Long read on the Macedonian name issue
Cvetin Chilimanov
URL:
https://medium.com/@Cvetin/long-read-on-the-macedonian-name-issue-4e5824917891
Everybody is so hung up over the Alexander the Great monument in downtown Skopje, but in my opinion two other monuments at the same square explain the argument of the Macedonian name better. Visitors there can see two similar, marble throned statues of Byzantine Emperor Iustinian and King Samuil. Justinian, the law giver and partial restorer of the Roman Empire, is honored in Macedonia given that he was born in the ancient city of Taurisium (now a hamlet called Taor in a gorge on the Vardar river just south of Skopje). Samuil, (who is also claimed by Bulgaria, but I won’t be going into that this time, or ever) was a warrior king who ruled a medieval kingdom from the Macedonian lakeside city of Ohrid at the turn of the first and second millenium and is best known for his bloody wars with Byzantium, including the battle on Mt. Belasica (1014). After the battle, the victorius Byzantine emperor Basil II perpetrated an act of such cruelty that he shocked even the medieval world, when he blinded the 15.000 captured Macedonian soldiers, leaving only one of a hundred with one eye, so he could lead the rest of the soldiers home.
So, clearly Macedonians and Byzantines were not friends. Samuil ruled a Slavic speaking kingdom built on the ruins of Byzantium. Why then are Samuil and Justinian honored in similar style in the capital of modern day Macedonia?
The answer is that (warning to Greek visitors — if you read further I will not be held liable for your aneurism) modern day Macedonians are not exclusively Slavic, or exclusively descendent from the ancient Macedonian stock, but are a mix of the two (and of a bunch of other, possibly lesser elements).
The essence of the name issue on the Greek side is that, because the Macedonians clearly speak a Slavic language, and the Slavs are believed to have moved in the Balkans in the 5th, 6th century AD (practically yesterday in Balkan terms!) then they have no connection to the glorious Classical period. No such stark divide exists on this side of the border. Yes, we speak a Slavic language. And roughly a third of our names are Slavic, a third are Biblical, but a solid third are from the Classical period. We wouldn’t think twice about naming a child Dimitar or Sofia or Katerina, just as we would name it a Slavic Goran or Vladimir or a Biblical Ana or Petar. Actually, I would venture that the concentration of Alexanders (and especially Philips) is much higher in the Republic of Macedonia than in Greece, where the two warrior kings ostensibly belong). If you observe the broader culture, the similarities between Macedonians and Greeks are startling. Chain smoking men who get homicidal behind the wheel, fast talking women who will give you a piece of their minds (and then some), Macedonian and Greek weddings, wedding dances and drinks are copy/pasted affairs, our approach to love, life, politics, economics, corruption and penchant for conspiracy theories clearly show that we belong to a same culture, despite the different languages.
The same, I would say, applies to the Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Albanians — if anything, the hatreds between our peoples are not based on some major differences such as existed between the whites and blacks in the American South, but on the narcissism of small differences.
Nikola Mladenov, a late, great conservative Macedonian journalist, used to explain the story of the Slavic conquest thusly (I quote from memory)
“Ok, let’s say that the Slavs came in the 6th century AD and killed all the real Macedonian men. Surely, I mean SURELY they didn’t kill all the women! *wink wink*”. Of course that when the Slavs came they didn’t possess the technology necessary for mass extermination of the conquered peoples — they had no gas chambers or machine guns. They could expel some, they could kill, rape, enslave others, but the carricatural portrayal that exists in the Greek consciousness, that the Byzantine lands that were taken by Slavic tribes went through a clean sweep and an entirely new civilization was built from scratch is hogwash. Slavs settled in towns and villages, farmed the land, lived among remaining citizens from the Byzantine Empire, adopted their religion, gave them their language, learnt from them how to build churches and waterworks, taught them how to free their slaves and advance from slavery to feudalism…. As the shrines of Zeus were turned into shrines of St. Elijah, so the Pagan Slavic Gods and Godesses were transformed into Christian saints and the old customs were given a new, monotheical robe.
In a word, we are an omelette which was scrambled and rescrambled many times through the millenia, with the Persian, Celtic, Roman, Hun invasions, the Gothic, Kuman, Avar inroads, the Turkish occupation, the advance of Christianity, the attempts to reform it, then shield it from the Muslim overlords, and yet, the name of the country remained — Macedonia. The omelette can’t be unscrabled now in a purely Slavic yolk and a purely ancient Macedonian egg white. This is not an uncommon situation. A friend of mine from the States, who originated from the deepest, darkest Peru (h/t Paddington bear) spoke Spanish at home, with his family, but one look at his facial features would tell you that he is not a descendent from Spanish colonists, but originates from the Incan Empire.
Macedonians, Greeks, Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians.. do not have the distinct facial features or color of skin that would help us differentiate one from the other, but as the example of the remnants of the Spanish Empire shows us, it is possible for the conquered native people to fully adopt the language of numerically quite inferior invaders. If you visit Rome, you will see men dressed as gladiators or legionaries in front of the Coloseum, but they will not speak Latin. They will speak a Romanized version of the language of the Germanic invaders who overran Rome. Does it mean that the people living in Rome today have no right to the heritage of the Classical Rome, or that the Arabic speaking camel renters in Cairo do not have the right to show you the ruins of Ozymandias? If we extend the Greek logic in the Macedonian name issue, that we mere Slavic speakers have no right to show off the rich artifacts that we unearth almost daily, it is precisely what it means.
Observe, for a moment, the Greek position in the name issue.
If I understand it correctly, uniquely in all of history, modern Greeks are the unspoilt, unmixed descendents of the ingenious race of Pericles and Achilles. The centuries of Roman or Turkish occupation just deflected off them, with no in-breeding. Sure, they threw away their old Gods for Christianity, and can barely recognize the ancient Greek language, but they are pure-blooded members of the Greek nation which recognizes no ethnic or religious minorities (an unsustainable proposition given their deathbed demographics and open borders policy toward the Middle East). In reality, in Classical times the Greek nation did not exist — it was a patchwork of warring city states, whose conflicts, including with the Kingdom of Macedon, helped write some of the glorious pages of peoplekinds (thanks Justin) literature. They had a common culture, and Macedon clearly belonged to it then, just as today, as I see it, Macedonia, Greece and the rest of the Balkans also share a common culture. Normal people would be glad to share a common culture with a linguistically different nation. In fact, Greece itself, or rather Byzantium, had a pro-active approach when it helped prepare the mission of St. Cyril and Methodius, to translate the Bible into the Church Slavonic and to eventually bring Christianity all the way to Vladivostok. That is how a mature and culturally confident country behaves — it sees the neighboring nations as an opportunity, as people you can turn into your own corner.
Modern Greece hysterically insists at NATO and EU summits that tiny and pooir Macedonia has designs on Greek territory!? It’s pityful and pathetic, a miserable excuse for a regional power.
And, seriously, if the Greeks are the pure-blooded descendents of Achilles, where are their equivalent accomplishments today? Where are the genius Greek writers and musicians? Where are their thousand ship fleets being launched to subdue a rebellious city somewhere? Where is their economic empire? The only thing that makes the Greeks notable today is that their welfare state collapsed before the other similar European welfare states and they compete with outrank Japan in their debt to GDP ratio. Otherwise, it’s a small to mid sized chronically corrupt and disfunctional Mediterranean state, which managed to win a European football cup once.
VUKOJEBINA NATION STATES
The modern national identity of the Greeks, Macedonians, Serbians, Bulgarians.. is not derived from the Classical period.
.
.
.
