<div align="left"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="353"> <tr> <td> <div align="center"> <div align="center"> <h1 class="heading_1">The Grecomans</h1> </div> <p class="body_text">For the Bulgarian Committee, the real enemies were not the Greek <i>andartes</i> but the Grecomans, those strange fighters who, although they spoke Bulgarian, refuted with their actions the theory that language is an infallible criteria of ethnic identity, as Sofia was arguing. They wanted to Greeks and were ready to prove it.</p> <p class="body_text">The classes of the Slavophone <i>Makedonomachoi</i> were packed, their position being of great interest to both Greece and Bulgaria. They inhabited a large part of the contested “middle zone” of Macedonia.</p> <p class="body_text">This Slavophone area had its own brigand tradition, which was as equal to that of the rest of Greece. The Slavophone fighters of 1821 fought even in southern Greece when the revolution had died out in Macedonia. The younger generations had taken part in a series of revolutionary movements, the most important being that of 1878, which covered the whole of Western Macedonia from Olympos to Vitsi.</p> <p class="body_text">The legendary Slavophone Kotas Christou, the patrician of Korestia, is the best known but not the only example. A harsh opponent of the region’s Albanian beys, he saw his vision for freedom became trapped between two conflicting nationalisms. His collaboration with Pavlos Melas and the other pioneers of the Macedonian Struggle made him famous, but did not help him escape from the labyrinthine paths of local small-time politics. Betrayed, he was arrested by the Turks and hanged at Monastir. Many of his Slavophone compatriots followed his example in each village of Macedonia.</p> </div> </td> </tr> </table> </div>
