https://youtu.be/hO-VecH574E?feature=shared
Hi all, I’m a Greek Cypriot from the diaspora- I’ve always loved documentaries and as a history grad I love learning about the history of the region. Around a year ago, I watched “the Macedonian” for the first time- it soon became one of my favourite documentaries, it’s filmed in such a natural way and the story is very emotional and touching. One scene that stayed in my mind was a shop owner towards the end, who replies “no, I’m not Macedonian” to the film maker whilst speaking in Macedonian- you can see how deep the internalised shame and repression of people’s identities goes in that Florina area
For obvious reasons, amongst the varied forms of indoctrination I received going to Greek school, including “don’t speak Cypriot outside of the house”, and “Cyprus is just a Greek island like any other, not it’s own country”, the 1948 “paidomazoma” and the horrific treatment of Macedonians received in their home villages was never mentioned even once. In fact, in all my years of visiting Cyprus and consuming Greek media, I’d never heard it mentioned. I’d really appreciate some more information regarding this dark chapter in the region’s history.
https://old.reddit.com/r/mkd/comments/1cl0pa7/the_macedonian_thoughts/
Posted by AMagusa99
2 Comments
not just that, there were also massacres, the most famous one is the Zagorichani massacre of 1905
The Greeks deny a very simple truth. This region was always called Macedonia. We belong in this region on all historic maps. No matter what you think of us and who we really are—Slavs, ancient Maceodnians, mix, whatever—you can’t say that we are not in Macedonia, because we are. Macedonians in Northern Greece are free to call themselves Macedonians, but I don’t get why they forbid us to use this name; it’s like they are going to get sick or something if we do it. But we know that they are nice people; they just overreact to everything, which ultimately harms only them. Why would we use this name to insult them or to cause them any harm? I mean, that’s so stupid. And we can’t stop calling ourselves Macedonians because we don’t know of any other name. It’s that simple. And also my ancestors died for this land and they considered themselves Macedonians, so who am I to say that they didn’t do that? That’s schizophrenic. You can see how much we are unjustly treated when you encounter Bulgarian, Albanian, Serbian and Greek on some comments or video online about Macedonians. Literally all of them say different things about us, one of them says we are Serbs, other says we are Bulgarian, the third one says we are not even humans lol. It’s very stupid nationalism.