The Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne and Victoria

03/11/2026

01/10/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/1BTfYpszZm/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Athens is pressing Skopje to remove what the Greek government describes as revisionist and irredentist references from school textbooks, arguing that certain formulations are inconsistent with the 2018 Prespa Agreement.

Greek Deputy Foreign Minister Alexandra Papadopoulou raised the issue in Parliament on September 30, saying Greece continues to seek changes to educational material that it considers incompatible with the agreement and with Skopje’s constitutional framework.

The dispute focuses particularly on the way historical figures and ancient Macedonian history are presented in recently issued textbooks. According to a Greek parliamentary question cited by To Vima, a sixth-grade textbook reportedly refers to Alexander the Great as “Alexander the Macedonian” and contains descriptions of a “homeland” that Greek lawmakers argue could promote a revisionist historical narrative.

Papadopoulou stressed that Greece is seeking what it considers an accurate presentation of historical events, terminology and figures such as Alexander the Great and Philip II in Skopje’s educational material. She also pointed to Articles 7 and 8 of the Prespa Agreement, which establish a framework for addressing the different historical meanings of the terms “Macedonia” and “Macedonian.”

Under Article 8, Greece and Skopje established a Joint Interdisciplinary Committee of Experts on historical, archaeological and educational matters. The committee is responsible for examining curricula, textbooks and other educational material and recommending changes where necessary, including references regarded as irredentist or revisionist.

The committee has continued its work, with the two sides exchanging and reviewing educational material. However, progress has been uneven, and the discussions remain politically sensitive. The minutes and deliberations of the committee are confidential, according to Papadopoulou.

The textbook dispute is part of the broader difficulties surrounding implementation of the Prespa Agreement, which entered into force in 2019 after decades of disagreement between Greece and its northern neighbor.

For Athens, the agreement goes beyond the country's name. It also established commitments concerning historical terminology, educational material and the avoidance of references that could be interpreted as irredentist or revisionist.

The issue remains particularly sensitive because historical references involving ancient Macedonia, Alexander the Great and Philip II carry significant importance in both Greek and Skopje political discourse.

Athens says it will continue raising the matter through the bilateral committee and diplomatic channels, seeking changes to educational material that it considers inconsistent with the obligations established by the Prespa Agreement.

17/09/2026

We wish you well John!
We are right behind you!!

20/08/2026

Senator Michaelia Cash — Senator for Western Australia, Shadow Attorney-General and Leader of the Opposition in the Senate — and Cindy McLeish MP State Member for Eildon in the Victorian Parliament, have both called out the disgraceful scenes at a Melbourne sporting fixture.

Their message is clear: this behaviour is unacceptable — and Football Victoria's fines and points deduction against Preston Lions FC reflect that.

Racism, hate, misogyny and violence have no place in our society. Neither does disruptive, antisocial conduct at what should be a family sport. Preston Lions have now recorded their second strike out of three in under 12 months.

The message is simple: clean it up — or face the consequences. Three strikes, and you're out.

19/08/2026

We do not hold hope that these measures will do much to stop the vitriolic behaviour that continues to spew from this club.

https://www.facebook.com/share/1CPbozp74d/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Preston Lions FC has been handed a three-point deduction, fines totalling $18,150 and restrictions on supporter attendance at away fixtures following an Independent Tribunal hearing into incidents surrounding its NPL Victoria Men's match against South Melbourne FC on July 18.

19/08/2026

"Ilinden Uprising" - What unbiased sources say really happened!

PART 2 of 5: IMRO — The Bulgarian Committee Behind Ilinden

The organisation that staged the 1903 uprising was IMRO — the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, founded in Thessaloniki in 1893. Its leaders and members were drawn overwhelmingly from the Bulgarian Exarchate's own school and church network built after 1870. Gotse Delchev, IMRO's most famous leader, is described by Encyclopaedia Britannica as someone who "seems to have identified himself as a Bulgarian."

IMRO's public slogan was "autonomy" for Macedonia — not outright union with Bulgaria. That wasn't idealism. It was strategy. After Berlin reversed San Stefano in 1878, the Great Powers would never have tolerated Sofia simply annexing Macedonia outright. "Autonomy" was the version of the plan that might actually survive European diplomacy.

Meanwhile a second, more explicit faction operated openly from Sofia: the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee, the "Supremists," working with covert backing from the Bulgarian government itself and pushing straightforwardly for annexation.

Two wings, one destination. This is the organisation that, in August 1903, launched an uprising still being rebranded today as the birth of a separate "Macedonian" nation. Next: what actually happened on the ground.

10/08/2026

Last weekend, Assistant Minister Ged Kearney stood with Preston Lions FC, personally congratulating the club on its 2026 Dockerty Cup win and praising the way "local sporting clubs... bring people together, build community."

Three weeks earlier, on 18 July, banners reading "GREEK CHICKS HAIRY T**S" and "ANTI-HELLASS" were held up by Preston Lions supporters at their match against South Melbourne Hellas — a sexualised, misogynistic attack on Greek women and girls, in front of families and children. On 22 July, our Association wrote to Ms Kearney directly, as a listed Presidents Club sponsor of the club, asking her to publicly condemn the conduct and to clarify whether she would continue that sponsorship while Football Victoria's investigation remained open. We have received no response, and no public condemnation.

Football Victoria's own sanction — two home games played behind closed doors — has already come and gone. The investigation Ms Kearney was asked to wait on is still unresolved. And yet there she was, in club colours, celebrating on the pitch, without a word about the community she was asked to answer to.

This is not what accountability looks like. If Ms Kearney is comfortable enough to stand with this club publicly, she should be equally comfortable answering, publicly, the questions our Association put to her in writing: does she condemn what happened on 18 July, and does she still consider her sponsorship appropriate while it remains unresolved?

Until we hear that answer, this silence speaks for itself — and it is a bitter disappointment to every Greek Australian family who expected better.

10/08/2026

"Ilinden Uprising" - What unbiased sources say really happened!

PART 1 of 5: 1870 — Where the Real Story Begins

Every account Skopje tells of Ilinden starts in 1903. The real story starts 33 years earlier, and it isn't Greek propaganda — it's diplomatic record.

In 1870, under sustained Russian pressure, the Ottoman Sultan issued a firman creating the Bulgarian Exarchate: a church breaking away from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which had represented Balkan Orthodox Christians — Greek and Slav alike — for centuries. This wasn't a theological split. It was a claiming mechanism. Whichever village's clergy "chose" the Exarchate over the Patriarchate was, from that point forward, administratively counted as Bulgarian: Bulgarian-language schools, Bulgarian textbooks, a Bulgarian national register. Encyclopaedia Britannica's own entries on Bulgarian history treat the Exarchate's creation as the acknowledged starting point of the modern "Macedonian Question" — not a Greek framing, a standard one in Western reference works.

Eight years later, the mechanism paid off — briefly. The 1878 Treaty of San Stefano, imposed by Russia on a defeated Ottoman Empire, created a "Greater Bulgaria" swallowing nearly all of Macedonia. Britain and Austria-Hungary, alarmed at a Russian client state dominating the Balkans, forced it back off the map within months at the Congress of Berlin. This is not contested history; it's in every standard European diplomatic history of the period. But the goal Berlin blocked didn't disappear — it went underground, into schools, church registers, and eventually armed committees.

From the 1870s through the 1890s, Macedonia became the site of a quiet but intense contest: rival Greek (Patriarchist) and Bulgarian (Exarchist) school and church networks, each competing for the religious and educational allegiance — and therefore the recorded nationality — of the same Slavic-speaking Orthodox villages. American and British scholarship on this period (see, for instance, Duncan M. Perry's Duke University Press study of the Macedonian revolutionary movements) treats this church-and-schoolroom rivalry as the direct institutional precursor to the armed organizations that followed. It was in this environment — not a spontaneous 1903 national awakening — that the organization behind Ilinden was born.

Next: the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation — who actually ran it, and what Ottoman government records called them.

Sources for this part: Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries on Bulgaria and the Bulgarian Exarchate; Duncan M. Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Revolutionary Movements, 1893–1903 (Duke University Press, 1988); standard accounts of the Congress of Berlin, 1878.

27/07/2026

Football Victoria

https://ftbl.vc/4fOFXBG

*A response to Football Victoria's statement on the Preston Lions sanctions*

Football Victoria has released its update on Saturday's conduct, with initial sanctions attached. Of the three responses we've now reviewed — Nathan Lambert MP, Assistant Minister Ged Kearney, and now FV — this is the one backed by the most concrete action. That deserves to be said plainly, alongside where it still doesn't go far enough.

**What they got right**

FV didn't soften the language. They called Saturday's scenes "utterly disgraceful" and committed to acting "decisively to protect the wider community" against what they term a small minority using football as a platform for vilification. Crucially, they backed that language with something Lambert and Kearney did not: real, immediate sanctions. Preston Lions' next two NPL home fixtures — against Bentleigh Greens and Green Gully, along with the Women's and U23 matches that precede them — will be played behind closed doors, no spectators. The matter has also been referred to the independent FV Tribunal, with financial penalties, points deductions and match restrictions explicitly on the table, and further action under the Three Strike Policy still under consideration. They also thanked the community members who supplied evidence to the investigation — an acknowledgment that our community's persistence in documenting and reporting this has directly shaped the outcome. And the closing line is one we want to see repeated by everyone who comments on this: "If individuals cannot uphold the standards expected of our football community, they should step away from it."

**Where it fell short**

For all of that, FV's statement never once names what this actually was. It speaks throughout of "vilification," "division" and a "small minority," but at no point does it say the words Greek, Greek Victorians, or misogyny — despite the fact that our formal letter to FV's Integrity & Compliance Unit set out precisely what was displayed and asked FV to confirm this would be treated as vilification, both racial/ethnic and gender-based, not generic anti-social conduct. Nathan Lambert MP managed to say plainly who was targeted. FV, the body actually running the investigation, has so far chosen not to.

The statement also doesn't engage with the pattern. This is the third documented incident involving Preston Lions supporters in just over a year, and FV's own enforcement history includes a real inconsistency our community has already raised directly with them: Oakleigh Cannons were required to remove a Greek flag in September 2025, while reported breaches by Preston Lions supporters around the same period went unaddressed. A genuine accounting of this pattern — and of FV's own uneven enforcement of it — is missing.

Finally, the sanctions announced so far sit at the club level. There's no confirmation of what happens to the individuals already identified as responsible, no timeline for when the Tribunal will report, and no detail on what preventative measures — proper bag checks, banner screening — will apply at ordinary matches going forward, rather than just the enhanced security reserved for the marquee Dockerty Cup Final.

**What we still want to see**

We are asking FV to confirm, in writing, that this investigation and any Tribunal outcome will be recorded as vilification — racial and gender-based — not filed away as generic misconduct the way the September 2025 incident was. We want individual consequences for those already identified, not only fixture restrictions that affect the whole club. We want a firm date for the Tribunal's findings and for a decision under the Three Strike Policy. And we want an honest account of why a club with three documented incidents in thirteen months, and a supporter base that has repeatedly targeted our community, was allowed to reach a third strike before action of this scale was taken.

Real sanctions are a start most other responses this week haven't matched. Now we want the finding to match the sanction: name what this was, and hold the individuals — not just the fixture list — to account.

— The Executive Committee, Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne and Victoria

*Απάντηση στη δήλωση της Football Victoria για τις κυρώσεις κατά της Preston Lions*

Η Football Victoria δημοσίευσε την ενημέρωσή της για τη συμπεριφορά του Σαββάτου, με αρχικές κυρώσεις να τη συνοδεύουν. Από τις τρεις απαντήσεις που έχουμε πλέον εξετάσει — του Nathan Lambert MP, της Υφυπουργού Ged Kearney, και τώρα της FV — αυτή είναι εκείνη που στηρίζεται στην πιο συγκεκριμένη δράση. Αυτό αξίζει να ειπωθεί ξεκάθαρα, μαζί με το πού ακόμα δεν φτάνει αρκετά μακριά.

**Τι έκανε σωστά**

Η FV δεν μαλάκωσε τη γλώσσα της. Χαρακτήρισε τις σκηνές του Σαββάτου «απολύτως επαίσχυντες» και δεσμεύτηκε να ενεργήσει «αποφασιστικά για την προστασία της ευρύτερης κοινότητας» απέναντι σε αυτό που αποκαλεί μικρή μειοψηφία που χρησιμοποιεί το ποδόσφαιρο ως βήμα προσβολής. Το σημαντικότερο, στήριξε αυτή τη γλώσσα με κάτι που ούτε ο Lambert ούτε η Kearney έκαναν: πραγματικές, άμεσες κυρώσεις. Οι επόμενοι δύο αγώνες της Preston Lions εντός έδρας στο NPL — απέναντι στην Bentleigh Greens και την Green Gully, μαζί με τους αγώνες Γυναικών και U23 που προηγούνται — θα διεξαχθούν κεκλεισμένων των θυρών, χωρίς θεατές. Το θέμα έχει επίσης παραπεμφθεί στο ανεξάρτητο Δικαστήριο της FV, με χρηματικά πρόστιμα, αφαίρεση βαθμών και περιορισμούς αγώνων να βρίσκονται ρητά στο τραπέζι, ενώ περαιτέρω δράση βάσει της Πολιτικής των Τριών Παραπτωμάτων παραμένει υπό εξέταση. Ευχαρίστησαν επίσης τα μέλη της κοινότητας που προσέφεραν στοιχεία στην έρευνα — μια αναγνώριση ότι η επιμονή της κοινότητάς μας στην τεκμηρίωση και την καταγγελία διαμόρφωσε άμεσα το αποτέλεσμα. Και η καταληκτική γραμμή είναι κάτι που θέλουμε να επαναλαμβάνεται από όλους όσους σχολιάζουν αυτό το θέμα: «Αν άτομα δεν μπορούν να τηρήσουν τα πρότυπα που αναμένονται από την ποδοσφαιρική μας κοινότητα, θα πρέπει να αποχωρήσουν από αυτήν».

**Πού υστέρησε**

Παρ' όλα αυτά, η δήλωση της FV δεν ονοματίζει ποτέ τι πραγματικά ήταν αυτό. Μιλά σε όλη της την έκταση για «προσβολή», «διχασμό» και «μικρή μειοψηφία», αλλά πουθενά δεν λέει τις λέξεις Έλληνες, Έλληνες Βικτωριανοί, ή μισογυνισμός — παρόλο που η επίσημη επιστολή μας προς τη Μονάδα Ακεραιότητας & Συμμόρφωσης της FV περιέγραφε με ακρίβεια τι είχε επιδειχθεί και ζητούσε από την FV να επιβεβαιώσει ότι αυτό θα αντιμετωπιστεί ως προσβολή, τόσο φυλετική/εθνοτική όσο και έμφυλη, όχι ως γενική αντικοινωνική συμπεριφορά. Ο Nathan Lambert MP κατάφερε να πει ξεκάθαρα ποιοι στοχοποιήθηκαν. Η FV, ο φορέας που διεξάγει πραγματικά την έρευνα, μέχρι στιγμής έχει επιλέξει να μην το κάνει.

Η δήλωση δεν ασχολείται επίσης με το μοτίβο. Αυτό είναι το τρίτο τεκμηριωμένο περιστατικό που αφορά οπαδούς της Preston Lions μέσα σε λίγο περισσότερο από έναν χρόνο, και το ίδιο το ιστορικό επιβολής κανόνων της FV περιλαμβάνει μια πραγματική ασυνέπεια που η κοινότητά μας έχει ήδη θέσει απευθείας ενώπιόν της: η Oakleigh Cannons υποχρεώθηκε να αφαιρέσει ελληνική σημαία τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2025, ενώ καταγγελθείσες παραβάσεις οπαδών της Preston Lions την ίδια περίπου περίοδο έμειναν χωρίς αντιμετώπιση. Μια ειλικρινής λογοδοσία για αυτό το μοτίβο — και για την ίδια την ανομοιόμορφη επιβολή κανόνων της FV — απουσιάζει.

Τέλος, οι κυρώσεις που ανακοινώθηκαν μέχρι στιγμής βρίσκονται σε επίπεδο σωματείου. Δεν υπάρχει επιβεβαίωση για το τι θα συμβεί στα άτομα που έχουν ήδη εντοπιστεί ως υπεύθυνα, καμία χρονική προθεσμία για το πότε θα αποφανθεί το Δικαστήριο, και καμία λεπτομέρεια για το ποια προληπτικά μέτρα — κατάλληλοι έλεγχοι τσαντών, έλεγχος πανό — θα ισχύουν σε συνηθισμένους αγώνες στο εξής, πέρα από την ενισχυμένη ασφάλεια που προορίζεται μόνο για τον κορυφαίο τελικό του Dockerty Cup.

**Τι θέλουμε ακόμα να δούμε**

Ζητάμε από την FV να επιβεβαιώσει, εγγράφως, ότι αυτή η έρευνα και οποιοδήποτε αποτέλεσμα του Δικαστηρίου θα καταγραφεί ως προσβολή — φυλετική και έμφυλη — και δεν θα αρχειοθετηθεί ως γενικό παράπτωμα, όπως συνέβη με το περιστατικό του Σεπτεμβρίου 2025. Θέλουμε ατομικές συνέπειες για όσους έχουν ήδη εντοπιστεί, όχι μόνο περιορισμούς αγώνων που επηρεάζουν όλο το σωματείο. Θέλουμε σταθερή ημερομηνία για τα ευρήματα του Δικαστηρίου και για απόφαση βάσει της Πολιτικής των Τριών Παραπτωμάτων. Και θέλουμε μια ειλικρινή εξήγηση για το γιατί ένα σωματείο με τρία τεκμηριωμένα περιστατικά μέσα σε δεκατρείς μήνες, και μια βάση οπαδών που έχει επανειλημμένα στοχοποιήσει την κοινότητά μας, επιτράπηκε να φτάσει σε τρίτο παράπτωμα πριν ληφθεί δράση αυτής της κλίμακας.

Οι πραγματικές κυρώσεις είναι μια αρχή που οι περισσότερες άλλες απαντήσεις αυτής της εβδομάδας δεν κατάφεραν να φτάσουν. Τώρα θέλουμε το εύρημα να αντιστοιχεί στην κύρωση: να ονοματιστεί τι ήταν αυτό, και να λογοδοτήσουν τα άτομα — όχι μόνο το πρόγραμμα αγώνων.

— Το Διοικητικό Συμβούλιο, Παμμακεδονική Ένωση Μελβούρνης και Βικτώριας

Football Victoria (FV) is providing the following update, regarding the conduct of a group of Preston Lions FC suppo