I just don't understand these proud 'Greeks'




If the native tongue of your grandparents was not Greek then how can you be of Greek origin!




Sure, your family probably no longer speaks of when their surname was changed, but their are still obvious signs, particularly the native tongue of your ancestors, that shows that your origins are not 'Greek'!




Wake up and smell the roses.

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Replying to:

"heidelberg was gona fold a few years ago but luckily some so called greek macedonians (very confused macedonians) sold their houses and youse survived."




Howcome nobody knows baout this other than yourself? Sounds like we got some pretty dedicated supporters!




"by the way who is the 2002 premiere lague champions? what mate? and where did heidelberg come? what was that?"




The season finished less than two weeks ago - suffering from amnesia are you?

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Replying to:

heidelberg was gona fold a few years ago but luckily some so called greek macedonians (very confused macedonians) sold their houses and youse survived. by the way who is the 2002 premiere lague champions? what mate? and where did heidelberg come? what was that? anyway have a good read of this and try to understand. MAKE SURE U READ IT!




Ted Yannas is a short, heavy-set man with a shaggy black beard that almost hides the rugged features of his square face.' Whether he is speaking Macedonian, Greek, or English, his words emerge slowly and precisely with an intensity that suggests a troubled, at times bitter man. He drives heavy equipment for a living and owns his own construction company: Ted Yannas Excavations Pty. Ltd. of Melbourne, Australia.




In his wallet Ted carries a small black-and-white photograph taken one night in 1959 in Thessaloniki. In the photograph Ted, a ten-yearold boy at the time, stands with his parents and his younger brother and sister on a dark street in front of a huge neon sign advertising a local newspaper. The name of the newspaper, and the word spelled out in large capital letters across the top of the photograph, was MAKEDONIA.




Ted's family was from Kladorabi (Kladhorrahi in Greek) a small village in the district of Florina just a few miles from the border between Greece and Yugoslavia. This was the third time they had made the long trip to Thessaloniki to take the medical examinations that were required for emigration to Australia. Ted's father had made the decision to emigrate in 1954 for several reasons. A few years earlier the Greek government had confiscated his family's land because a relative of his had fled to Yugoslavia at the end of the Civil War in 1949. More recently someone had told him not to waste his money sending Ted to high school. Ted would never get a job even if he did graduate. That's when Ted's father knew it was time to leave Greece.




When he applied for a passport, Ted's father was told that he would have to go to the local police station and sign a statement renouncing the Communist Party. He didn't know what they were talking about; he'd never been a member of the Communist Party. He'd only been in trouble once in his life. During the Metaxas dictatorship, when he was eighteen years old, he'd been jailed for acting in a Macedonian performance of The Bloody Wedding, a popular play, which was also performed in Greek, about a Turkish pasha who kills a beautiful Christian woman because she refused to join his harem. By 1967, when Ted's family was finally given permission to leave Greece, it was too late for Ted to get a good education in Australia. Thinking back on all this, Ted says, "I left Greece with a knife in my back."




When Ted's family came to Australia, they came as Greeks, as Greek-Macedonians. They went to the Greek church, not the Macedonian church, and they tried to avoid what they called "the partisan, the Yugoslav, side of the Macedonians." Ted's mother always used to say, "There's no Macedonia; only Yugoslavia and Greece." One day in school Ted's teacher introduced him to another new boy from Greece. Ted started speaking Greek to him, but the boy didn't speak Greek, so they tried to communicate in broken English. When the boy learned that Ted was from Florina, he asked if Ted knew Macedonian. From then on they spoke Macedonian, and they became good friends.




During their first few years in Melbourne Ted and his family lived with an uncle, Nikos Karelis, who had come to Australia in 1954. Nikos' father had been arrested before World War 11 on the grounds that he was a Communist and that he was pro-Bulgarian. But he was a royalist; he supported King George. What kind of Communist could he have been? He fled to Yugoslavia in 1945. Nikos himself was put in jail and tortured in Florina during the Civil War. Then he spent six months in a prison camp on Makronisos, an island in the Aegean. Nikos says he suffered a lot at the hands of the Greeks. After he was released, his mother and his brothers went to Bitola to be with his father. As the oldest son, Nikos stayed in the village, but when the Greek government confiscated his family's property, he left for Australia. Nikos' wife remembers the day when her grandfather was driven away in a jeep by the Greek military police. "We never saw him again," she says. "No one knows where he was buried; there were bodies everywhere. They did a lot of bad things. They think we'll forget."




Nikos was the first Macedonian in Melbourne to own a bulldozer. He hired Ted as a driver and got him started in the construction business. Once, several years later, Nikos recommended Ted for the job of digging the foundation for the new Macedonian Community Center in Epping, but the people in charge there refused to hire him when they found out he was a member of Heidelberg Alexander, the soccer team founded by people from Florina who were "pro-Greek." At work Ted would tell Nikos what he'd learned about Greek history in school in Greece. Nikos would say, "No. It wasn't like that. I lived it."




When their financial situation improved, Ted's family moved into their own home, first in Northcote and then in Lalor, two working-class suburbs that spread across the flat plains to the north of Melbourne. One weekend Ted's father heard that The Bloody Wedding was being shown in Macedonian at a movie theater in Preston, a nearby suburb with a large Macedonian community. Ted's father hired a taxi-something he never did-to take the family to the theater. "As much as he was trying to be Greek here in Australia," Ted says now, "he just couldn't wait to see that movie." When they returned home afterward, Ted's father just sat with his head in his hands for hours. He didn't say a word; he just cried.




In the early 1970s Ted was engaged to a woman whose family was originally from a village near Kladorabi. Vera's father had fought with the Communists during the Civil War. When the war was over, he settled in Yugoslavia, where Vera grew up. Vera was a Macedonian. Ted spoke English with Vera and Macedonian with her parents. Ted's parents wanted a Greek wedding-in the Greek church ' with Greek music at the reception; they wanted their grandchildren baptized in the Greek church as well. Vera's father agreed. At first Vera thought that Ted's parents were the same kind of people as her parents, but then she realized they were different. Ted's parents idealized everything that was Greek. Vera thought that attitude was disgusting. Ted had been brought up to believe that the Macedonian language was something inferior and useless, but Vera knew that wasn't true. She'd been to school in the Republic of Macedonia, where Macedonian was the official language. Sometimes they had dinner at a Greek restaurant run by one of Ted's aunts.




Vera thought people there danced like Zorba the Greek. When Vera's father wanted to tease Ted, he called him "Grshto"-the Greek boy.




After his father died in 1976, Ted decided to visit one of his father's closest friends in Adelaide. Ted had many things he needed to talk to him about, many questions he needed to ask. "I always thought I was Greek," Ted says now, "but there were things I couldn't explain. My brother and sister just accepted things; they believed what they learned in school. But not me. I always had questions. Why do we have two last names, Yannas in Greek and Yovanov in Macedonian? Why do we speak Macedonian? Why do they call us Bulgarians? My parents would say, 'Don't ask questions. Forget about it. just leave it alone."' It was from his father's old friend in Adelaide that Ted finally got some answers. It was then that he learned for the first time about his relatives who had fled to Yugoslavia, about The Bloody Wedding, and about his father's renunciation of the Communist Party. Ted's parents had raised him as a Greek, but he was beginning to have doubts. Now he didn't know what he really was. A year later Ted and Vera took a trip around the world. First they stopped in Toronto to visit some relatives there. Then they went to Athens, where Ted had some cousins. Vera remembers being shocked by how completely Greek they were. When Ted and Vera finally arrived in Kladorabi after a long trip from Athens, a policeman told them they needed a military permit to visit the village because it was located in a sensitive border area. Ted simply replied, "I didn't need a permit to be born here, so I don't need a permit to visit here," and he walked away. During their stay in Kladorabi, Ted went to a bank in Florina to make the final payment on his family's land, which had been confiscated after the Civil War. All the years Ted's father had been in Australia, he had been gradually buying back his own land from the Greek government. The last stop on their trip was Bitola, across the border in Yugoslavia, where Vera's relatives lived. At a dance held to welcome their overseas guests Vera's relatives announced that they had a visitor from Greece and asked the band to play a Greek song in Ted's honor.




Alexander Versus Makedonia




Ever since he came to Melbourne, Ted had been a loyal fan of the Heidelberg Alexander Soccer Club. Ted and his friends called it "our club," because it had been founded by "our people," local Macedonians from Florina. One of Alexander's biggest rivals was Preston Makedonia, a team which had also been founded by people from Florina, but people who identified themselves as Macedonians, not as Greeks. Alexander's other big rival was South Melbourne Hellas, the Greek team, or as some people put it, "the real Greek team." When these teams played each other, Hellas fans called Alexander fans "Bulgarians," Alexander fans called Makedonia fans "Yugoslavs," and Makedonia fans called Alexander fans "Greek-lovers" or "traitors."




Some people went to these games for the politics, but back then, Ted said, he and his friends just went for the soccer. In 1979 Ted was invited to become an official member of the Heidelberg Alexander Soccer Club.




Three months later he was elected to the executive committee. Alexander had just bought a new ground and needed to build a clubhouse and some stands. The club was short of money and couldn't afford to hire anyone to do the job, so Ted did all the earth moving for free. Two years later something happened that changed Ted's life forever. Alexander was scheduled to play a preseason game against Makedonia. This would be the first meeting of the two teams since Makedonia had joined the National Soccer League. Two days before the game a meeting of the executive committee of Heidelberg Alexander was called. Tommy Strikos, a member of the committee who worked in the Greek consulate, opened the meeting.




"Gentlemen," he said, "I bring you a message from the consul. We can't play this game. This game has to stop." The consul was afraid that playing the game against Preston would give the Macedonians recognition. The stronger Preston grew, the more people would realize that it was a Macedonian club and the more people would realize who the Macedonians were. Strikos said that the consul was even willing to pay Alexander the ten thousand dollars it would lose by canceling the game. They would just tell Preston that some of their players were injured.




At this point Ted stood up and said, "I don't like this. We're a sporting club, and you want us to get involved in politics."


Strikos jumped out of his chair; he was furious.


"Do you know why you're sitting in that chair?" he shouted at Ted.


"I'm here to help the club," said Ted.


"No you're not!" screamed Strikos. "You're here to help me destroy that race! As good Greeks we have to drown those people in the Yarra River!"


Looking back on that incident years later, Ted says, "At that moment I realized he was talking about my people. He was asking me to destroy myself. That's when I understood that I was truly a Macedonian. Whatever part of me felt Greek died; it disappeared. My whole life passed in front of me, and I realized I was false. I felt like an adopted child who had just discovered his real parents. All my life had been a lie. I'd been a janissary; I'd betrayed my own people."'




After every National Soccer League game the home team buys the visiting team two slabs of beer and one of soft drinks. When Heidelberg Alexander played Preston Makedonia during the 1981 season, no one on the Alexander committee would go into the Makedonia dressing room. Finally someone said to Ted: "You're one of them. You go." A few years later Ted quit Heidelberg Alexander and joined Preston Makedonia. But that's not the end of the story.




After he left the club, Ted learned that John Topalis, Alexander's president, had removed Ted's name from the big mahogany board on the clubhouse wall that listed the names of all the committee members who had served the club since its founding in 1958. "They can't do that," Ted protests. "They can't write me out of the club's history. They can't change my history either. I was part of that club.




I built the field myself, and now Topalis erases my name because I'm a Macedonian. What does he think he is? He's a Macedonian too; he just pretends to be Greek. His father was shot by the police in the Civil War because he played in a band that sang Macedonian songs. When I joined Alexander, we spoke Macedonian all the time. No problem. Now they say, 'What's that Bulgarian you're speaking?' So our people leave. Now you have to be 100 percent Greek to be in the club."




Needless to say, officials of Heidelberg Alexander see things differently. One well- educated committee member talks about Ted in very sarcastic terms. "That ethnogenetic process is like Pentecost. The Holy Spirit descends on you and enlightens you, and you become a Macedonian. It's all Slav propaganda."




Another club member, who had been a good friend of Ted's, speaks about him more sympathetically. "I lost my best friend. How can he say he's a Macedonian now? Until a few years ago he said he was Greek. We were the same; we were Greeks from Macedonia. Ted used to have a pile of records a foot high, and a stack of cassettes twice that high-all Greek music. When he stopped listening to them, he gave them all to me. I saw him changing ... wavering, and I said to him, 'Ted, I don't care. We're friends; let's stay friends. My house is always open to you, but don't talk politics with me. Don't insult me; don't call me stupid and backward.'




"But it didn't work. Whether he got smarter, whether he got stupider, or whether he got paid, I don't know. But it didn't work."




A Real Macedonian Patriot




Now Ted is what many Macedonians call "a real Macedonian patriot." He contributes hundreds of dollars every year to organizations like the Ilinden Foundation, the Macedonian Action Group, and the Australian Macedonian Human Rights Committee. He attends all the demonstrations, rallies, and protests held by the Macedonian community of Melbourne for the international recognition of Macedonia and for the protection of the human rights of Macedonians in northern Greece. He often wears a "Macedonia '91 Folk Festival" hat and a T- shirt with a portrait of Gotse Delchev, or on more formal occasions a red lapel pin in the shape of a map of "United Macedonia."




Ted recently held a surprise birthday party for a friend of his from Florina. Some men came dressed up as nineteenth-century Macedonian bandits, with wooden rifles and cartridge belts crossed over their chests. Their wives wore traditional Macedonian folk costumes. The birthday cake was decorated with a big red map of Macedonia, all of Macedonia. When it came time to cut the cake, the band sang the following verses from "Pearl of the Balkans," a popular new patriotic song:




There is only one truth.


There is only one Macedonia.


Divide her! Tear her to pieces!


She will still be our most dearly beloved land.




But no one could bear to cut through the center of the cake and divide up Macedonia, so they just took small pieces from around the edge leaving Macedonia united and whole. A Macedonian driving by the hall where the party was taking place stopped his car in the middle of the road to see what was happening. He thought they were celebrating the recognition of the independence of Macedonia and that he had somehow missed the news.




Wherever Ted goes, the conversation inevitably turns to the subject of Macedonia. One Friday night at the bar of the Epping Hotel on High Street in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, Ted was talking with Thanos, a Greek from Katerini. Thanos, unlike most Greeks, was willing to accept the fact that Macedonians existed who were not Greeks, but he was strongly opposed to the creation of a Macedonian state that would include any Greek territory. This wasn't good enough for Ted, though. Ted argued that Korea, Cyprus, and Macedonia were the only three countries in the world that were still divided.


"If I've rented my house to someone for a year," he asked Thanos, "and I want to move back in when the year is over, what do I do? Don't I have the right to take it back?"




Once Ted was talking with a man who had been born in Florina, but whose father had come to Greece in 1922 as a refugee from Pontos in Asia Minor near the Black Sea.


"What am I?" the man asked Ted.


"You tell me what you are," said Ted. "I can't tell you. What are you?"


"I'm Pontian because my father was Pontian. But I'm also Macedonian because I was born in Macedonia. And I'm Greek too because Macedonia is part of Greece."


"You want three identities, and you won't even let me have one!" said Ted. "You're not a Greek. You're a refugee, an Asian. You were made a Greek. You're not a Macedonian either. You were brought to Macedonia. You don't even speak Macedonian. Our people are the real Macedonians. just because you were born in Macedonia, that doesn't mean you're a Macedonian. You can't choose what you are. Blood is passed down from father to son. You can choose what you want to be, but you can't choose what you are.


"I'm a Macedonian, but I'm an Australian citizen too," Ted continued. "That's my choice. I didn't choose to be a Macedonian. I am a Macedonian. If I was born with black skin, I can't change that. I can choose my nationality, my citizenship, but that doesn't mean I can change the color of my skin. Your national consciousness can change. Fine. But the real essence of who you are can't change. Can the consciousness of a black make him white just because whites raised him and he lives like a white? No. His skin will still be black. You can choose to be a Greek the way I can choose to be an Australian, but you're not. I'm a Macedonian, and if you tell me I'm not, you can get stuffed."




On another occasion Ted said, "We become what people tell us, but that's brainwashing. We don't change in natural fact. When we left Greece, we believed we were Greek. But we were made Greeks. When people ask me now, 'How did you change?' I tell them, 'My grandmother didn't speak Greek. Do real Greeks have grandparents who didn't speak Greek?' All the years I spent in Greek schools were useless. I got older and thought about who I was. Now I'm proud of who I am. I'm a Macedonian. Lots of people say that they're Greek-Macedonians. But you can't be Greek and Macedonian at the same time. You can only brainwash a Macedonian and make him a Greek."




Ted says that ever since he realized he was a Macedonian, his relationships with his fellow villagers have been strained. Most of the other members of the Kladorabi Family Association in Melbourne are Greek. Ted doesn't go to the association meetings anymore. People don't even tell him when they're scheduled to take place; they say he's a troublemaker. Once someone asked Ted to sponsor the calendar put out by the association every year, but there's a Greek flag on it, so he refused. Ted still goes to the village dances, though, in spite of the fact that the master of ceremonies speaks Greek at the microphone and that people there dance mostly Greek dances. Ted is quick to point out that the Greek they speak is very broken and that "they'd break their legs if they ever tried to do the tsamiko." "Anyway," he adds, "the tsamiko isn't really a Greek dance. It's Turkish; it's from Asia Minor." But what bothers Ted most about these dances is the fact that the president of the Greek Community of Thomastown and Lalor is often invited as guest of honor.




Vera does not enjoy going to the Kladorabi dances because she's afraid there will be trouble, the way there was a few years ago when Ted asked the leader of the band to play a Macedonian song. The leader of the band said that the organizers of the dance had instructed him to play only Greek songs. So Ted went up to a member of the village committee and asked, "Is this function to keep our culture alive in this country or what?" The committee member couldn't say anything, because he knew that back in their village they used to sing songs in that language. After a great deal of discussion the band was finally allowed to play a Macedonian song. But the song Ted requested was a really patriotic song they never sang back in the village. Ted's favorite verses were:




Come, let us gather


From all our villages and towns


To shout together loudly:


"Get out Greeks! We don't want you."




People were furious with Ted for requesting a song that was insulting to Greeks. Ted's response was, "Why are you so upset? I don't see any Greeks here anyway. Besides, I didn't write the words. It's just a traditional Macedonian song." Ted says that even the Macedonians who are pro-Greek don't like to dance Greek dances all the time.




back to the top: read it again if you do not understand !


if u want the source then write back if not the ........

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Replying to:

"HAVE FUN IN DIVISION 1 U SUB-HUMAN "




Yeah we probably will have fun in division 1 considering that we will be winning more games than we did in Premier League.




"GYPSY SCUMBAGS, AND IN 2004 DIVIOSN 2 IS WAITING FOR YOUSE, OR U MIGHT JUST FOLD ALL TOGETHER "




Gypsy scumbags???? LOL take a look at your nation and your people and ask your surrounding neighbours about your history and you will see who the Gypsies are. As for the season 2004 prediction - do yuo think you are Nostradameus to predict the future? Nobody can predict the future theres no saying what will happen then in year 2004 we could be in the NSL and you could be in division 2 state 2 but again nobody knows so theres no point trying to sound concrete about it like you do you fool.




" MIGHT JUST FOLD ALL TOGETHER LIKE U WERE A FEW YRS BACK"


When did Heidelberg ever fold in it's 34 year history? Please explain so I as well as the rest of the Australian soccer public can be educated. LOL if you do not know what you are talking about then don't post anything you big goose! You are making youself sound like a uneducated goose!

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Replying to:

HAVE FUN IN DIVISION 1 U SUB-HUMAN GYPSY SCUMBAGS, AND IN 2004 DIVIOSN 2 IS WAITING FOR YOUSE, OR U MIGHT JUST FOLD ALL TOGETHER LIKE U WERE A FEW YRS BACK. LOL!!!!! LOL!!!!!! LONG LIVE MACEDONIA