No. It often has been. E.g.
But speaking of the Romanians, I was going to post next on their cousins, the Aromanians or as you problably call them "Vlachs." I'll start at a funeral:
Here is one exmaple for many: "In 1904 a Vlach died in Monastir [Republic of Macedonia: then too it didn't have a majority Greek population] His relations wanted to bury him in Roumanian, the Greeks insisted in Greek. The Bishop (a Greek) forbade a Roumanian funeral, the relations would not have a Greek one. As usual both sides appealed to the judgee of ecclesiastical affaires, the Turkish Kaimakan. The Kaimakan, as usual, could do nothing without instructions from Constantinople, and the Porte, as usual, could not make up its mind. So there came a preliminary order to put off the funeral till the Governement had considered the caee. Meanwhile, as it was becoming quite time to do something, the wretched man was embalmed. Time passed and nothing was settled. Then both sides began fighting over the body, the market-place was shut up, and two charges of cavalry could not disperse the mob. The Wali, desperate and helpless, as last telegraphed direct to the Sultan imploring him to let the man be buried somehow before the mob had pulled the town down. At last the decision came. The Government could not afford to gratify either side, so the man was to be just put in the ground without any burial at all. See the newspaper report in Bradford: Macedonia, pp. 189-190. "Nothing," adds Mr. Bralisford, "could be more Turkish, and nothing could be more Greek."
Fortescue adds when "Greeks publish statistics of Macedonia, nearly all the people they brazenly write as "Hellenes" are really these half-Hellenized Vlachs"
The Phanar knows that if all the Vlachs go there will be, indeed, nothing but a slender remnant of the Roman nation left to work for the "Great Idea" in Macedonia. So it has set its face desperately against the Roumanian movement, as it does against all national feeling among the Christians that it will pretend to think Greeks. For years there has been a regular persecusion of these Vlachs; every priest who spoke Roumanian in church was promptly excommunicated; the Greek papers never ceased heaping abuse on Margaritis and his work, and there has been a long chain of nationalistic squabbles under pretense of ecclesiastical disputes between these two parties as ludicrous to the outsider as they are degrading to the Orthodox Church.
http://books.google.com/books?id=6JkIrx4rlbwC&pg=PA332&lpg=PA332&dq=Fortescue+Vlach&source=bl&ots=ldRGEfez9U&sig=0Lk6kBcTgX1B0dNOj1YjQkP2oL4&hl=en&ei=CfUISvrLKpTFtgeC4b3gCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PPA334,M1Sir Charles Eliot clearly states his work "Turkey in Europe" that "...The Bulgarians, Serbs and Vlachs have Millets of their own and do not cooperate in the Hellenic cause" and that "we hear of Vlach bands who are said to contend (fight against) Greeks in the region of Karaferia (Veria)"".[23] There was also pressure on Aromanians to become linguistically assimilated, which can be traced back to the 18th century, when assimilation efforts were encouraged by the Greek missionary Cosmas of Aetolia (1714-1779) who taught that Aromanians should speak Greek because as he said "it's the language of our Church" and established over 100 Greek schools in northern and western Greece. The offensive of the clergy against the use of Aromanian was by no means limited to religious issues but was a tool devised in order to convince the non-Greek speakers to abandon what they regarded as a "worthless" idiom and adopt the superior Greek speech: "There we are Metsovian brothers, together with those who are fooling themselves with this sordid and vile Aromanian language... forgive me for calling it a language", "repulsive speech with a disgusting diction".[24] [25]
The Vlachs, recognized as a separate nation by the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, were for the first time incorporated in Greece only in 1881, when Thessaly and a part of Epirus were offered to Greece by the Great Powers. Having been split into two by the new borders, the bulk of the Vlachs of these province petitioned[29] the Great Powers of the time to be let to stay within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, but in vain. Greece followed a policy of creating a Greater Greece, according to the "Megali Idea". Most of the Aromanians became part of the Greek state in 1913 after the rest of Epirus and parts of Macedonia became part of Greece after the First Balkan War.
One of the greatest figures during the Aroumanian awakening was Apostol Margarit, a native of Avdela in southern Macedonia, on the slopes of the Pindus mountains. As early as 1862, Apostol Margarit introduced the vernacular in the school of the large prosperous town of Klissoura(Vlaho-Klisura), in the Kastoria region of Macedonia. Nicepheros, the Greek bishop of Kastoria tried for many years to close down the school, but without success. In December, 1879, the first unsuccessful attempt on the life of Apostol Margarit took place. Margarit was wounded during a second attempt on his life during December 1890. There were Vlach schools in Klissoura, Krushevo, Nizepole, Trnovo, Gopesh, Ohrid, old Avdela in the Pindus mountains and new Avdela near Veria. Later more schools were founded in Macedonia, and then a Vlach high school was established in Bitola(Monastir) in the 1880s. The Greeks were naturally alarmed by the national reawakening of the Vlachs. At their peak, just before the Balkan Wars,there were 6 secondary gymnasiums, and 113 primary schools, teaching in Vlach. Due to the ongoing pressures from the Greek Church in the Ottoman provinces of Rumelia, Vlachs and their schools were viewed with suspicion. In 1880 Greek guerrillas attacked some villages near Resen because the village priests had committed the unpardonable sin of using Vlach in the church services. In the same year the Greek bishop of Kastoria had the schoolmaster in Klissoura arrested because he taught in the Vlahs'native language. A momentous date in the history of the Vlachs was May 23, 1905, when the Sultan issued a decree officially recognizing the Vlachs and affirming their rights to maintain their schools and churches. Following the proclamation of the decree, the Greek bishops, and the armed terrorist bands they supported, unleashed a campaign of terror on the Aromanians to discourage them from taking advantage of their rights. In 1905, the Vlach abbot of the Holy Archangel monastery in the Meglen region was murdered by a Greek band. In the summer of 1905 some villages near Bitola were attacked. On October 27, 1905, Greek guerillas attacked the village of Avdela in the Pindus, birthplace of Apostol Margarit, and razed it to the ground. Then in 1906, in the town of Véria(Berea), the priest Papanace was murdered as he was on his way to church to serve the Divine Liturgy in Vlach. The Romanian Vlach school in the village of Avdhela in Pindus, which was one of the first Romanian sponsored Vlach schools, active as early as 1867, was burned and razed to the ground on 27 October 1905 by Greek guerrillas....George Padioti, an Aromanian author (born and living all his life in Greece) describes one of the last liturgy services in Vlach: “ February 1952, the Aromanian Church 'Biserica ramana Santu Dumitru', burned by German troops in spring 1944. The priest Costa Bacou officiated the last allowed liturgy in Aromanian language. Afterwards, he was not permitted anymore because he refused to forcibly officiate the divine service in Greek language."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromanianshttp://www.bulgarmak.org/agras.htmAs a sidenote, this all had a profound influence on Arab history: the Ottoman adminstrator in Macedonia, Sati Husri was deeply impressed by the politics of the schools in identity formation in Macedonia, and after WWI implemented them as minister of education etc. in several Arab states. Though a Muslim (secular), he identified the Arab Patriarchate of Antioch as "the first victory of Arab nationalism."
Too bad that hadn't extended to Jerusalem: I've been to both patriarchates, and the contrast between the vibrant Antioch and the moribund Jerusalem is striking. Is it those Arabs that the PoJ sold to Phanar that you are talking about in the US? Last I heard, the were still refusing to be handled like merchandise between absentee landlords (all in a days work for Phanariots). Would it be obedience to go, or codependence? The other Arabs I know who went to the GOA had real identity issues, thinking of themselves as ruumiy but marginalized as not being Greek.
http://www.orthodoxchristianity.net/forum/index.php/topic,16967.0.htmlLa Multi Ani.
