The Macedonian Question

The name dispute between Athens and Skopje.

Western Archives

9:55 PM by under

The mainstream established viewpoint about Macedonia is given below. You can easily verify that by looking at the collection of links (the majority of which are at the bottom of this post) from mainstream sources like e.g. Time Magazine, New York Times, etc.

Ancient Macedonia or Macedon for short was a Greek kingdom around Pella in modern day Greece’s territory. Macedon was much smaller than today's geographical area of Macedonia. Their military success against the Persian Empire marked the beginning of the Hellenistic era in antiquity, during which the Hellenic civilization and language spread to the whole of the then known world.

Since the end of the Roman times, and for well over 2,000 years, Macedonia was never identified with specific and constant adminstrative or geographical borders. It was only late in the 19th century that the name “Macedonia” was used conventionally to denote the region of three Ottoman vilayets (provinces) namely of Thessaloniki, Monastir (present Bitola) and Uskub (present Skopje). By that time the region had become the bone of contention among various Balkan nationalities. By the dawn of the 20th century, the name “Macedonia” was widely accepted as the geographical denomination for the region which more or less included the above three Ottoman provinces; not the region of the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia. It is worth remembering that at that time the name “Macedonia” had a geographical—not an ethnic nor administrative—connotation.

As a result of the Balkan wars of 1912-13, the region was liberated from Ottoman rule. The initial three allies—Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia—who had fought together to overthrow the Ottomans from their European possessions, shared parts of the region. In the end, Greece acquired the southern part, which included the entire Aegean littoral region, which approximately amounted to 51% of “geographical Macedonia”, and close to 90% of the ancient kingdom. About 38% reverted to Serbia (later Yugoslavia), while Bulgaria was limited to only 9%. A small strip of land west of the Prespa lake was later joined to the Albanian state.

Of the three parts of “geographical Macedonia”, only the Greek part was given, after its liberation, the administrative name of Macedonia, namely “Geniki Dioikisi Macedonias" (General Administration of Macedonia).

Now let's come to the hot issue of ethnicities. The modern-day geographical Macedonian ethnicities include Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians, a Slavic population identifying themselves as Makedonci and some smaller fractions of Serbs, Turks, Vlachs etc.

The Slav Makedonci are ethnically, or at least linguistically, very close to Bulgarians. For example, all mainstream sources state that the language of the Slav Makedonci, the so-called Makedonski, are mutually intelligible with standard Bulgarian.

Here is a New York Times article on the ethnicities of Macedonians ca 1900.

It is worth mentioning that the above account of Macedonian ethnicities does not mention anything for an 'ethnic Macedonian' group.

One only needs to examine the following mainstream articles below to find out that the part of Macedonia that today constitutes Greek Macedonia has been inhabited by ethnic Greeks in the beginning of the 20th century. That's why the Greeks fought a prolonged, hard, bloody and for many years undercover war to liberate Macedonia from both the Turkish and Bulgarian rule:

New York Times article: Published APRIL 17, 1897
Titled: FIGHTING IN MACEDONIA

New York Times article: Published October 2, 1902
Titled: NO TITLE
*Please note that the article mentions Monastir which is in present day FYRoM. There were a large presence of Greeks in Southern FYRoM.

New York Times article: Published December 27, 1902
Titled: MAY ALTER BALKAN SITUATION

New York Times article: Published September 12, 1903
Titled: AID FOR MACEDONIAN GREEKS (mid-section of the article)

New York Times article: Published September 16, 1903
Titled: TURKS STILL MURDERING

New York Times article: Published November 22, 1912
Titled: CUT OFF TURKS' REAR GUARD

It is worth mentioning AGAIN that the above accounts of Macedonian ethnicities does not mention anything for an 'ethnic Macedonian' group. Let us now take a look at the Yugoslav "artificial Macedonian nation-building":

Macedonians Stressing the Arts To Build Slavic Cohesiveness
By DAVID BINDER Special to The New York Times
February 16, 1965, Tuesday
Page 6, 637 words
SKOPLJE, Yugoslavia -- What began 20 years ago as a highly self-conscious and rather artificial Macedonian nation-building campaign has now developed into a calm evolution. Involved are about one million people whose sense of identity and cohesiveness grows with every passing year.
Perhaps the most important single act in the campaign was the codifying of a written Macedonian language, a once obscure tongue of Slavic origin, in the spring of 1945.
The purifying of the tongue has been going on since then with periodic purges of “un-Macedonian” borrowings from the Bulgarian, Turkish, Serbian and Greek; the incorporation of hitherto obscure words from Macedonian dialects and the creation of new words.
According to Prof. Blaze Koneski, who teaches linguistics at Skoplje University, the language is expanding rapidly. The fist dictionary published a few years ago had about 30,000 words. The second, now under preparation, will have more than 70,000 words.
Two journals, Makedonski Jazik and Literaturen Zbor, keep watch over the language. The leading newspaper, Nova Makedonija, employs a reader to keep its columns clear of alien usages.

(To read the rest of this article, you must purchase the full issue.)

The most important act of this artificial campaign was the "creation" of a written language.
Let us now take a look at articles from Time Magazine and where we see Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito's aggressive intentions against Greece:

Time Magazine: Published July 23, 1945
Titled: Toward Warm Water?

Time Magazine: Published March 15, 1948
Titled: As the Twig Is Bent

Time Magazine: Published January 09, 1950
Titled: Innocents' Day



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