GREEK EDUCATION IN MONASTIR - PELAGONIA

FOREWORD BY THE PRESIDENT
OF THE SOCIETY FOR MACEDONIAN STUDIES
In 1913, the Treaty of Bucharest put an end to the Balkan Wars (1912-
1913). Under its terms the Pelagonian city of Monastir was annexed to Serbia;
and since then, in a succession of South Slav states, it has been known
as Bitola. The native Greek inhabitants of the city had, indeed, used the
name Bitolia as well as that of Monastir. From 1386 until October 1912 the
city belonged to the Ottoman Empire, before that to its predecessor, the
Byzantine Empire.
For more than five centuries, under Ottoman rule, it was an important
city with a multiethnic population, a city that bore the stamp of the powerful
presence of its native Greek residents and their vitally potent activity in the
educational, economic and social spheres.
After 1913 the populous Greek community left the city and the many
substantial towns and villages in the surrounding territory and resettled, as
refugees, in Greek Macedonia, chiefly in nearby Florina and in Thessaloniki.
Their memory, however, lives on, still vivid in 2008. Numerous public
buildings, primarily schools and hospitals, their imposing mansions in the
historic city centre, their splendid churches, including St Demetrios, which
is still the Orthodox Cathedral, their surviving descendants in the city, and
the many handsome tombs with epitaphs commemorating prominent families
in the cemetery still used by the Helleno-Vlach Community of Monastir,
are an important part of the history of this city, despite the fact that its
population has soared and its composition has altered dramatically.
The History of Monastir, an extensively documented study by research
scholar Antonis Koltsidas, was published in a 1243-page volume by the
Kyriakides Bros Press in Thessaloniki in 2003. That entire project was
sponsored by distinguished Thessaloniki lawyer Naoum Babatakas, who
was born and raised in Monastir. In memory of his parents, Mihail and Vassiliki,
the same generous sponsor enabled the Society for Macedonian Stud-