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When Oliver Stone's Alexander came out, there were endless arguments about Alexander's nationality and Macedonian heritage on the Internet Movie Database disussion boards. These arguments in turn degenerated into online fistfights between Greek and FYROM nationalists -- a Greek would post an inpenetrably dense chunk from a 'historical' essay lifted from a propaganda website (with a name like macedoniafacts.com or macedoniatruth.org), followed by an FYR-Macedonian doing likewise (also from websites with names like macedoniafacts.com or macedoniatruth.org), repeated ad nauseum.

The people posting these screeds actually thought that they could change peoples' opinions this way, when for outsiders it was a perfect hall of mirrors of fanatical nationalism and mythologised history, each side asserting that their people had lived in Macedonia in unbroken historical continuity for thousands of years while the other lot were recent interlopers, with everything the same on both sides except for the names...

by Gag Halfrunt on Mon Feb 18th, 2008 at 08:48:58 AM EST
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Believe it or not, it gets much worse than mythologized history. So much of the problem is recent.

You have Greeks in the Macedonia region who are themselves refugees from either the Ottoman Empire or the Soviet Union. They moved en masse to the region while at the same time Pomaks and Bulgars and Slav speaking Greeks were moved out (for many reasons, losses from Balkan Wars, siding with the Nazis, or also aiding the Communists for the Greek civil war). Karaskidou's book Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood does a pretty good job of showing the ethnic mix over the last century in this area. Outside of Greece, Albanians and Macedonians are aggrieved for land losses. Meanwhile, inside of Greece, you have Greeks aggrieved for their own land losses elsewhere. Plus, ww2 and the civil war were not only "cause" for expulsion of other ethnic groups, but a good number of Greeks as well (such as my uncle, a 12 year old drafted into the ranks of the guerillas, he lived in the Eastern Bloc up until the early 1990s). This is why Greek sentiment is so adamant about the Greek part of Macedonia. It's a rather recent addition to Greece, and it was gained through much bloodshed in Balkan Wars, WW2 (against Germany, Bulgaria, Albania, Italy, 1 million Greeks died), and the Civil War.

In Macedonia, meanwhile, you have a national crisis right now because former Macedonian Presidents have become Bulgarian citizens and moved to Bulgaria, as have a great many young people, which further fuels Bulgarian arguments that Macedonians are simply Bulgarians converted to a national mythology by Tito. Ultimately, I think all this mixing speaks to our tenuous identities and the bankruptcy of romantic nationalism. Let them call themselves whatever they wish, whoever they think they are, but maybe to avoid future bloodshed a distinction could be made between Greek Macedonia and whatever. New Macedonia as the US recently proposed?

by Upstate NY on Mon Feb 18th, 2008 at 09:49:46 AM EST
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