Македонска Искра

Until the 1930s it seems to have been acceptable for Greeks to talk about the Slav language spoken in Macedonia as ‘Macedonian’ and about its speakers as ‘Macedonians’.

I will cite six literary testimonies from the end of 19^th and beginning of 20^th century. 

-In his book, "Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Blood" the nationalist writer Ion Dragoumis argues that "'Macedonian' is the correct term for this language, which the Bulgarians, he says, misleadingly call " Bulgarian ".

-In her work "In the Secret Places of the Marsh" which was first published under the Metaxas regime in 1937, Penelopi Delta refers to the local Slavonic language as "Macedonian dialect ', though in another passage she refers to it inaccurately as “Macedonian , a mixture… of Slavonic and Greek.”

-Extract from the letters of Pavlos Melas who wrote to his wife published in fullness in 1964 in Athens by Pavlos Natalia Mela titled "PAYLOS MELAS", quoted part from page 242 of passage 11 and 12:

“............Pirzas translated emotionally, loudly, and with a lot of passion, as Kottas spoke in Macedonian. The teacher got the children to sing something. We couldn't tell if the language was Macedonian or Greek. All the schoolchildren know how to read and write (Greek), but hardly any know how to speak it...I learnt a few Macedonian words that I say to women and mothers, which pleases them........ ...”

Narrating about life in Greece in the book "When I was a boy in Greece" published in 1913, George Demetrius describes the difficult conditions of life under Ottoman despotism and the organized resistance from the locals, in Chapter 11, on page 132 he write :

“Being neither Turkish nor Greek, we called them Bulgarian, but their language is not Bulgarian, but the Macedonian dialect, and I found lovable people among them, honest, hospitable, and kind.“

-The Greek historian Spirou Mela, a contemporary and cousin of Pavlos Melas, gives us the following testimony as direct participant in the Balkan Wars:

“Occasionally, up by chicken-chasing, the cackle, the sounds, all of a sudden a village woman would appear and start to curse in her own heavy(difficult) macedonian language.The soldiers offered her money, and searched for whom they should compensate for the damages, and also to buy bread, wine, tsipuro, butter, cheese and other eatables. Instead they got in return the same stereotypical answer, that they first heard outside Nausa where they met the first slavic speaking villager, who answered us with his head bent down, the answer we got wherever we went, from the outskirts of Thessaloniki and all the way to Florina, it was the same melancholic answer to all our demands: Nema, there is none.”

"Oi Polemoi 1912-1913" by Spirou Mela, page 157, published in 1972.

-Stratus Myrivilis, in his first edition of the novel "Life In the Tomb" in 1924 which is based on his personal experiences in the war with the Bulgarians in the First World War, includes the scene when he speaks of a Slav-speaking family who live north of the Greek border, which - "they don’t want to be either Bulgarians nor Serbs or Greeks. Only Orthodox Macedonians. "

In later editions (1936) Myrivilis excited the last sentence because he no longer felt it to be politically advisable to include it. (See footnote 40 in Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 By Peter Mackridge, page 303 and 304)Since then however, it has become politically incorrect in Greece to talk about the of Slav speakers as 'Macedonians' and their language as 'Macedonian'.