THE MIRACLE
A True Story |
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A few months later, on 17th December, 1913, the Florence
Protocol gave Albania the Northern Ipirot regions of Chimara,
Delvino, Argyrokastro and Korytsa. The 300,000 inhabitants
of these areas are Christian with a strong Greek
consciousness. Yet here they were, suddenly, violently and
inhumanely cut off from the rest of Greece. "Good night,
dear Greeks, and good luck with the Albanian brigands,"
wrote the noted French politician Georges Clemenceau, in
the newspaper, Homme Libre. The wrath of the Greeks in
Ipiros finally led to a popular uprising and the Corfu Protocol
of 17th April, 1914, granting autonomy to Northern Ipiros.
The Allied Conference in Paris on 13th January, 1920
agreed to let Greece have Northern Ipiros. However, Italy's
frenzied reaction led to a reversal of the decision. When the
Second World War broke out, Albania sided with its lord
and master, Italy. But Greece achieved something that no-one
could have imagined; it won the first great victory of
the war against the axis powers, thereby offering hope of
freedom to the enslaved people of Europe. At the same
time it liberated Northern Ipiros for the third time, receiving
abundant promises from the major Allied Powers concerning
national rights that came to nothing.
After the end of the war in Northern Ipiros, all the promises
and commitments were forgotten and Hellenism in Ipiros
was plunged into darkness under the most authoritarian
kind of tyranny Europe had seen since the Middle Ages.
This continued until the overthrow of real Socialism, when
the strong wind of democratic reform burst open the gates
of the last stronghold of totalitarianism, Albania. But attitudes
did not change along with this new cloak of democracy.
Turkey was always at hand to "assist" in Albania's anti-Greek
hysteria, which manifested itself frequently and in a
variety of ways.
With regard to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,
this was the creation of the Communist leader, Marshall
Tito, immediately after the Second World War. It was he
who, within the context of a Federal Yugoslavia, founded a small republic in the broader region of the upper reaches of
the River Axios, which he called Macedonia and which had
Skopje as its capital.
The Greek character of Macedonia can be dated back for
more than 3,000 years and has a rich history that would fill
whole volumes with evidence. The name Tito gave to the
new federal Yugoslav republic was, on the one hand, an act
of provocation towards Greece, but at the same time it
constituted a domestic issue within Yugoslavia, in the sense
that the United States of America has 15 Arcadias, 10
Spartas and 11 cities called Athens. Tito sought to
manufacture a nationality that would plunder Macedonian
heritage and which he would endow with a "national vision",
which was the expansionist prospect of a united Macedonia;
in other words, a mortgage on the future.
In 1954 he embarked on an organised propaganda
campaign, formulating theories about Philip of Macedonia
and his son, Alexander the Great; he appropriated the
language of St Paul and the Greek freedom-fighters of the
1821 Revolution - just as the Bulgarians had done 100
years earlier. Still licking its wounds from the enormous
loss of life during the Second World War and the bitter
fighting of the civil war that followed, Greece pretended not
to see Tito's obvious designs.
When, in 1991, Tito's creation - the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia - emerged from the mists of the civil
war in Yugoslavia, every possible form of provocation was
put into effect against Greece. Maps of the republic that
included ancient Macedonia, i. e. part of Greece, were printed
and circulated around the world. Coins were minted depicting
the White Tower, the emblem of Greece's northern capital,
Thessaloniki. A flag was devised showing the sun of Vergina,
the symbol that was discovered on the tomb of Philip of
Macedonia during the excavations carried out in Northern
Greece by the great Greek archaeologist, Professor Manolis
Andronikos.
By calling itself "the Republic of Macedonia", the former
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