Tymphaios

In 1948, Cominform, the first official forum of the international communist movement since the dissolution of the Comintern, put into action a plan to take hostage to communist countries children from Greece during the Greek civil war. The aim was to re-educate the children as well as blackmail the populace and the Greek government towards reaching a settlement leading to a partition of Greece and the subsequent creation of an internationalist "Macedonian" Republic. This move has favoured by the Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito and had been a Comitern policy aimed at destroying the national states of the Balkans through the creation of internationalist republics. Today several FYROM sources claim or at least believe the abducted children were FYROMacedonian. Indeed that they were not abducted, rather they were refugees fleeing the Greek army.

In a recent visit to Australia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) prime minister Nikola Gruevski spoke to FYROM expatriates about the inability for them to live freely in their FYROMacedonian motherland in Greece and Bulgaria: "Macedonians (sic) in Australia are enjoying a unique opportunity to live together with their compatriots of Aegean and Pirin Macedonia, which does not happen in our motherland". At the same time extremists such as Risto Stefov are accusing Greece of a war atrocity: expelling up to 50,000 "Macedonians" from Greece during the Greek civil war in 1946-49. These are presumably the FYROMacedonians now living in Australia free, while it is not possible to do so in the FYROMacedonian motherland - in Greece and Bulgaria.

Alexander the Great continues to be relevant today, more than two thousand years after his death. That his origin is presently so hotly contested is testament to his legacy. Alexander´s campaign changed the culture of Asia. Alexander also became a model for Roman rulers and ultimately had an impact on European ideals. On the 3rd of October the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim opened an exhibition under the title "Alexander the Great and the opening of the world" subtitled: Asia´s cultures in transition. Already by the end of the first week the exhibition had attracted three thousand visitors.

In 1945, a committee set up by Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito invented for the first time an alphabet for the new "Macedonian" language. The official documents introducing the new alphabet and language were written in Bulgarian.

Should the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) remain a UN member? By the signing of the New York Agreement in 1995, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) agreed to become a member of the United Nations in exchange of adopting an official name that would not be "Republic of Macedonia" or "Macedonia". Until then it should be referred to in the United Nations as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).

According to Makfax and other sources, FYROMacedonian journalist Branko Gerovski has received death threats directed at his children.

Since the United Nations Security Council Resolutions of 1993 and the New York Interim Accord of 1995 in relation to the name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, FYROM has not made a single proposal for a name that would be mutually acceptable or any real progress in relation to the United Nations Resolutions and Agreements. Its foot-dragging and insistence on the name "Macedonia" in bilateral agreements rather displays an indifference for the United Nations resolutions.

The FYROMacedonian civil rights activist Vasko Gligorijevic (or Vasco, previously known by his Bulgarian name Vasil Gligorov), a strong criticiser of FYROMacedonian president Nikola Gruevski, disappeared on the 4th of July. Before his disappearance he had sent an email to a trusted individual saying: "I may be arrested again. I know that from my sources. Please check me on this email in the next 12 hours. Do not alert nobody for now, please, it is not certain. But do check me every 12 hours for few days. If repeatedly do not answer in next hours or days, I´m dead, I´m gone."

Ethnic Macedonians are by definition the most indigenous Macedonians to the area of Macedonia. Three hundred and forty scholars have recently rebutted the current propaganda emanating from Skopje that the ancient Macedonians were Slavs. This has obviously ruffled a few feathers and have caused a spur of activity in certain segments of the Former Ethnic Macedonians are by definition the most indigenous Macedonians to the area of Macedonia. Three hundred and forty scholars have recently rebutted the current propaganda emanating from Skopje that the ancient Macedonians were Slavs. This has ruffled a few feathers and has caused a spur of activity in certain segments of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Coincidentally 'The History of the Macedonian People' was published by the Institute of National History in FYROM and is available in FYROMacedonian and English, apparently with the aim to be distributed to foreign organizations worldwide. The book has erased the words Hellenic and Hellenism from historic discourse. These terms have been replaced with the appropriate (sic) Macedonianism and Aleksandarism.

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 within FYROM, the other side often being labeled as "ethnic 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).

The map of a Greater FYROM consisting of three main parts, the part of proper FYROM or Povardarje or Vardarska, the Bulgarian part and a Greek so-called "Aegean" part, is a permanent feature of propagandistic material in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Even school books show such a multipartite country with unredeemed territories and claim that such a country has existed from prehistoric times to our own times with its borders apparently unaltered.

Schoolbooks in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia consistently represent Macedonia as encompassing a region that consists of FYROM, the Greek administrative district of Macedonia and parts of other countries. An astonishing fabrication of history teaches schoolchildren that these borders of "Macedonia" existed from antiquity and that their country was "dismembered" and Macedonians underwent a genocide by the Greeks.

Bulgarian and more recently Yugoslav policies under Tito, dictated by Stalin, have attempted to present a picture of a Macedonian ethnicity as distinct or even opposed to Greek. The true character of Macedonia (in Greece) is clear not only from the historical and archaeological record but also from the cultural heritage of Macedonia, Greek from ancient times without interruption, that remains alive among Greeks in Macedonia.

Left with a big void between themselves and the Macedonians who lived 2500 years ago, the FYROMacedonian campaigners, rather than reform their extreme viewpoint, have decided to disprove that Greece has existed. There was a request recently that the Greeks show evidence of Greece in older European maps. A collection of such maps is presented here.

Macedonism is a word used to refer to the doctrine of the Macedonian origin currently popular among many vocal political campaigners from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Several arguments are presented to support this idea. Among the pseudo-scientific ones is the claim that the modern inhabitants of FYROM have inherited the genes of the Macedonians. Studies of human genes and their distributions is a somewhat controversial area of genetic research, too often used by race supremacists to back up their racist beliefs.

Historical falsification is the practice of fabricating original evidence to further one's goals. In a recent post, Risto Stefov reinvents the leaders of the Greek Revolution for Independence in Macedonia in 1821 and presents them as FYROM-Macedonian heroes apparently fighting for the freedom of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).

On the 25th of March 1821, the day of the Anunciation, Greeks declared independence from Ottoman rule. The declaration was proclaimed throughout Greece from Crete to Macedonia.

A cult of identification of the modern inhabitants of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) has grown since 1992, with the aim of portraying FYROM as an inheritor and indeed the single inheritor of all things Macedonian. This culture, aided by laws that forbid scientific research in FYROM on the origins of its inhabitants, strives to take away from Greece and especially from the Greek administrative district of Macedonia almost anything that forms part of its Macedonian heritage.

The nationalistic principles of the nineteenth century, in which an ethnicity was genetically unchangeable through time, is a fossil of pre-scientific thinking. For Risto Stefov, his ethnic creationism is an old myth he needs to resuscitate to save in his mind the macedonist ideology in FYROM: if no Greeks exist, then Macedonia is up for the taking.

Human endurance marks humanity as much as intelligence. It is as much responsible for the emergence of humans as our cognitive skills. In the history of evolution, vertebrates developed the ability to store memories in their brains. Our ancestors in Africa for the first time combined human endurance...

A civil rights activist has been arrested by the police and taken to a psychiatric clinic, stripping him completely of his civil rights in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). The activist's name is Vasko Gligorijevic. About a week after publishing an article criticizing the FYROMacedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and a FYROM law forbidding historical research on the identity of FYROMacedonians, Vasko Gligorijevic disappeared. On that day he left a message in an internet message board, saying that the police was searching his flat and he was placed under arrest.

In recent years, NGOs and politicians around the world, have formed concerned groups and attempted to enter into dialogue with the Indonesian government in support of freedom of expression in West Papua. Surprisingly, a West Papuan, Buchtar Tabuni, has now been taken to court on charges of subversion in what appears to be an Indonesian attempt to punish the international community for its support of Papuan human and civil rights campaigners.