authorities wanted to take puni-
tive measures against those who were suspected of acting for the Bulgarians while, on the
other, local politicians successfully intervened and protected them.
In addition to the local politicians, the local press also played an important role in redu-
cing the arbitrariness of nation-state institutions and expressing the needs and aspirations
of the people. This can be seen if we look at Prefect Kalligas’ stance in 1930 on the question
of Slavic-speakers who migrated from Greece to Bulgaria and who, on their return, had
been influenced by Bulgarian propaganda which they then acted on. Kalligas tried to
limit these movements by giving orders to the prefecture to refuse to issue passports
for travel to Bulgaria. The measure failed, partly because of the existence of an indepen-
dent local elite, namely the lawyers who regularly wrote articles in local newspapers. As
Kalligas said in his report: ‘The columnists create a damaging national uproar against
the alleged abuses by the Prefecture’. There is a huge number of articles in the local
press written by villagers who protest against abuse by state institutions. For instance, a
villager complained because ‘law-abiding’ citizens suffer undue pressure (arrests and ques-
tioning by the police)
because some people who claim a monopoly on patriotism slander them to the authorities.
The military authorities need to understand that now only Greeks who love their country
live in Greece, and they need to put an end to this pressure. (Kastoria, 29 July 1928)

In connection with the excesses of the police and the role of the press in the area, it is
worth mentioning a complaint from residents of the Slavic-speaking village of Posdivista
(Chalara). According to this complaint, the policemen from Konomplati (Makrochori) ‘went
to Posdivista and, as they thought that they were not treated in an appropriate way,
started suing the villagers for a variety of reasons’. Eventually Valalas, the editor of the
newspaper, intervened and the lawsuits were thrown out by the chief of the Konomplati
police (Kastoria, 23 September 1928).
The fact that the positions held by the local newspapers and politicians were the same as
those held by senior government officials is proved by the writings of the Governor General
of Macedonia, Stylianos Gonatas. In a 1931 report (found in the Museum of the Macedonian
Struggle Archive) to the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of the Interior and the Prime Minister,
he disagreed with proposals by military officers for more-dynamic assimilation measures
towards the Slavic-speaking minority. His basic argument was that ‘real assimilation has
to happen naturally and psychologically; it depends mostly on environment and self-inter-
est’. Besides, according to Gonatas, when Yugoslavia had taken dynamic assimilation
measures of its own, the ‘Bulgarian’ minority was engaged in constant gang activity and
murders, while ‘no gang can remain active in our region due to lack of support by the
local population’. Gonatas stresses that Slavic-speaking populations will ‘become impreg-
nated with Greek feeling out of self-interest, as they already feel that they are better off
under the Greeks. Thus over time, even the very few Bulgarian fanatics will gradually disap-
pear’. Gonatas closes his report by asking for funds ‘so that it is possible to build a bridge on
a community road, to put a water fountain in a village, to repair a church etc. Such things
have greater psychological effect than any propaganda’. The importance of infrastructure
14 R. ALVANOS

work is also stressed by the Prefect of Florina, Kalligas, who notes in his report that the Bul-
garians were spreading propaganda in America, stating that the Greek government had not
undertaken much infrastructural work in Macedonia because it ‘knows that, sooner or later,
it will be forced to abandon these territories’. Clearly Kalligas’ attempt here (which, as men-
tioned above, did indeed have positive results) is to play on leaders’ national pride and to
convince them of the need for funds for the region.
Seen from the contemporary perspective of human rights, the fact remains that the
Greek state did not take any positive measures to protect and develop the cultural iden-
tity of the Slavic-speakers, such as creating schools in their own language (Michailidis
1996). However, it should be mentioned that the Greek state did try to recognize the
Slavic-speaking citizens of Greece as a national minority because Greece had an acute
need to develop a good image abroad after the Asia Minor catastrophe, so that it
could get the loans much needed to rehabilitate the refugees (Louvi 1988; Pantelakis
1988). One expression of the effort which the Greek government put into establishing
international goodwill was the Politi-Kalfof Protocol of September 1924, which basically
recognized a Bulgarian minority in Greece, stating that it should be placed under the
protection of the League of Nations (Sfetas and Kentrotis 1994; Tounta-Fergadi 1986).
However, Greece’s ally, Serbia, protested strongly as it was afraid that the Slavic-speakers
living in southern Serbia (today FYROM) would be recognized internationally as Bulgar-
ians as a result of the agreement. Because of both the Serbian reaction and the reaction
in Greece, in February 1925 the Greek parliament refused to ratify the Protocol (Kofos
1964).
To mitigate the reaction by the League of Nations after the Politi-Kalfof Protocol was
rejected, the Greek government announced that it would set up schools for Slavic-speak-
ers and that they would be permitted to hold church services in Slavic. At the same time,
the government stopped calling Slavic-speakers ‘Bulgarian-speakers’, ‘of Bulgarian
descent’ or plain ‘Bulgarian’ and began calling them ‘Macedonian Slavs’ so that they
would not be confused with either the Bulgarians or the Serbs. In addition, their language
was considered to be a ‘Macedonian Slavic dialect’, which was different from Bulgarian and
Serbian (Kostopoulos 2003a; Tounta-Fergadi 1986). In May 1925, the Greek Education Min-
istry’s department for the education of Slavic-speakers issued the Abecedar, a school
primer which was to be used to teach the villagers in the Slavic language. Greece used
the Abecedar at the League of Nations as proof that the government had fulfilled its obli-
gations towards the Slavic-speakers. Although some copies of the Abecedar reached vil-
lages in Greek Macedonia, in reality they were never used because of the strong
reaction from influential local Greek nationalists in the villages, many of whom were
Slavic-speakers who considered it to be an insult to their Greek national identity (Michai-
lidis 1996).
After General Pangalos’ failed attempt in February 1926 to have Slavic-speakers
recognized as a Serbian minority, they were eventually recognized by the Greek state
as Greek Slavic-speakers. From then on, the official Greek opinion in all international
fora was that there was no Bulgarian minority issue, as it was considered that all the
Slavic-speakers who considered themselves to be Bulgarians had migrated to Bulgaria
during the voluntary population exchange. Even in the 1930s, when the global environ-
ment changed considerably, Greece continued with the same policy. Not only was the
language of Slavic-speakers not ‘forbidden’ but it was dominant and was spoken
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 15

almost everywhere in the public space, except perhaps in schools and army campuses. In
the courts, Slavic-speakers who did not have a good understanding of Greek had the
right to an interpreter (Kastoria, 22 May 1927 and 8 July 1934). Slavic was also commonly
spoken in the municipal councils and in the communication between politicians and vil-
lagers. In fact, the Slavic language was used as a tool to promote intimacy and trust
between politicians and villagers. As Dragoumis admits in a letter to a friend in 1956,
the local politicians (despite his instructions) used to make their speeches in Slavic
when they were in the Slavic-speaking villages. This, he added, should not seem an
extraordinary thing to do since the villagers did not understand Greek well and the poli-
ticians wanted to get their votes (FDA 104/168).
Summing up the situation, military officer Fessopoulos points out that, unlike other
states which cleared their border regions of alien ethnic groups, Greece sacrificed every-
thing ‘to the party interest’ and Greek governors exceeded ‘every other state in liberalism
and forbearance towards minorities’ (Skordilis 1994, 69–70).

The Metaxas dictatorship

A turning point in the history of the Slavic-speaking group in Greece occurred on 4
August 1936. The views held by state officials evolved into official public policy
during the Metaxas regime. Nationalistic reports from the military, teachers and
other state agents proposing the forced assimilation of the linguistic minority and
repression of the Slavic language and Slavic culture in general, were adopted and
implemented by Metaxas’ government. The elimination of parliamentary structures
had a significant impact on the relations between the state and the Slavic-speaking
minority. Under the parliamentary democratic regime, Slavic-speakers felt that they
were involved in the political game of resource distribution through the personal
relationships they had developed with politicians and their local agents
(κομματάρχες). With Metaxas’ rise to power, a phase of isolation and forcible assimila-
tion began. The process of their integration into the Greek society and nation ended
violently and abruptly.
The law ‘on security measures of fortified sites’, published in December 1936, was the
basis for a series of ‘legalised’ acts of discrimination against those whom the authorities
considered to be, somehow, suspect. According to this law (and the decrees that followed
it), all frontier Prefectures were designated as ‘defence areas’, which included ‘supervised
zones’ where military authorities were effectively in control. The military carried out vast
numbers of checks on any civilians who wanted to enter these areas or simply to move
around in them. There was a Military Security Commission in each county in the
‘defence areas’ assigned to decide whether any individual who was a suspect against
the security of the region should be expelled (Alivizatos 1983). This new legislation conso-
lidated the transition of political power from local politicians (who were familiar with the
region and its inhabitants) to the military authorities, who often came from outside the
area and were in favour of forced assimilation measures. This transition from peaceful inte-
gration to a tactic of forcible assimilation led to substantial interference in the daily lives of
Slavic-speaking villagers.
To cap it all, the most irrelevant piece of information about someone ‘motivating resi-
dents to disobey the authorities’ was enough for the suspect to end up in front of a military
16 R. ALVANOS

committee, with the immediate threat of deportation (Kostopoulos 2000, 174–176).

Although there are no sources for the exact number of deportations that took place in
the area during the Metaxas regime, it is certain that it was not only communist Slavic-
speakers who were deported but also Slavic-speakers who were suspected of subversive
activities against the nation. Moreover, there were many occasions when the issue of Bul-
garia sympathizers was used by local state officials for their own enrichment. This was
confirmed by Doros Pefanis, a fervent nationalist and government official, who referred
to the Metaxas period as follows:
Unfortunately, there were countless examples where the phrase “You are Bulgarians” was
accompanied by exploitation. From 4 August on, the business of “Either you give me so
much or I will deport you for being a Bulgarian Communist” had become a goldmine in the
Florina-Kastoria Prefecture, and the Prefect, the policemen or even junior state officials
were involved in this. (Kostopoulos 2000, 176)

The main intervention of the ‘New State’ in the daily life of the Slavic-speakers was the
prohibition of the use of their Slavic mother tongue. The probability that Bulgaria, which
had not accepted the frontiers that resulted after the Second Balkan War, would attack
Greece, using as a pretext the existence of the Slavic minority, made the Greek govern-
ment especially anxious. The probability of a threatening alliance between Yugoslavia
and Bulgaria – thus forming a South Slav bloc on the country’s northern borders –
gave added urgency to the Greeks’ Bulgarophobia (Divani 1995; Carabott 1997).
Through a series of administrative measures, Slavic-speakers were banned from speak-
ing their language in public. Offenders were arrested and given a fine in accordance
with their economic and social status. Because the police received a share of the fines,
they implemented this law with great zeal (Giangiorgos 1993; Poulton 1994; Carabott
1997; Kostopoulos 2003b).
It should be noted that the Metaxas regime was much more tolerant to the other
languages that were spoken in Macedonia – such as Romanian Vlach, Arvanitika (Albanian)
and Turkish (spoken mainly by the refugees who came from Asia Minor) – as they were not
considered a threat to Greece’s national territorial integrity (Divani 1995; Kostopoulos
2000). By the end of the interwar period when, according to the official census of 1940,
the Vlach-speaking population of the country numbered some 53,997 souls, there were
as many as 22 Vlach-minority primary and three secondary schools, attended by around
1,300 pupils, principally funded and partly staffed by Romania (Carabott 2005). Thus
there was a clear discrimination against the Slavic language and Slavic-speakers. The
ambassadors of the previous policy, the local politicians, watched the new situation
with dismay: ‘We are going to destroy all the national achievements that we have had’
wrote Simos Stanois, a political friend of Filipos Dragoumis, in 1937. A few months later
he added:
Everyone is in despair. We have reached a point where Greeks are becoming Bulgarians
because [the Prefect Tsachtsiras] calls everyone Bulgarian and does not show any respect
to anyone. He has destroyed all the work we have done here. […] You must take an interest
in our region again and save it from Mr Ali Pasa, as the inhabitants here call him. (FDA 57/87
and 89)

The above statement is confirmed by many Slavic-speakers who experienced this period
and remember it with great resentment. According to oral testimonies,2 the period before
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 17

Metaxas was a good phase in their relations with the Greek state. They did not recall har-
assment by the state or any interdiction of their language. As one of them said, ‘Then even
the gendarmes were singing with us in our language’. Everything changed after 4 August
1936. Every informant had a story to tell about a member of his or her family who was
arrested because he/she was speaking the forbidden language. One of the informants
said that his father had to sell an ox so as to be able to pay the fine imposed on his
own father while, in another case, a woman had to work throughout the summer in the
fields in order to pay the fine imposed on her mother.
In the Metaxas period, the Slavic language could no longer co-exist with Greek national
identity and those who espoused it (even the former Greek Macedonian fighters) found
themselves being persecuted. The crucial link between the state and Slavic-speakers –
the local politicians – were replaced by military commissions set up in the ‘supervised
zones’, commissions which believed in the nationalistic logic of forced assimilation and
visible national homogenization.

The importance of the Metaxas regime

For many scholars dealing with the issue of Slavic-speakers in Greece, the interwar years
(1922–1940) are perceived as an undifferentiated period of persecution of the Slavic
language (indicatively Karakasidou 1993; Kostopoulos 2000; Robou-Levidi 2016).
Reports of local state agents (military officials, teachers, prefects etc.) offer ample evi-
dence of the enmity of the state towards the Slavic language and its existence in the
Greek state. However, we should not perceive of the state in monolithic terms. There
was a crucial split between Parliamentarians (as elected representatives) and agents
appointed by the Greek state (police, military personnel, school teachers). The former
had adopted a policy of integration of Slavic-speakers to the Greek nation of their free
will and without denying them their mother tongue. Under the democratic regime,
they were able to impose their own perception of state policy and the constraints repres-
sing state agents.
Therefore the Metaxas dictatorship should be seen as a decisive turning point rather
than the continuation (or culmination) of a policy of persecution. During its dictatorship,
the Slavic language was rendered synonymous with the non-Greek national consciousness
(Carabott 1997). Conversely, at the beginning of the twentieth century during the ‘Mace-
donian Struggle’, the Greek state and Greek national agents (such as the Greek Makedo-
nomachi) were using the criterion of self-ascription as the main characteristic of national
identity. Thus the Slavic-speakers who asserted their Greek identity could be accepted
as equal members of the Greek nation like other linguistic groups of Macedonia (such
as Vlachs and Arvanites). Under Metaxas’ regime, the Greek nation developed mainly on
the basis of what Smith calls ‘ethnic nationalisms’ (1986). In this model of national ideol-
ogy, cultures are nationalized and culture becomes the basic criterion of national identifi-
cation (Agelopoulos 2000). Essentialist ideologies of nationalism politicize language and
culture when they attribute political significance to practices that were hitherto irrelevant
to an individual’s political affiliations and loyalties (Karakasidou 1993, 1997; Cowan 1997).
The homogenizing efforts at Greek nation-building (which did not greatly affect Macedo-
nia’s other ethnic groups) enhanced the visibility of the Slavic-speaking group. They were
perceived as ‘others’ and faced the ethnic stigma attached to their group (Van Boeschoten
18 R. ALVANOS

2000). Thus, Metaxas probably helped to nurture the very nightmare he wished to dispel, i.e.
to create a national minority while it was disappearing (Carabott 1997).

Conclusion
We can never be sure about the ‘true’ identity of the Slavic-speakers during the interwar
years. Ethnic identity is ‘constructed, fluid and variably salient, rather than essential,
fixed and already given’ (Cowan and Brown 2000, 3). It may be (as most reports of this
time indicate) that some of them identified with Greece; others were more close to Bul-
garia, while most had a changeable identity according to the everyday needs of survival.
Similarly, in 1929, in conversation with a League official, the Greek Prime Minister,
Eleftherios Venizelos, admitted to three categories of a population that he called ‘Slavo-
phones’: those who identified as Bulgarians, those who spoke Bulgarian ‘but were passio-
nately Greek in national consciousness’ and those who had no national identity at all and
just wished to be left alone (Cowan 2008, 343).
Since we cannot enter the minds of the latter and since we think of identities as situa-
tional (rather than essentialist), we should focus on their living conditions and the policy of
the state towards them. Knowing the hard circumstances that the Slavic-speakers endured
in the years 1936–1949 renders it difficult for us to understand and evaluate the political
and social situation they experienced before 1936. It prevents us from putting ourselves in
their place and realizing that, in the early 1930s, they were not aware of the difficult future
that was ahead of them. Yet, they had the recent memory of an even more difficult past.
Until 1922, Slavic-speaking villagers had lived through at least 20 years of extensive vio-
lence and insecurity (the Ilinden uprising in 1903, the Macedonian struggle, the Balkan
wars, the First World War and the Asia Minor campaign).
In contrast, in the 18 years from 1922 to 1936, their living conditions greatly improved.
Actually, it is an irony of history that most of the promises made to them by the Bulgarian
guerrillas at the turn of the century, in their effort to gain the Slavic-speakers’ support, were
fulfilled by the Greek state in the 1920s. These included land distribution, free education
and the establishment of railways and agricultural banks (Karavas 2010). In particular, the
fact that the state bought the wheat at guaranteed prices which were above the market
price, and the decline (or abolition) of state tax were two of the most beneficial new con-
ditions that Slavic-speakers gained from being included in the Greek state (Alvanos 2015).
As was the case for most of the villagers in Greece, the quality of their everyday life
improved considerably (despite the problems – especially the fact that they were not
given the final title deeds to their fields). This can be seen in the impressive population
increase in the areas where they lived.
Yet the situation was far from being idyllic for the Slavic-speaking people in Greek
Macedonia. As mentioned above, a part of the Greek society – especially military and
police agents – did not share the desire for peaceful integration and called for stricter
measures to repress the Slavic language. Available evidence indicates that these cases
were the exceptions rather than the rule as far as the policy of the Greek state towards
the Slavic-speaking minority was concerned. The free press was used as a means for
denouncing such incidents.
Most importantly, the rivalry of politicians from the two main parties of the interwar
years in their attempts to win the votes of the Slavic-speaking villagers proved to be to
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 19

the benefit of the latter, who did not fail to exploit their antagonism in their favour. The
role played by local politicians and their agents was crucial in the containment of the
ardent nationalistic logic of forced assimilation. Although politicians were in favour of cul-
tural homogenization and were dictating to their voters a ‘nationally correct’ discourse
about their own past and identity, at the same time they had to promote their voters’
aspirations, as they needed their support to succeed in the elections. Thus, they would
not force them to change their language and customs while trying to satisfy their
demands and solve their problems. Above all, they would make every effort to integrate
the villagers into the Greek state and society, with the same rights as the other Greeks.
Their own political success depended on their voters’ integration into the Greek nation
and this was the reason behind their calls for more funds, more infrastructural work and
better administration in the region.
The collapse of the parliamentary democracy in 1936 meant a dramatic change in the
lives of the Slavic-speaking inhabitants of Greece. Nationalistic reports from the military,
teachers and other state agents proposing the forced assimilation of the linguistic minority
and the repression of the Slavic language and Slavic culture in general, were adopted and
implemented during Metaxas’ government. Local politicians did not have the power to
support their former allies. The result of this was that a significant portion of Slavic-speak-
ers felt that they were living in a hostile state. This alienation of Slavic-speakers from the
Greek state would have significant consequences in the 1940s.

Notes
1. Kalligas’ (103-page) report to the Ministry of the Interior, 26 February 1930, Archive of the
Museum of the Macedonian Struggle (hereafter the Kalligas Report).
2. I undertook and recorded oral interviews in the area of Kastoria during the period 1998–2005.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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