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Kato Kleines (, before 1926: Κάτω Κλέστινα - Kato Klestina; Bulgarian and Macedonian: Долно Клештино, Dolno Kleštino) is a village and a former municipality in Florina regional unit, West Macedonia, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Florina, of which it is a municipal unit. The municipal unit has an area of 188.564 km2. It is 7 km north of the city of Florina. The population was 2,132 in 2021.
In 1845 the Russian slavist Victor Grigorovich recorded Kleshtina ( Клештина) as mainly Bulgarians village. Григорович, В. Очерки путешествiя по Европейской Турцiи, Москва, 1877 Johann Georg von Hahn in his map from 1861 marked the village as Bulgarian, too.Croquis der westlischen Zurflüsse des oberen Wardar von J.G. von Hahn. Deukschriften der k Akad. d wissenseh. philos. histor. CIX1Bd, 1861. Besides Slav-speaking population there were 150 Albanians in Kato Kleines in the end of 19th century. Васил Кънчов. „Македония. Етнография и статистика“. София, 1900, стр.249 (Kanchov, Vasil. Macedonia — ethnography and statistics Sofia, 1900, p. 249). According to the statistics of geographer Dimitri Mishev (D. M. Brancoff), the village had a total Christian population of 504 in 1905, all Patriarchist Bulgarians.Dimitri Mishev (D. M. Brancoff), La Macédoine et sa Population Chrétienne, p. 176 It also had 1 Greek school.
Muslims of Kato Klestina were Albanian speakers. The 1920 Greek census recorded 792 people in the village, and 320 inhabitants (49 families) were Muslim in 1923. Following the Greek–Turkish population exchange, Greek refugee families in Kato Klestina were from East Thrace (2), Asia Minor (1) and the Caucasus (74) in 1926. The 1928 Greek census recorded 817 village inhabitants. In 1928, the refugee families numbered 77 (288 people).
Kato Kleines had 523 inhabitants in 1981. In fieldwork done by anthropologist Riki Van Boeschoten in late 1993, Kato Kleines was populated by a Greeks population descended from Anatolian Greek refugees who arrived during the Greek-Turkish population exchange, and Slavophones. The Macedonian language was spoken in the village by people over 30 in public and private settings. Children understood the language, but mostly did not use it. Pontic Greek was spoken by people over 60, mainly in private. Table 1: Réfugiés grecs; Footnote 2: Le terme « réfugié » est utilisé ici pour désigner les Grecs d’Asie Mineure qui se sont établis en Grèce dans les années vingt après l’échange de population entre la Turquie et la Grèce (Traité de Lausanne, 1924). Table 3: Kato Klines, 523; R, S, M2, P3; R = Refugiés, S = Slavophones, M = macédonien, P = dialecte pontique"
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