The Great Hero of Macedonia, Tellos Agras
There are certain chapters of modern Greek history which oblivion and the strange mentality of "modernization" try, in their own way, to fade away, with the aim of making them disappear…
On this very day, then, on 7 June 1907, the Bulgarian Komitadjis killed Tellos Agras, Sarantos Agapinos, the man who took the place of Pavlos Melas at the head of the Macedonian Struggle. Here is how Penelope Delta describes his dreadful journey towards immortality.
"And then his martyrdom began. With rifle butts and spitting they pushed him along, bound. Barefoot and in tatters they took him to the first village.
– Do the bear dance! Dance! they commanded him; he answered by cursing them, and the blows of the rifle butts rained down. But the small-bodied Greek chieftain, wasted away by fevers, stood proud, his head high, his gaze fearless.
– What is one man whom you will kill, you dishonourable pig-snouts, he told them. Forty will rise up to avenge my blood! You will pay dearly for your treachery…"
A lieutenant of the Greek Army, from a family of Messenian captains of the Revolution, he replaced Pavlos Melas as leader of the armed bands of Macedonian fighters in Western Macedonia. In 1906, in a clash with the Bulgarians, he was seriously wounded in the shoulder, while the climate and the mosquitoes in the marsh of Giannitsa gave him malaria with high fevers; yet, despite his shattered health, he continued to take an active part in the Struggle!
On 3 June 1907, following negotiations, he arranged a meeting with the pro-Bulgarian voivodes of the Vermio region, Zlatan and Kasaptse. Agras was accompanied by his faithful friend Antonios Mingas, from Naousa. They went to the meeting unarmed, as the agreement stipulated, but the pro-Bulgarians did not keep their word and treacherously seized them. For four days they paraded them barefoot through the villages of the region with continuous torments and humiliations. Tellos Agras, defiant to the end, not only did not bend under the torture, but even "provoked" and insulted his tormentors.
On 7 June 1907 the two National Martyrs were hanged on a walnut tree between the villages of Techovo and Vladovo. After the Liberation of Macedonia the two villages were named Karydia (Walnut) and Agras, respectively!
Thanks to the bravery of the local and Greek fighters, the spirit of the inhabitants of Macedonia who held a Greek consciousness remained high throughout the whole duration of the Macedonian Struggle (1994-1908), despite the persecutions and murders by Ottomans and Komitadjis; as a result, a few years later, in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, the greater part of Macedonia was liberated by the victorious Greek army and incorporated into the Greek State.
It would be good to remember the Macedonian Struggle, to commemorate Pavlos Melas and Tellos Agras; better still would be for our children to be taught about that period, today, when the falsifiers of History are raising their heads again in that contrivance they have stuck onto our northern borders.
And we, who grew up with "The Secrets of the Swamp," let us try to leave behind us some little thing, in the face of what was bequeathed to us by the heroes whom the homeland is bound to honour and commemorate. Immortal ones!
