Thousands of Greeks protest over name change for Macedonia

Up to 100,000 Greeks converged on Athens on Sunday to demonstrate against a name-change deal with the Republic of Macedonia, days before a vote in parliament on the accord.

Athens has long contended that its neighbour’s name implies territorial ambitions against its own northern province of Macedonia.

Under the accord, known as the Prespes agreement and reached with Skopje last June, the Balkan republic will be renamed North Macedonia in order to resolve a row that began with the dissolution of Yugoslavia almost 30 years ago.

However, many Greeks are still unhappy that the mostly Slavic state will still have Macedonia in its name.

Thousands of protesters who had travelled to Athens by bus, plane and ferry packed into Syntagma Square in front of the parliament building yesterday, chanting “Macedonia is Greek”.

Police fired rounds of teargas into the crowd and demonstrators, some draped in giant Greek flags, could be seen vomiting and running for cover. Greece’s leftist prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, blamed the clashes on “extremist elements” of the ultra-right Golden Dawn party out in force under the motto “resistance to treachery”.

“Macedonia is one and it is Greek,” said Andreas Androutsos, a young engineer, deploying a refrain echoed by many attending the demonstration. “What the government is doing is fascistic. It is trying to pass an agreement that so many of us are against. Macedonia belongs to the Greek people, it doesn’t belong to any political party.”

As part of the pact, MPs in Athens’s 300-seat House are required to ratify it after parliamentarians in Skopje endorsed the agreement earlier this month. Once passed, the renamed Balkan nation can begin accession talks with Nato and the EU – alliances Greece has blocked because of the dispute.

Organisers had hoped to attract as many as 600,000 protesters to pressure the government into holding a referendum on the deal but turnout fell well short of that, according to police. Of the 3,000 buses lined up to travel to the capital, mostly from the country’s north, only 326 were recorded clocking in at tolls on national highways.

Yet hostility to the accord remains visceral and deep. In a nation humiliated by the depredations of years of economic crisis, successive surveys show around 70% of Greeks are opposed to the agreement.

“Millions of Greeks are, and will continue to be, against the Prespes agreement,” tweeted the country’s conservative former prime minister Antonis Samaras, a nationalist whose career was first fermented by the dispute. “Whatever provocation they come up with, however much teargas they spray, people will remain unbowed for Macedonia.”

Among the most trenchant criticism is the belief that Slavic Macedonians are bent on appropriating Greek history, not least the ancient warrior king Alexander the Great.

Demonstrators, who included diaspora Greeks who had flown in from as far away as the United States and monks from the monastic community of Mount Athos, were united in vehemence on Sunday that the accord amounted to cultural theft.

“All the findings show that Alexander was a Greek. He spoke Greek, he thought in Greek, there was nothing Slavic about him,” said Chrysanthi Papageorgiou, a woman who had come in from Athens’s poorer western suburbs with her husband Yannis for the protest. “We are not against our neighbours but we are going to defend our rights. We are not going to submit or surrender to them.”

Tsipras claims the pact protects Greece’s cultural heritage by drawing a “clear distinction” between the eponymous Greek region, its ancient civilisation and the neighbouring country.