“And now what. That’s a difficult question. Like this: I don’t have any problem speaking Czech. If I did, I wouldn’t accept citizenship. By the act of accepting citizenship, I became a Czecho-Macedonian you might say, like they say Czecho-American or Czecho-Canadian. They’re Czech by origin, but now they’re Canadians. Well I’m a Czech now, but I was born in Greece, that is in Macedonia. I don’t have any problem with that.”
“Until he came up to me - so I greeted him ‘Dobre utro’, which in my mother tongue means ‘Good morning’. And he looked at me, eyes popped in surprise - he knew we were Greek children - and he said ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good morrow’ ... ‘Good morrow’ I think he said to me, and it was my turn to pop my eyes that he’d replied our way. Then he started asking something, and I didn’t wait for anything, I rushed into the wagon and shouted like a mad man: ‘People, rejoice, they speak the same as us!’ ”
“Well, just that whether they were left-wing or right, and I’ll be entirely honest now, for us as ethnic Macedonians it was all the same. Both parties had the one aim - to erase the Macedonians inhabiting Greek territory.”
“Well, and even the education, I don’t know, in my days, my grandfather had perfect command of Turkish, English, and of course of his mother tongue, but he didn’t even know how to say hello in Greek, and he never learnt Greek. He didn’t know a word of Greek.”
"They chased partisans, civilians... they fled with their cattle to Albania and were shot at from airplanes. Some 80,000 people died there. When it was over, the Americans and the English came in, brought in trucks, excavators and bulldozers. They made pits between the two lakes, picked up the dead, threw them in the pits and covered them with quicklime. The fields that used to be there are still not cultivated today, lying fallow."
"We were in that village... I don't know, maybe ten or twelve days. We slept on the ground because there was nothing. Luckily I had a blanket I took from the house, so I wrapped the two little girls - my sister and my cousin - in the blanket, and they slept in the blanket. There were straw stacks in the village, so we stole straw at night and slept in the straw with my cousin. There was a man from the village as a watchman. They brought macaroni cooked in the cauldron from the village every day. They gave us army cups and one scoop of macaroni a day, that was all the food we had. We were hungry, cold, and dirty. I went to the guard, he was an older gentleman. I said, 'Sir, how are we going to be? Did you bring us here to die or what?' He looks at me sadly and says, 'Son, I know how you are suffering, but there's nothing I can do. We can't do anything. We have nothing to ourselves. The Germans and Bulgarians have completely plundered us, even the cattle, we have nothing. What we give you is taken from what we get from Italy.'"
Konstantin Miovský was born on 8 August 1934 in the village of Strkovo located on the present-day border of Greece, Macedonia and Albania. After his father died in 1941 on World War II’s Albanian front, the family of five, Konstantin, his mother, two sisters and grandfather, was left without a breadwinner. Konstantin and his grandfather worked three-and-a-half hectares until his mother remarried a few years later. By then the Greek Civil War was raging and the area was under the control of Communist partisans. In March 1948, they gathered all the children between aged three to 13 in the schoolyard and took them away from their parents on pain of death, allegedly to save them from bombing. Konstantin, his two little sisters and their cousins first marched eight and a half kilometres to the Yugoslav border. Then the children were loaded into cattle trucks and taken across the Balkans to friendly People’s Democratic Republics of Central Europe. Konstantin and his two sisters stayed in Mikulov for several months, in a spa hotel in Ľubochňa and at the castle in Slovenská Ľupča before being moved to an orphanage in the Moravian town of Sobotín. Eventually the siblings were separated - Konstantin was taken to Cheb and employed in a factory at age 14. For a while it looked like he would be sent back to Greece to fight on partisans’ side against the royal army. Since the partisans lost the war, Konstantin and his sisters stayed in Czechoslovakia. He took apprenticeship in Cheb, worked at the Královopolska in Brno and studied in technical high school in Brno before landing at the Brno plant of TOS Kuřim where he stayed until retirement. While he settled in Czechoslovakia voluntarily and was happy here - he had a good job and started a family - he remained a Macedonian in his heart forever.
