The Odd Couple; The Stefov – Gandeto connection

by Nick Michael Hodges

In his article “The little Dictionary had no chance”, which was published in the American Chronicle on April 17, 2011, Risto Stefov says that he is wondering why the Greeks are behaving the way they do and he has obviously found somebody by the name J.S.G. Gandeto who has written a book called “The Theft of a King who Stole Alexander” and he uses that book as his, I may say, Gospel to explain the “Greek behavior” as it is presented or described in that book by a man who I think he may be as qualified to do that about the Greeks as Judas might had been asked to do the same thing about Jesus Christ.

I do not know for sure but I would like to think that there are books out there that explain or describe the Greek behavior but J.S.G. Gandeto is writing things about the Greeks and their behavior that Risto Stefov wanted to hear and thus present in his article whatever claptrap he was able to find in J.S.G. Gandeto´s book that was written to allow himself and his fellow South Slavonians Slavs to vent out their passion, hate and malice against ...

The Origins of Greece's Policy with Regards to the Current "Macedonian Issue"

by Evangelos Kofos

abstract from the essay “Documenting the Greek-Macedonian Name Controversy”

Sudosteuropa, 58, January 2010, pages 413-435

The original "Macedonian question" emerged in the last decades of the 19^th century and covered the two first decades of the 20^th. Simply stated, it was a contest between three young Balkan states, vying with each other to inherit the possessions of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. The vaguely defined "Macedo­nian" lands were both the prize and the apple of discord for Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs. For the European powers, the treaties of the Balkan Wars (Bucharest 1913) and the First World War (Neuilly 1919 and Lausanne 1923), terminated the armed conflicts in Southeast Europe, rendering the "Macedonian Ques­tion" a challenging subject for historians rather than politicians.^[1] Not so for the locals.

Perceptions of an endured "historical injustice", lost homelands for hundreds of thousands of uprooted natives, various types of population exchanges, all followed by suppressive measures for the induction of varied ethnic groups into new unified political environments, kept the issue alive. Out of the peace settle­ments, Greece had emerged as a status quo country, Bulgaria as an irredentist one. Former Serbia, subsequently Yugoslavia, had turned introvert seeking to put its multi-ethnic state entity in order.

Soon, new international actors emerged in the region, intent on plying the murky Macedonian terrain for their own benefit. The first....

The social and historical parameters of the Greek abducted children (Greek civil war)

By Yannis Tsalouhidis,

Macedonia and the Historical Guilt,

Thessaloniki 1994, p. 76-79

An internationally unprecedented historical crime. The issue of the Greek children who were taken to Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc in 1948-1949 is still obscure as an insoluble incident of the Civil War in Greece. The parties involved stopped working on the issue, which is today exploited by the blatant Slavo- "Macedonian " nationalists in Skopje and abroad.

The varied and opposed terms given to the issue are indicative of the contrary opinions that the two sides have: "kidnapped" or "refugees", "Greeks" or "Macedonians", "mass kidnapping " or "exodus ", "genocide " or "rescue ". In order to clarify the issue, it is necessary to find more evidence, since we cannot gain access to the archives of the CP. of Greece, Yugoslavia, Skopje and Bulgaria, neither can we get the protagonists to talk and clear up many obscure parts. Those who brought about the tragic kidnapping ought to talk eventually.

The Greek Government brought the issue of the these children to the U.N. for the first time in March 1948, as soon as it was made known that the Greek Communist guerillas removed great numbers of children, between the ages of...

The Myth of Modern Macedonia - inventing an identity

By Professor John Melville-Jones

Last year I learned that a statue of Alexander the Great was to be erected in Skopje. I knew enough about modern history to be sure that the choice of this subject was not simply, as in some places (for example in Edinburgh), the result of a desire to commemorate a heroic figure of the past. I realised that it was part of an attempt that has been made during the last few generations to create an identity for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia which can stretch back to distant antiquity. So what we have here is a myth in the making.

A myth is a story which can be told, retold, and modified. It survives because it gives pleasure, or satisfies a human need. It may be based on a fact, but it is not a historical account of something that happened, because even if an event took place that led to the birth of the myth, the story has been so changed for artistic or other reasons that it takes a form that is different from the form that it had when it was born. So a raid that might have been made on a city in Asia Minor by men who sailed from Greece in the second millennium B.C. turns into the story of the abduction of Helen and the Trojan War.

To take another example, among....