At the end of the Second World War, in May 1945, a deserted Vojvodina village near Novi Sad was inhabited by unusual refugees - communists from Greece.
In the village of Buljkes, where the Germans lived until the end of the Second World War, the Greeks had an assembly, a police force, a single currency, a newspaper, a theater and other institutions, which is why some called it the "seventh Yugoslav republic".
"That village became a kind of autonomous territory because the Yugoslav authorities left the organization of life in the village to the members of the Greek Communist Party," Milan Ristović, a historian and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, told the BBC in Serbian.
About 4.000 members of the left-wing People's Liberation Army of Greece (ELAS), the armed wing of the People's Liberation Front (EAM), found their last refuge from the fighting in Buljkes.
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Among them was Philo Kozmidis, a 36-year-old partisan from Thessaloniki with extensive war experience. He had a family and two daughters in Greece, whom he renounced and thus saved them from the reprisals of the monarchists in this country.
Over time, the population of Buljkes grew to more than 5.000 people.
The Greeks lived there peacefully until the split between Tito and Stalin, after which most of them, at the end of 1949, left Buljkes and went to the countries of the Eastern Bloc. A smaller number remained in Yugoslavia.
After the departure of the Greeks, colonists arrived in Buljkes from other parts of Yugoslavia, mainly Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Lika in Croatia and southern Serbia.
With the arrival of new residents, the village changed its name to Maglić, after the mountain on the border of Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
According to the 2011 population census, 2.486 people live in Maglić, mostly Serbs. Today, there are almost no Greeks and their descendants in this village.
A Greek island in the Pannonian Sea
The status of autonomous territory or "Greek republic in Yugoslavia", as Ristović calls this village in the book "Experiment Buljkes", was obtained thanks to the connection between Yugoslav and Greek partisans.
"They were in a privileged position and did not have the treatment of classic refugees, but practically they were refugees," Uranija Kozmidis Luburić, a professor at the Novi Sad Faculty of Technical Sciences and head of the physics department, told the BBC in Serbian.
Her father Philo fled to Greece as a child from his native Odra in Turkey. After the Second World War, he became a refugee again.
he came to Yugoslavia alone via Bulgaria, as the third man of ELAS, with the intention of welcoming his comrades.
"He was a great opponent of private property and never showed a desire for something to be his," recalls Kozimidis Luburić, which Filo received while living in Yugoslavia.
Kozmidis was the commissioner of the commune in charge of supplying the Greeks with food and other products.
"He fought fiercely for the Greeks to get all the best. The state took great care of them, perhaps even more than the people from Yugoslavia, just to show them that great communist solidarity," says Kozmidis Luburić.
On one occasion, the Greeks received a wagonload of rotten apples, which Philo protested and sent back.
That's when he met Ida Sabo, Urania's mother and partisan, at that time a socio-political worker and member of parliament in charge of refugees.
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Ristović says that the main decision-making body in the commune was the board, that is, the "village government" composed of the most influential people trusted by the Communist Party of Greece.
In addition to the board, there were other institutions in Buljkes, such as the police and prison, as well as a school, a printing press, a theater and a cinema.
In the village school, classes were held in Greek, and the printing press published the newspaper Glas Buljkes, as well as other publications and political pamphlets, also in Greek.
The village had large arable land and livestock farms, so the villagers were mostly engaged in agriculture.
They also founded cooperatives - wheelwrights, tanneries and spinning mills, among others, and they also produced bricks in the former German brick factory.
Buljkes printed money - the Buljkes dinar, which was used as a means of payment and was valid only on the territory of the commune.
Buljkes in the civil war in Greece
In the book "The Second World War", British Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes how in October 1944 he agreed with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that Greece would be left to "British influence".
In December of that year, a conflict broke out in Greece between the communists and the government-controlled army, but Stalin kept his word to Churchill at the meeting in Moscow and did not support the communists.
In February 1945, the warring parties signed an armistice according to which ELAS was to be disarmed.
The Greeks who settled Buljkes in May 1945 did not agree with that agreement.
They were mostly members of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and "the most radical members of ELAS". A small number of refugees were civilians - women, children and the elderly.
When the civil war started in Greece in 1946, Buljkes became a center for the recovery of fighters and the training of new personnel, thanks to the Yugoslav authorities.
"What the government in Athens protested against was the existence of what was called a military academy in the propaganda. These were actually courses for commanders that lasted about three months, and then those course participants were sent back across the border to Greece to become part of the command staff," says professor Ristović.
In this way, the Yugoslav authorities were the main ally "from the shadows" of the Democratic Army of Greece - communist fighters in the civil war.
The Greek royal government and Western allies accused Yugoslavia of "actively aiding the civil war", after which the Yugoslav authorities allowed foreign journalists to visit Buljkes.
"There are instructions in the archives on how those visits were prepared, that those who will speak to foreign journalists should never say their real names and that they should say things that would help refute the accusations that it was some kind of military camp, but that it was just a refugee commune," adds Ristović.
Over time, Great Britain left the guardianship of Greece to America, and the civil war itself ended in October 1949 with the victory of the monarchists.
Dead bodies in canals and wells
The schism between Tito and Stalin in 1948 disrupted the life of the Greek commune.
The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) supported the resolution of the Informburo and sided with Stalin, which led to the cutting of the main channel of aid.
There was a division among the Greeks in Buljkes - into a majority that supported Stalin and a minority that sided with Tito.
People from both sides disappeared in mutual conflicts, and were later found in wells, ponds and canals around Buljkes.
This was followed by the reaction of the Yugoslav authorities and their bodies, primarily the Udba.
Philo Cosmidis sided with Tito.
"For him, Tito was a person more worthy of respect than Stalin. He could not see Stalin with his eyes and considered him a very bad communist, more of a dictator than a communist," says Kozmidis Luburić.
Philo lost two good friends in the clashes between the Greeks in Buljkes - one "Stalinist" and one "Titoist".
"The first ended up in the canal, the second in the well," says Kozmidis Luburić.
She adds that her father tried to convince some friends to stay and that Stalin was not the right choice, but to no avail.
Due to his political stance, Kozmidis was shot twice. Once he was walking down the street with Urania, holding her hand.
"I was very young and did not know what was happening. I only remember that my dad threw me to the ground and that a bullet grazed him in the back," she recalls.
He did not want to talk about this event. Urania is convinced that they were Greeks, but she never found out if they were from Greece or from Buljkes.
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After a series of incidents and quarrels between the Yugoslav leadership and representatives of the KKE, in September 1949, the "Seventh Yugoslav Republic" Buljkes was abolished.
"The majority made the decision that he should leave Yugoslavia, to countries where you can find those who are on your ideological line, and not as 'ideological heretics' Yugoslavs," Professor Ristović explains.
They were transported by train across the border to Hungary, from where some found a new home in Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia, and there were also those who reached Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.
Several Greek families remained in the village after 1949, among them the Skutelis.
Cinematographer and producer Orfeas Skutelis is a third-generation Greek from Bulje.
Although he has been living in New York for five years, he comes to Serbia every summer and spends most of his time in the house in Buljkes, where he finished elementary school.
His grandparents, Polixenia and Janis, are one of the few Greeks who stayed in Buljkes after 1949 and started a family there.
A year later, Orpheas' father Adonis was born, who was baptized Anton.
Over time, the descendants of the first generation of Greek settlers started families with spouses of other nationalities.
And Orpheas is the child of a mixed marriage - a Montenegrin mother and a Greek father.
"I grew up speaking Greek with my grandparents and Serbian-Croatian with my parents," he says.
Uranija Kozmidis Luburić was in similar situations when she was growing up, because her grandmother on her mother's side spoke Hungarian, her father Greek, and her mother and father, when they were together, Serbian.
"They also killed each other's children"
Orfeas says that he does not know how his ancestors stayed in Buljkes "since the grandfather was a Stalinist and for a while he hid until everything was reconciled.
"My assumption is that the grandmother made the decision because she had a difficult life and did not want her life to be overturned again, so she decided to stay," Orfeas explains to the BBC in Serbian.
Polixenia, like Philo Cosmidis, fled from her native Turkey to Greece, and before she came to Yugoslavia, her two daughters were saved from retaliation by the Red Cross.
"They were very brutal towards each other, supporters of monarchists and communists, and they killed each other's children.
"Nothing less brutal than here in the Second World War and this last one," says Skutelis.
Although they had known each other before, it was only in the village that love was born between the nurse Polixenia and the Greek partisan Janis.
"Grandfather probably knew her first husband. There is a story that they gathered as partisans at the grandmother's ex-husband and that they were visited by Svetozar Vukmanović Tempo," says 44-year-old Skutelis.
Orfeas started working on a documentary about "Operation Buljkes" with a friend, a film director, for which he had been collecting material for years.
In search of personal stories, he got in touch with Alexis Parnis, the director of the theater in Buljka.
"The split between Tito and Stalin found him on a theater tour in Bulgaria and Romania.
"They had an escort from the civil service because they couldn't move anywhere on their own and do what they wanted," recounts Skutelis.
He says that Parnis then went to Moscow where he worked as a director and writer. Today he lives in Greece.
Among the Greeks of Bulje, there was a fear of reprisals, so some of them, especially children, hid their identity and presented themselves under other names.
That is why they burned all the registers and documents when leaving the village.
"Director Alexis Parnis confirmed it to me. He left the village with a travel permit, while his identity card and everything else he had in the village was destroyed," says Orfeas Skutelis.
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Greek communists and their descendants could return to their homeland only after 1981, when the government of Andreas Papandreou passed the Law on National Reconciliation, allowing the safe return of political refugees from the civil war.
Philo Cosmidis did not return, although he was pardoned from his death sentence after World War II.
The reason was disappointment in the events in Greece, especially those that preceded his arrival in Yugoslavia.
"He personally participated in conflicts with left-behind fascists, where the English gave them blanks and his comrades died because they shot with empty guns," says Kozmidis Luburić.
"They ended the whole story very cruelly," he adds.
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From the Greek Buljkes to Bački Maglić
After the departure of the Greeks, colonists from other parts of Yugoslavia arrived in Buljkes.
"In five calendar years, the village changed three population structures," Vinka Marjanović, who moved to the village with her parents in 1959 from her native Glamoč in Bosnia, told the BBC in Serbian when she was four years old.
"At one point, there were 17 peoples and nationalities in the village - Yugoslavia in miniature," says Vinka Marjanović.
She says she went to school with several Greek girls, who "felt like Magli women" and who never spoke Greek among themselves.
"And they didn't like to speak Greek with their parents when we were present. That's why many of them haven't even learned Greek, which is a shame," adds Marjanović.
Philo Kozmidis rarely returned to the village after the Greeks left it, and his daughter Urania only visited Maglić a few times.
He believes that it would be better for the Greeks of Bulje if "that 'state' didn't even exist".
Uranija Kozimidis Luburić thinks that the Greeks would have fought less if, instead of in one village, they settled all over Vojvodina.
"They came here and were supposed to mix and keep their cultural features like all nations. That mixture is the best thing that can happen to a person".
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