Ethnic Macedonians
Tymphaios
July 08, 2009
Outside Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), ethnic Macedonians is a term sometimes used by neutral sources to define the two sides in the 2001 conflict between ethnic Albanians and the other side in FYROM, the other side often being labeled as "ethnic Macedonians". The other side includes a reputed 44,000 with Bulgarian passports, and a number of Vlachs, ethnic Serbs and Roma gypsies and a few other ethnicities, including Greeks, of unknown numbers. But for simplicity at the time, in the context of the 2001 ethnic conflict, they were being lumped together by some writers as "ethnic Macedonians". All other sources about "ethnic Macedonians" emanate from FYROM, their spokepersons abroad and the pro-FYROM Vinozito party in Greece. The FYROM side of course and the Vinozito party in Greece, want to refer to the Slavophone Greeks and/or Macedonian Slavs of Greece as "ethnic Macedonians". That their view gained only about 1600 votes in Macedonia itself in the June 2009 EU Parliamentary elections, speaks volumes about how seriously this view is being held among the Macedonians of Greece. Considering that all mainstream Greek parties are supporting the Macedonian Prime-Minister of Greece Costas Karamanlis on the "name issue", the electoral experiment of Vinozito has proven a true test of allegiances of Greece´s Macedonians.
The Slavs of Greece have been referred to as Bulgarian or Bulgarising Slavs in all international treaties at the time of the Balkan Wars and First World War, as well as in documents of the League of Nations and the United Nations referring to the period. Especially for the inhabitants of Macedonia in Greece, to not be considered a Macedonian is an affront. In 1992 there were protests in Thessaloniki where about one million Macedonians demonstrated their Greek identity and protested the usurpation of their name and heritage by the inhabitants of the newly proclaimed "Republic of Macedonia" (FYROM).
Let us have a look at what evidence FYROM has in calling the Slavic population of Greece "ethnic Macedonians", that is in Greek terms non-ethnic Macedonians. Let us have a look at the ethnic Macedonians in a FYROM schoolbook:
The Greek painting "O Ai Laos" (O Agios Laos) is used as proof of "ethnic Macedonians" (FYROMacedonians) in a FYROM schoolbook. The painting clearly depicts the Macedonians as characteristic Greek figures: There are two Greek armatoloi in the center, front row, a man holding a bouzouki on the left, a Greek philosopher on the right, one Makedonomachos, a Greek soldier. Above them the Greek words: Ai Laos (in Greek: "Saint People"). Below them a poem in Greek. A Graecian urn, an Ionic pillar capital, a Greek icon of Panagia and, to the left, Karagiozis. Is he the FYROMian ethnic Macedonian? Above among the angels, two angels are dressed as armatoloi and hold Greek flags. Why are the angels above the ethnic Macedonians holding Greek flags? Are the ethnic Macedonians Greek after all rather than Yugoslavs? Do school children in FYROM ask this sort of question?
When did the first ethnic Macedonians appear in Greece? Were Alexander´s army of Macedonians not ethnic Macedonians? Herodotus considered the Doric races of the Peloponnese to be of the Doric and Macedonian ethnos (he wrote literally ETHNOS nothing less). Not ETHNE but ETHNOS in the singular, a single ethnos, the Doric-and-Macedonian ethnos.
"From the Peloponnese sailed the Lacedemonians with sixteen ships, the Corinthians with the same number as at Artemision, the Sikyonians with fifteen ships, the Epidaurians ten, the Troezenians five, the men of Hermion three, these all, except the Hermionians, being of the Doric and Macedonian ethnos."
Herodotus Histories Book 8, paragraph 43 (5th C BC)
So the Spartans, the Corinthians and many of the other Peloponnesians, just like the Macedonians themselves, belonged according to Herodotus to the Doric and Macedonian ethnic group. Herodotus lived a long time before the present conflict and was not a Macedonian himself, so his account can be considered neutral. Alexander´s Macedonians spread a Greek language and culture to the rest of the world. The persistence of the FYROM side with revising history has forced 340 academicians, scholars of the Graeco-Roman civilization, to send a letter to US President Barack Obama strongly stressing this point.
http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html
The letter reads:
"Dear President Obama,
We, the undersigned scholars of Graeco-Roman antiquity, respectfully request that you intervene to clean up some of the historical debris left in southeast Europe by the previous U.S. administration.
On November 4, 2004, two days after the re-election of President George W. Bush, his administration unilaterally recognized the "Republic of Macedonia." This action not only abrogated geographic and historic fact, but it also has unleashed a dangerous epidemic of historical revisionism, of which the most obvious symptom is the misappropriation by the government in Skopje of the most famous of Macedonians, Alexander the Great.
We believe that this silliness has gone too far, and that the U.S.A. has no business in supporting the subversion of history. Let us review facts. (The documentation for these facts [here in boldface] can be found attached and at: http://macedonia-evidence.org/documentation.html)"
After mentioning that Aristotle himself was a Macedonian among other facts, the authors conclude:
"The questions follow: Why was Greek the lingua franca all over Alexander´s empire if he was a "Macedonian"? Why was the New Testament, for example, written in Greek?
The answers are clear: Alexander the Great was Greek, not Slavic, and Slavs and their language were nowhere near Alexander or his homeland until 1000 years later. This brings us back to the geographic area known in antiquity as Paionia. Why would the people who live there now call themselves Macedonians and their land Macedonia? Why would they abduct a completely Greek figure and make him their national hero?
The ancient Paionians may or may not have been Greek, but they certainly became Greekish, and they were never Slavs. They were also not Macedonians. Ancient Paionia was a part of the Macedonian Empire. So were Ionia and Syria and Palestine and Egypt and Mesopotamia and Babylonia and Bactria and many more. They may thus have become "Macedonian" temporarily, but none was ever "Macedonia". The theft of Philip and Alexander by a land that was never Macedonia cannot be justified.
The traditions of ancient Paionia could be adopted by the current residents of that geographical area with considerable justification. But the extension of the geographic term "Macedonia" to cover southern Yugoslavia cannot. Even in the late 19th century, this misuse implied unhealthy territorial aspirations.
The same motivation is to be seen in school maps that show the pseudo-greater Macedonia, stretching from Skopje to Mt. Olympus and labeled in Slavic. The same map and its claims are in calendars, bumper stickers, bank notes, etc., that have been circulating in the new state ever since it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Why would a poor land-locked new state attempt such historical nonsense? Why would it brazenly mock and provoke its neighbor?
However one might like to characterize such behavior, it is clearly not a force for historical accuracy, nor for stability in the Balkans. It is sad that the United States of America has abetted and encouraged such behavior."
Internet warriors from FYROM have claimed that once the word "Macedonia" is approved for FYROM, the recognition that the ancient Macedonians were FYROMacedonians will inevitably follow. This is the level of thinking of a people who received a written language from a dictator of a different ethnicity to theirs - and that only in 1945 as a pretext for the annexation of Hellenic Macedonia to Yugoslavia.
What happened to the Greeks of Hellenistic times, did they vanish? Some FYROM propagandists, such as the self-taught unhistorian Risto Stefov, claim the Greeks just vanished with the rest of the Hellenistic world. It does not quite explain how the language survived. Indeed it survived while maintaining the historic pronunciation of the Greek of late antiquity, until today. It does not explain the vast corpus of Greek literature (including the New Testament), history and some science and the writings of the church fathers in Greek, that are the subject of study of librarians, museums and university departments. The Greeks of Alexander´s time did not disappear nor did the Greeks of Macedonia disappear, as in all periods we find the Greek language attested in Macedonia. The Greeks are the ethnic Macedonians and indeed they are the ethnic Macedonians in Macedonia. Three hundred and forty scholars must have some degree of truth on their side when they consider the modern so called "Macedonian" ethnicity a product of cold war politics.
Let me add that to the Greeks from the time of Isocrates onwards, in order for one to be a Greek it did not require a genetic test or proof of identity. The use of the Greek language and Greek education was sufficient qualification. The Greeks of Byzantium were no different in their perception to the Greeks of the Hellenistic period or the Greeks of today. The third National Assembly in Troezen adopted in 1827 the third Hellenic Political Constitution, by which every person who was a Christian residing in Greece and those who came to Greece to fight for its cause and all those who are foreigners but wish to fight for the Greek idea are Greek citizens. Whereas some nations have defined their identity in narrow nationalistic terms or even in eugenic terms, as is being attempted today in FYROM in complete absence of knowledge about the genes of the ancient Macedonians, Greeks have defined themselves as before in terms of language and culture. The Greeks of today are Greeks in being the carriers of that tradition.
But let us turn again to the narrow minded definition of an ethnicity that has nothing whatsoever to do with language or attested history but at least something to do with the fabrication of both. According to some FYROM propaganda sources, there are 2,500,000 ethnic Macedonians in Greece! FYROM Kanal5 considers all two and a half million Greek Macedonians as ethnic Macedonians. With that the issue is settled. Of course all the inhabitants of Hellenic Macedonia are ethnic Macedonians as they are Greeks, speaking Greek, the language of the ancient Macedonians, and living in the historic region of Macedonia in Greece. Both sides finally agree.
http://vardaraxios.wordpress.com/2009/03/
In 1993 when the President of Bulgaria Mr Zelev was on a formal visit to Sweden and was asked by a journalist of the Swedish newspaper "Svenska Dugbladed" about the so called "Macedonian nation", he replied: "The Macedonian nation that was fabricated by the Commitern after the war was a Crime committed by Titoism and Stalinism".
Before we forget the Macedonian Slavs of Hellenic Macedonia completely, it appears there had been an attempt in the early 1900s to attest their language. A Lexicon had appeared in 1907 of the language of the Macedonian Slavs inhabiting the region of Hellenic Macedonia. The Slavic words were written in Greek letters and usefully so, as in many cases the words were similar or nearly identical to the Greek words. The Macedonian Slavic was compared also with the Tsakonian dialect (a modern idiom of Doric Greek) to demonstrate that the deviation from standard Greek was comparable to the deviation of Tsakonic from standard Greek.
A few pages from that Lexicon can be seen here:
http://makedonika.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/the-book-that-should-not-exist-macedonian-greek-lexicon-from-1907-continued/
The Macedonian Slavic spoken in Hellenic Macedonia at the turn of the 20th century was clearly filled with Greek words and it is no wonder that the Slavophones around the Kastoria, Serres, Kilkis and Yannitsa regions fought for the freedom of Macedonia against the Bulgarian kommitadjis (in actual fact past inhabitants of today´s FYROM). That the Bulgarians were considered Bulgarians and not Macedonians is attested from the name the Macedonians of Hellenic Macedonia used for themselves: the Macedonomachoi, the fighters for Macedonia. They are honoured everywhere in Macedonia with monuments for defending the hellenicity of Macedonia in that difficult period. They are the descendants of the same ethnic Macedonians of the past, and the ancestors of the ethnic Macedonians of our time, the Greeks of Hellenic Macedonia. If it was not for the resistance of the Macedonomachoi, Hellenic Macedonia might have been today a part of Bulgaria or of FYROM. Were these ethnic Macedonians defending Macedonia from themselves? Where is the logic in the FYROMacedonian argument?
An ethnic Greek is an ethnic Macedonian and if one lives in Macedonia, he is a geographic Macedonian as well as an ethnic one. FYROM needs to think of a name in its own language to define its own people. A Greek name is not sufficient. Ethnicity cannot be transferred from one ethnic group to another ethnic group for diplomatic or political (essentially imperialistic) reasons. What else can be transferred like that? History? Identity? Heritage? Land? Shall we close the universities, as history can apparently be invented in Skopje, and concern ourselves with inventing facts, redrawing new maps and coloring geographical books in any arbitrary way we fancy? Or should we perhaps take education a little bit more seriously? Ethnic identity cannot be exchanged, it is not a commodity. Ethnic identity cannot be re-arranged. If a new identity is needed, it needs to be new.
The Slavs of Greece have been referred to as Bulgarian or Bulgarising Slavs in all international treaties at the time of the Balkan Wars and First World War, as well as in documents of the League of Nations and the United Nations referring to the period. Especially for the inhabitants of Macedonia in Greece, to not be considered a Macedonian is an affront. In 1992 there were protests in Thessaloniki where about one million Macedonians demonstrated their Greek identity and protested the usurpation of their name and heritage by the inhabitants of the newly proclaimed "Republic of Macedonia" (FYROM).
Let us have a look at what evidence FYROM has in calling the Slavic population of Greece "ethnic Macedonians", that is in Greek terms non-ethnic Macedonians. Let us have a look at the ethnic Macedonians in a FYROM schoolbook:
The Greek painting "O Ai Laos" (O Agios Laos) is used as proof of "ethnic Macedonians" (FYROMacedonians) in a FYROM schoolbook. The painting clearly depicts the Macedonians as characteristic Greek figures: There are two Greek armatoloi in the center, front row, a man holding a bouzouki on the left, a Greek philosopher on the right, one Makedonomachos, a Greek soldier. Above them the Greek words: Ai Laos (in Greek: "Saint People"). Below them a poem in Greek. A Graecian urn, an Ionic pillar capital, a Greek icon of Panagia and, to the left, Karagiozis. Is he the FYROMian ethnic Macedonian? Above among the angels, two angels are dressed as armatoloi and hold Greek flags. Why are the angels above the ethnic Macedonians holding Greek flags? Are the ethnic Macedonians Greek after all rather than Yugoslavs? Do school children in FYROM ask this sort of question?
When did the first ethnic Macedonians appear in Greece? Were Alexander´s army of Macedonians not ethnic Macedonians? Herodotus considered the Doric races of the Peloponnese to be of the Doric and Macedonian ethnos (he wrote literally ETHNOS nothing less). Not ETHNE but ETHNOS in the singular, a single ethnos, the Doric-and-Macedonian ethnos.
"From the Peloponnese sailed the Lacedemonians with sixteen ships, the Corinthians with the same number as at Artemision, the Sikyonians with fifteen ships, the Epidaurians ten, the Troezenians five, the men of Hermion three, these all, except the Hermionians, being of the Doric and Macedonian ethnos."
Herodotus Histories Book 8, paragraph 43 (5th C BC)
So the Spartans, the Corinthians and many of the other Peloponnesians, just like the Macedonians themselves, belonged according to Herodotus to the Doric and Macedonian ethnic group. Herodotus lived a long time before the present conflict and was not a Macedonian himself, so his account can be considered neutral. Alexander´s Macedonians spread a Greek language and culture to the rest of the world. The persistence of the FYROM side with revising history has forced 340 academicians, scholars of the Graeco-Roman civilization, to send a letter to US President Barack Obama strongly stressing this point.
http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html
The letter reads:
"Dear President Obama,
We, the undersigned scholars of Graeco-Roman antiquity, respectfully request that you intervene to clean up some of the historical debris left in southeast Europe by the previous U.S. administration.
On November 4, 2004, two days after the re-election of President George W. Bush, his administration unilaterally recognized the "Republic of Macedonia." This action not only abrogated geographic and historic fact, but it also has unleashed a dangerous epidemic of historical revisionism, of which the most obvious symptom is the misappropriation by the government in Skopje of the most famous of Macedonians, Alexander the Great.
We believe that this silliness has gone too far, and that the U.S.A. has no business in supporting the subversion of history. Let us review facts. (The documentation for these facts [here in boldface] can be found attached and at: http://macedonia-evidence.org/documentation.html)"
After mentioning that Aristotle himself was a Macedonian among other facts, the authors conclude:
"The questions follow: Why was Greek the lingua franca all over Alexander´s empire if he was a "Macedonian"? Why was the New Testament, for example, written in Greek?
The answers are clear: Alexander the Great was Greek, not Slavic, and Slavs and their language were nowhere near Alexander or his homeland until 1000 years later. This brings us back to the geographic area known in antiquity as Paionia. Why would the people who live there now call themselves Macedonians and their land Macedonia? Why would they abduct a completely Greek figure and make him their national hero?
The ancient Paionians may or may not have been Greek, but they certainly became Greekish, and they were never Slavs. They were also not Macedonians. Ancient Paionia was a part of the Macedonian Empire. So were Ionia and Syria and Palestine and Egypt and Mesopotamia and Babylonia and Bactria and many more. They may thus have become "Macedonian" temporarily, but none was ever "Macedonia". The theft of Philip and Alexander by a land that was never Macedonia cannot be justified.
The traditions of ancient Paionia could be adopted by the current residents of that geographical area with considerable justification. But the extension of the geographic term "Macedonia" to cover southern Yugoslavia cannot. Even in the late 19th century, this misuse implied unhealthy territorial aspirations.
The same motivation is to be seen in school maps that show the pseudo-greater Macedonia, stretching from Skopje to Mt. Olympus and labeled in Slavic. The same map and its claims are in calendars, bumper stickers, bank notes, etc., that have been circulating in the new state ever since it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Why would a poor land-locked new state attempt such historical nonsense? Why would it brazenly mock and provoke its neighbor?
However one might like to characterize such behavior, it is clearly not a force for historical accuracy, nor for stability in the Balkans. It is sad that the United States of America has abetted and encouraged such behavior."
Internet warriors from FYROM have claimed that once the word "Macedonia" is approved for FYROM, the recognition that the ancient Macedonians were FYROMacedonians will inevitably follow. This is the level of thinking of a people who received a written language from a dictator of a different ethnicity to theirs - and that only in 1945 as a pretext for the annexation of Hellenic Macedonia to Yugoslavia.
What happened to the Greeks of Hellenistic times, did they vanish? Some FYROM propagandists, such as the self-taught unhistorian Risto Stefov, claim the Greeks just vanished with the rest of the Hellenistic world. It does not quite explain how the language survived. Indeed it survived while maintaining the historic pronunciation of the Greek of late antiquity, until today. It does not explain the vast corpus of Greek literature (including the New Testament), history and some science and the writings of the church fathers in Greek, that are the subject of study of librarians, museums and university departments. The Greeks of Alexander´s time did not disappear nor did the Greeks of Macedonia disappear, as in all periods we find the Greek language attested in Macedonia. The Greeks are the ethnic Macedonians and indeed they are the ethnic Macedonians in Macedonia. Three hundred and forty scholars must have some degree of truth on their side when they consider the modern so called "Macedonian" ethnicity a product of cold war politics.
Let me add that to the Greeks from the time of Isocrates onwards, in order for one to be a Greek it did not require a genetic test or proof of identity. The use of the Greek language and Greek education was sufficient qualification. The Greeks of Byzantium were no different in their perception to the Greeks of the Hellenistic period or the Greeks of today. The third National Assembly in Troezen adopted in 1827 the third Hellenic Political Constitution, by which every person who was a Christian residing in Greece and those who came to Greece to fight for its cause and all those who are foreigners but wish to fight for the Greek idea are Greek citizens. Whereas some nations have defined their identity in narrow nationalistic terms or even in eugenic terms, as is being attempted today in FYROM in complete absence of knowledge about the genes of the ancient Macedonians, Greeks have defined themselves as before in terms of language and culture. The Greeks of today are Greeks in being the carriers of that tradition.
But let us turn again to the narrow minded definition of an ethnicity that has nothing whatsoever to do with language or attested history but at least something to do with the fabrication of both. According to some FYROM propaganda sources, there are 2,500,000 ethnic Macedonians in Greece! FYROM Kanal5 considers all two and a half million Greek Macedonians as ethnic Macedonians. With that the issue is settled. Of course all the inhabitants of Hellenic Macedonia are ethnic Macedonians as they are Greeks, speaking Greek, the language of the ancient Macedonians, and living in the historic region of Macedonia in Greece. Both sides finally agree.
http://vardaraxios.wordpress.com/2009/03/
In 1993 when the President of Bulgaria Mr Zelev was on a formal visit to Sweden and was asked by a journalist of the Swedish newspaper "Svenska Dugbladed" about the so called "Macedonian nation", he replied: "The Macedonian nation that was fabricated by the Commitern after the war was a Crime committed by Titoism and Stalinism".
Before we forget the Macedonian Slavs of Hellenic Macedonia completely, it appears there had been an attempt in the early 1900s to attest their language. A Lexicon had appeared in 1907 of the language of the Macedonian Slavs inhabiting the region of Hellenic Macedonia. The Slavic words were written in Greek letters and usefully so, as in many cases the words were similar or nearly identical to the Greek words. The Macedonian Slavic was compared also with the Tsakonian dialect (a modern idiom of Doric Greek) to demonstrate that the deviation from standard Greek was comparable to the deviation of Tsakonic from standard Greek.
A few pages from that Lexicon can be seen here:
http://makedonika.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/the-book-that-should-not-exist-macedonian-greek-lexicon-from-1907-continued/
The Macedonian Slavic spoken in Hellenic Macedonia at the turn of the 20th century was clearly filled with Greek words and it is no wonder that the Slavophones around the Kastoria, Serres, Kilkis and Yannitsa regions fought for the freedom of Macedonia against the Bulgarian kommitadjis (in actual fact past inhabitants of today´s FYROM). That the Bulgarians were considered Bulgarians and not Macedonians is attested from the name the Macedonians of Hellenic Macedonia used for themselves: the Macedonomachoi, the fighters for Macedonia. They are honoured everywhere in Macedonia with monuments for defending the hellenicity of Macedonia in that difficult period. They are the descendants of the same ethnic Macedonians of the past, and the ancestors of the ethnic Macedonians of our time, the Greeks of Hellenic Macedonia. If it was not for the resistance of the Macedonomachoi, Hellenic Macedonia might have been today a part of Bulgaria or of FYROM. Were these ethnic Macedonians defending Macedonia from themselves? Where is the logic in the FYROMacedonian argument?
An ethnic Greek is an ethnic Macedonian and if one lives in Macedonia, he is a geographic Macedonian as well as an ethnic one. FYROM needs to think of a name in its own language to define its own people. A Greek name is not sufficient. Ethnicity cannot be transferred from one ethnic group to another ethnic group for diplomatic or political (essentially imperialistic) reasons. What else can be transferred like that? History? Identity? Heritage? Land? Shall we close the universities, as history can apparently be invented in Skopje, and concern ourselves with inventing facts, redrawing new maps and coloring geographical books in any arbitrary way we fancy? Or should we perhaps take education a little bit more seriously? Ethnic identity cannot be exchanged, it is not a commodity. Ethnic identity cannot be re-arranged. If a new identity is needed, it needs to be new.
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