Damiano (Dem Pella, Greece)

The village is located 5 kilometers northeast of the city of Yanitsa on the way to the town of Gumenisa and not far from the ancient Macedonian capital Pella .

In the Ottoman Empire

In the 19th century, Damyan was a purely Bulgarian village in the Enige-Vardar case of the Ottoman Empire. In 1848, the Russian Slavic Viktor Grigorovich mentioned Damiya in his Essay on Traveling in European Turkey , describing it as a Bulgarian village ^[3] .

In 1889, the Croatian Stefan Verkovich in the “Topographical-Ethnographic Essay of Macedonia” wrote the following about Damyan:

In the early 1870s, the inhabitants of Damyan (along with the inhabitants of the surrounding villages) actively fought for the autonomous Church , under the name " Bulgarian Exarchate ." They petitioned the sultan for the publication of the corresponding firman ^[5] . On May 11, 1872 , on the Day of Saints Methodius and Cyril , contrary to the prohibition of the Patriarchate, the act of proclaiming the autocephalous Bulgarian Church was solemnly read ^[6] .

In 1900, according to the data of the Bulgarian geographer Vasil Kinchev , there were 90 inhabitants in the village, all of them were Christian Bulgarians ^[7] . The whole village was under the care of the Bulgarian exarchate . According to the exarchist secretary Dimitar Mishev , in 1905 there were 112 Bulgarian exarchists in Damian ^[8] .

According to the Kukushsky Okoly school inspector Nikola Khirlova , in 1909 16 private houses in Damian were reliably owned by Bulgarian exarchists. They were engaged in farming and viticulture. The Bulgarian school in Damian was opened in 1907, and the first year it functioned illegally, in a private house. Due to the protracted conflict between the Exarchy and the Patriarchate of Constantinople , in 1909 the local church "Sveti Dimitar" was closed ^[9] .

In Greece

During the First Balkan War, the village was occupied by Greek units and remained behind Greece after the Second Balkan War . The Bulgarians left here for the area of ​​the Horn of the Old Planina , and after the Greek-Bulgarian and Greek-Turkish exchanges of populations, Greek refugees were placed in their place. In 1926, the name of the village was slightly modified in Damiano. In 1928, the village was already purely refugee; 100 families of refugees (373 people ^[10] ) lived in it.

Born in Damian

• Georgy Ivanov Peshev - Goncho (1885–1973), served as Chetnik by Governor Hristo Zinov and Ivan Byrlo , died as a refugee in Sveti Vlas ( Horn of Old Planyna ^[11] ).
• Georgy Kostadinov Ginev (Gosho Damyansky), Head of the Local Committee of WMO ^[12]
• Dimitar Aigyrov (1866-1947), Bulgarian revolutionary, member of WMO, prisoner of Greek prisons.

• Dialect text from Damyan in: Shklifov, Blagoy and Ekaterina Shklifova. The Bulgarian dialect of texts from Egeisk Macedonia, Sofia, 2003, pp. 211-212.