Moderators, please note: Macedonia

[Jona Lendering]

Okay, we have recently discussed 'Make your land like ours' and we have shown ourselves to be grown-up people. I have contacted one of the moderators and we agree that a discussion about another potentially dangerous subject, Macedonia, must be possible; the moderators will, however, closely guard this thread.

I am currently writing a web-article about ancient Macedonia, and the more extreme modern opinions can not be separated from the recent diplomatic crisis. I think that it is prudent (and saves me from replying a lot of hate mail) if I add an explanation about the origin of modern Macedonia. Ladies and gentleman, do you think the following text will be acceptable?

In the nineteenth century, the power of the Ottoman empire on the Balkan peninsula was in decline and new kingdoms like Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria, came into being. They all claimed the area that was known as Macedonia, which was usually described as inhabited by Bulgarians, although there were local nationalists who stressed that the Macedonians were an independent nation. After the Balkan Wars (1912-1914), the country was carved up between the three states and the Serbian and Greek authorities launched harsh politics to change the ethnic composition of the land they had conquered. For example, the "Slavophone Greeks" of Thessalonica were restricted in their cultural activities, sometimes forced to resettle, and replaced by Greeks who had been forced to leave their ancestral towns in the west of Turkey.

After the Second World War, Serbia was the most powerful state in the Yugoslavian federation, and the Yugoslavian leader Tito tried to counterbalance Serbia's hegemony by giving Macedonia some autonomy, arguing that the Macedonians were an ancient nation and were no Serbians. (In fact, Tito recognized that the earlier policy of forced Serbianization had failed.) Another motive was Tito's hope to incite a revolt in the Greek part of Macedonia, which might result in the annexation of Thessalonica as Yugoslavia's southern port. Although Greece was divided by civil war, Tito soon discovered that the Greeks had thoroughly hellenized their part of Macedonia.

During the Cold War, Yugoslavia tried to remain out of the conflict between East and West. Bulgaria, however, was part of the Soviet Alliance, and every time the relations between Sofia and Belgrade deteriorated, anti-Yugoslavian propaganda was directed at the Yugoslavian republic of Macedonia by the Bulgarians. They also stressed that the inhabitants were no Serbians. As a result of all this, nationalist ideas that had existed among some early twentieth-century Slavs living in Macedonia, were kept alive.

Like all nationalists of all nations in the world, the Macedonians had thought about the origin of their nation. Of course they had a Slavic heritage, which meant that they were related to the Bulgarians and Serbs, and had -according to most scholars- settled on the Balkan peninsula in the Early Middle Ages. However, the Macedonian nationalists claimed that the Slavs had always lived on the southern Balkans, and they sought arguments to prove that the language spoken by the ancient Macedonians was in fact an early form of Slavonic. These ideas were highly controversial, and were disputed by historians from modern Greece, who claimed that the ancient Macedonians spoke Greek.

After the end of the Cold War, Yugoslavia disintegrated and its southernmost republic became independent. This would not have cause great problems, but the new state demanded an outlet to the sea and already printed banknotes with the White Tower of Thessalonica. These territorial claims were not appreciated in Greece, and a major diplomatic crisis started, in which the Greeks claimed that Macedonia had been Greek for the past 3,000 years. At the moment, the crisis has cooled down.

Summing up: there are nationalists in the former Yugoslavian republic who claim that their ancient ancestors spoke some sort of Slavonic, and conclude that therefore, modern Macedonia can lay territorial claims to all parts of ancient Macedonia; and there are Greeks who say that the ancient Macedonians spoke Greek. Greece has not made territorial claims.

The point is that both the Slavonic Macedonians and the Greeks claim too much. There is no evidence that the ancient Macedonians spoke a language related to Slavonic Macedonian, and there is no evidence that the Macedonians were regarded as Greeks. The truth may be somewhat like this: the Macedonians, living north of ancient Greece, spoke a language that was related to Greek, were considered to be related to the Greeks, were increasingly hellenized after c.400 BCE and were ruled by a dynasty that was recognized as Greek. However, in spite of diminishing cultural differences, Greece and Macedonia remained separate political units (e.g., the Roman provinces Achaea and Macedonia).