The Macedonian Controversy
Macedonia has been the subject of much controversy since the early 1990s and, although the brouhaha has dropped from the fever pitch that it reached back then, the Macedonian question remains the subject of fiery arguments in Greece. Although inter-ethnic strife is nothing new in the Balkans, what sets this specific disagreement apart is the ancient historical dimension , exploited by modern states in their quest for a communal identity. The name Macedonia is a geographical term of long standing, applied to an area that has always been populated by a variety of races and cultures. It is today divided unequally between Greece (the lion's share), Bulgaria and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) with a tiny fraction in Albania. The original Kingdom of Macedonia, which gained pre-eminence under Philip II and his son Alexander the Great , was part of the Greek cosmos; Aristotle , born at Stageira, Halkidhiki, tutored Alexander. It is thought that the Macedons may have originally migrated from central Europe. Almost nothing is known of their "native" tongue, but Greek was used as the lingua franca, especially for cultural activities. The capital, first established at Veryina , was transferred around 400 BC to Pella , which shortly afterwards became the capital of Greece. The empire lasted for little more than two centuries, exhausted by its galloping expansion: under Alexander's dynamic and despotic leadership Macedonia spread as far as Egypt and India. The lands were then controlled successively by the Romans, Saracens and Bulgars, while pockets were settled by Albanians and Serbs; it was part of the cosmopolitan Byzantine empire before eventual subjugation under Ottoman Turkish rule. In the late nineteenth century, when the disintegration of the Ottoman empire began to raise the issue of future national territories, the name Macedonia denoted simply the geographical region. Its highly heterogeneous population included Greeks, Jews, Vlachs, Albanians and Turks and various Slavs. While no one ethnic group predominated overall (the Greek Orthodox community was in a minority), the Greek language remained the lingua franca. The first nationalist struggles for the territory began in the 1890s, when small armies of Greek andartes , Serbian chetniks and Bulgarian comitadjis took root in the mountains, battling each other ferociously before uniting briefly against the Ottomans in the first Balkan War (1912). Following Turkish defeat, the Bulgarians , traditionally Greece's second foe, laid sole claim to Macedonia in the second Balkan War (1912-13), but were defeated by a Greco-Serb alliance; a 1913 agreement between the victors divided much of Macedonian territory between them, roughly along linguistic/ethnic lines. The Greek government was even prepared to let Bulgaria have most of Macedonia, as "recovering" the Asia Minor coast had become a nobler goal; at all events, during World War I the Bulgarians occupied much of Greek Macedonia, before capitulating in 1917. After Versailles, a small part of Slav-speaking Macedonia remained in Bulgaria, and Greek-speakers living in Bulgaria were "exchanged" for Bulgarian-speakers in Greece, under the 1919 Treaty of Neuilly. Then, under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greek refugees from Asia Minor were settled throughout Greece (what would now be called ethnic cleansing). In the north they swamped the remaining Slavophones. The position of Yugoslavia, however, under Tito, was more ambiguous. Yugoslavia had established the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in its share of the historical territory, and from time to time Belgrade issued thinly veiled irredentist threats. The Serb-dominated federation also "reinvented" the Macedonian language in an attempt to bring it closer to Serbo-Croat than Bulgarian; the republic, a neglected backwater, was encouraged to have a separate but pro-Serb identity. When the Yugoslav federation fell apart chaotically and violently in mid-1991, and the population of Yugoslav Macedonia voted overwhelmingly for an independent state, many Greeks predicted that the tiny resourceless country would not survive, especially given its "ethnic heterogeneity". But under wily autocrat President Gligorov the population rallied together. Both officially and at grassroots level, Greek reaction was vitriolic, especially when the fledgling nation provocatively adopted the sixteen-pointed star of Veryina (the symbol of the ancient Macedonian dynasty) on its flag and coinage (later abandoned). Foreign ministers did the rounds of EU capitals, imploring their allies not to recognize the new state; increasingly rebuffed by the international community, the PASOK government instigated a unilateral economic boycott of the new republic, eventually lifted. After negotiations, the country was recognized by the international community (officially) as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia ( FYROM ). Greeks grudgingly accepted this fait accompli , but virtually all still refuse to use the name. The media refer to it as Ta Skopia and its people as Skopiani ; Greek tabloids tend to use the phrase "pseudo-statelet of Skopje" and the press is not allowed to refer in print to Yugoslav "Macedonia" - the Greek rendition of the official acronym is "pYDM" (proin Yougoslaviki Dhimokratia tis Makedhonias). Icons of ancient Macedonian culture, such as the sixteen-pointed star of Veryina (albeit sometimes missing four rays) and images of the heroic figure of Alexander the Great, are ubiquitous in northern Greece. At the height of the crisis, official posters and stickers throughout Greece proclaimed that Macedonia had always been part of Greece, for "three thousand years" no less, and further exhorted visitors to "read history". All this has been bad news for the estimated 40,000 Slav-speakers , most of them elderly, living in Greek Macedonia (and Thrace). Nation states have often maltreated linguistic minorities and Greece seems to be no exception; activists leafleting for recognition of the Slav-speaking minority in the 1990s were arrested, and in 1994, a respected Greek professor working in the US, Anastasia Karakasidou, received death threats in her native city of Thessaloniki after presenting highly publicized research establishing that the region had only become "Greek" politically and ethnically since the early twentieth century, by means of a deliberate process of Hellenization. Her manuscript, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood , was declined for publication by Cambridge University Press, despite a ringing endorsement from its editorial review board, for fears about the safety of CUP personnel in Greece and of endangering CUP's lucrative sale of TEFL materials in Greece. Karakasidou, who teaches at SUNY Stony Brook, had her work published by the University of Chicago, but the episode highlights the sensitivity of this issue in Greece.
questionella says "wich time is train between thessaloniki and xanthi? "
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