ABOUT

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This is my attempt to preserve some of the history of my family ancestry and giving those that are new to it a little help. It originally started out as the "Family Names" section in my Banitsa website. Most people were unaware the last name their father was born with was different than their grandfather's even though they were born in the same village! So I sat down with my father and compiled a list of family names as they exist today, along with the original names the familes were known as before the Greek occupation and forced assimilation. It grew so popular that people were emailing me their family names as I grew the list. It got so popular that people also started sending me their parents village names in Macedoniand along with the Hellenized version. So I naturally decided to grow it from one specific village to the list I have now.

Along with my Banitsa and Dambeni websites people started creating their own village websites. Elders who were born in these villages were embracing the internet and creating their own little piece in the sky - posting their photos, telling their stories and memories, listing their own family names. A tribute to what they lost. Years later those same elders were getting tired, growing old and moving on. Websites were breaking, unpaid to exist in the cloud and slowly disappearing. So with the help of websites like Google and Internet Archive I began to consolidate some of that information here.

FAMILY NAMES

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To research your family you can't just perform a Google search for your last name hoping that a male in each generation has kept the exact spelling. There are certain nuances with family heritage and so far these are the ones I've found for my Macedonian heritage :

1. Up until the 1920s it was common in many cultures for the children to have a form of the father's first name as their last. Examples in some European cultures are "Richardson" (son of Richard) and "Samson" (son of Sam). In Macedonian culture something similar happens - the father's first name gets suffixed with "-ev", "-eff", "-ov" or "-off". In Macedonian culture if a father's name was Dine, all of the children would have a last name of "Dinev" or "Dineff". "Micho" would become "Michoff" or "Michev". "Stan" would become "Stanev" or "Stanoff".
2. If a husband was killed in fighting the wife would move back in with her parents and any children would eventually take her maiden name.
3. If the husband married a woman and moved in with her family - taking on the chores, farming the fields, etc. they would take on the wife's maiden name after the head of the household (which would be the father-in-law). If "son of Dine" married "daughter of Marco" and moved in with her parents he would be referred to as a "doma-zet" and the new couple would take on the name "Markov" or known as "na Markovtsi" including any children.

HISTORY

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The persecution of minorities
An excerpt taken from the Website Metaxas Project

Although the nationalist discourse of the 4th of August regime did not contain any aggressive or imperialistic resonance towards neighbouring countries, it did have a strong supremacist rhetoric concerning minorities in Greece, and most ethnic and religious minorities underwent hardships under Metaxas’ rule.

For Greek minorities such as of Slavs, Chams, Pomaks, Vlachs and Jews, the period of Metaxas was marked by forced assimilation, yet the degree varied depending on each minority. While the 4th of August regime tried to impose upon the minorities living in Greece a ‘Greek national consciousness’, in contrast to some other authoritarian regimes, no mass killings were ever executed and there is no evidence that any were ever planned.

The Metaxas dictatorship was especially brutal in its treatment of the Slavic speakers of Macedonia in Northern Greece, who by then had begun to identify themselves as Bulgarians and many of them had irredentist claims. On December 18, 1936, a legal act was issued concerning “Activities against State Security”, which punished claims of minority rights. On the basis of this act, a reign of terror began and thousands of Macedonians were arrested, jailed, sent to internal exile (“Exoria”) on arid, inhospitable Greek islands, or directly expelled from Greece.

On September 7, 1938, the legal act 2366 was passed. This law banned the use of the Slavic language in Greece, even in the domestic sphere. To enforce the law, Slavic-speaking localities were flooded with posters saying “Speak Greek”, evening schools were opened in which slavophone adults were taught Greek and Slavic-speaking schools were no longer permitted.

In general, any public manifestation of Slavic or Bulgarian national feeling and its outward expression through language, songs or dance was forbidden and severely punished. People who spoke Slavic were beaten, fined or imprisoned and slavophones were ill-treated during their military service. Some disputable sources claim that punishments in some areas included piercing of the tongue with a needle and cutting off a part of the ear for every Slavic word spoken, but this has never been confirmed officially.

In an attempt to suppress all kinds of expressions of Slavic cultural distinctiveness, Slavic inscriptions in churches were plastered over and the names of Slavic villages in the area were changed, although this process had begun decades before, since 1914, and had occurred much earlier, in the 19th century, in the South, where placenames of medieval Slavic origin had been changed into Greek names (some say restoring the original, ancient Hellenic names). The situation for many Slav-speakers became unbearable and many chose to flee their homes and migrated to the United States, Canada and Australia.

Village Naming Notes
A list of village naming notes in order to make this compilation :

This compilation of villages is the result of 20+ years of informal research. My everyday dealings with relatives, family members, and friends has led me to notice certain tendencies in the Macedonian population when it comes to speaking their mother tongue. In compiling this list I had to make certain assumptions and an informal set of rules when documenting the village and family names. What follows are my findings.

If a Macedonian family finds itself with members born in the same village it is not very noticeable. They all tend to speak the same dialect and use common words and phrases amongst each other. It's not until a member from outside the village (nearby, or from a different district) enters the conversation that you notice slight differences. Each district has their own slang, and although you can completely understand the person speaking, an acute listener would be able to disinguish what district they are from.

Waves of emigration from Macedonia also have their distinct language traits:

• Detsa Begaltsi who left Aegean Macedonia during the 1940s and 1950s
• First wave of Canada/USA immigrants during the 1880 - 1910s
• Second wave of immigrants to Australia, Canada and USA during the 1910 - 1940s
• Third wave of immigrants to Australia, Canada and USA during the 1950s - 1970s
• Subsequent immigrants from 1970s onwards