Mandres (
Greek: Μάνδρες,
Bulgarian: Хамбаркьой) is a village South of the City of
Kilkis in the
Kilkis regional unit, Greece. It is part of the municipal unit
Gallikos and has a population of 385 people (2021). Until 1926, Mandres was known as Ampar Kioi (
Greek: Αμπάρ Κιόι).[2] The name was also written as Ambar Köy.[3]
History
Ambar Koy was mainly a
Slavic speaking settlement and its population intermarried with other Slavic speaking villages in the area.[4] In the early 1900s,
Vasil Kanchov stated that the local population was composed of 300
Bulgarians and 66
Turks, whereas
Hilmi Pasha described the village as inhabited only by 195 Bulgarians.[5] During the period of the
Balkan Wars, the
Greek army destroyed the settlement[5] and it was repopulated by people from the village of
Mandritsa in
Bulgaria.[6] Until
World War II, relatives from both villages would visit each other.[6]
In the 1980s only middle aged and elderly generations within the village had knowledge of an Albanian dialect.[7] The Mandres Albanian dialect is similar to that of Mandritsa and sharply differs from other varieties of the
Albanian language.[7][8][3] For example the
gender system (masculine and feminine) present in all varieties of Albanian has disappeared from the Mandres Albanian dialect due to influence from the
Turkish language when the population in the past lived near
Turkey.[9]
^
abMichailidis, Iakovos D. (2007). "Population Shifts in Contemporary Greek Macedonia". In Koliopoulos, Ioannis (ed.).
The History of Macedonia(PDF). Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. p. 361.
^
abHamp, Eric (1992).
"On signs of health and death". In Dorian, Nancy C. (ed.). Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death. Cambridge University Press. p. 209.
ISBN9780521437578.
^Hamp, Eric (1992).
"Albanian". In Gvozdanović, Jadranka (ed.). Indo-European Numerals. Mouton de Gruyter. p. 883.
ISBN9783110113228.