They invaded Macedonia and reached as far south as Thessaly and the Peloponnese, settling in isolated regions that were called by the Byzantines Sclavinias, until they were gradually pacified.

Those regions remained under Bulgarian rule for two centuries, until the conquest of Bulgaria by the Byzantine Emperor of the Macedonian dynasty Basil II in 1018.

During the Middle Ages Slavs in South Macedonia were mostly defined as Bulgarians,[18][19] and this continued also during 16th and 17th centuries by Ottoman historians and travellers like Hoca Sadeddin Efendi, Mustafa Selaniki, Hadji Khalfa and Evliya Çelebi.

Fierce conflicts between the Greeks and Bulgarians started in the area of Kastoria, in the Giannitsa Lake and elsewhere; both parties committed cruel crimes.

[24] Bulgaria's entry into World War I on the side of the Central Powers signified a dramatic shift in the way European public opinion viewed the Bulgarian population of Macedonia.

At the end of 1922, the Greek government started to expel large numbers of Thracian Bulgarians into Bulgaria and the activity of ITRO grew into an open rebellion.

As a result, a bilateral Bulgarian-Greek agreement was signed in Geneva on September 29, 1925, known as Politis-Kalfov protocol after the demand of the League of Nations, recognizing Greek Slavophones as Bulgarians and guaranteeing their protection.

[16] Metaxas was firmly opposed to the irredentist factions of the Slavophones of northern Greece mainly in Macedonia and Thrace, some of whom underwent political persecution due to advocacy of irredentism with regard to neighboring countries.

Many Communist political prisoners were released with the intercession of Bulgarian Club in Thessaloniki, which had made representations to the German occupation authorities.

Bulgaria was interested in acquiring the zones under Italian and German occupation and hopped to sway the allegiance of the 80,000 Slavs who lived there at the time.

[30] Following the defeat of the Axis powers and the evacuation of the Nazi occupation forces many members of the Ohrana joined the SNOF where they could still pursue their goal of secession.

[38][39] Finally it is estimated that entire Ohrana units had joined the SNOF which began to press the ELAS leadership to allow it autonomous action in Greek Macedonia.

[49] In late 1944 after the German and Bulgarian withdrawal from Greece, the Josip Broz Tito's Partisans movement hardly concealed its intention of expanding.

[citation needed] In both cases, the attempt was to promise "freedom" (autonomy or independence) to the formerly persecuted Slavic minority as a means of gaining its support.

Following World War II, the population of Yugoslav Macedonia did begin to feel themselves to be Macedonian, assisted and pushed by a government policy.

[58] According to information announced by Paskal Mitrovski on the I plenum of NOF in August 1948, about 85% of the Slavic-speaking population in Greek Macedonia had an ethnic Macedonian self-identity.

[58] However a 1951 document from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia states the total number of ethnic Macedonian and Greeks arriving from Greece between the years 1941–1951 is 28,595.

[75] One study of the archives in Langadas and the Lake Koroneia basin in Thessaloniki Prefecture found that most of the 22 villages in the area contained a population primarily made up of former Slavic speakers.

In 2001 the first Macedonian Orthodox church in Greece was founded in the Aridaia region, which was followed in 2002 by the election of a Rainbow Candidate, Petros Dimtsis, to office[clarification needed] in the Florina Prefecture.

[82] In 2008 thirty ethnic Macedonians from the villages of Lofoi, Meliti, Kella and Vevi protested against the presence of the Greek military in the Florina region.

[116] Others were arrested, fined, beaten and forced to drink castor oil,[110] or even deported to the border regions in Yugoslavia[58] following a staunch government policy of chastising minorities.

[16][119] However, the Greek Communists were defeated in the civil war, their Provisional Government was exiled, and tens of thousands of Slavic speakers were expelled from Greece.

"[125] According to a 1994 report by the Human Rights Watch, based on a fact-finding mission in 1993 in the Florina Prefecture and Bitola, Greece oppressed the ethnic Macedonians and implemented a program to forcefully Hellenize them.

Whilst likewise many songs composed by artists from North Macedonia such as "Egejska Maka" by Suzana Spasovska, "Makedonsko devojče" by Jonče Hristovski,[136] and "Kade ste Makedončinja?"

Greek non-linguists, when they acknowledge the existence of these dialects at all, frequently refer to them by the label Slavika, which has the implication of denying that they have any connection with the languages of the neighboring countries.

Laws were enacted banning the language,[114][115] and speakers faced harsh penalties including being arrested, fined, beaten and forced to drink castor oil.

During the Greek Civil War, the codified Macedonian language was taught in 87 schools with 10,000 students in areas of northern Greece under the control of Communist-led forces, until their defeat by the National Army in 1949.

[159] Certain characteristics of these dialects, along with most varieties of Spoken Macedonian, include the changing of the suffix ovi to oj creating the words lebovi → leboj (лебови → лебој, "bread").

[160] Often the intervocalic consonants of /v/, /ɡ/ and /d/ are lost, changing words from polovina → polojna ("a half") and sega → sea ("now"), which also features strongly in dialects spoken in North Macedonia.

The association aimed to unite former child refugees from all over the world, with branches soon established in Toronto, Melbourne, Perth, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland and Macedonia.