In news from Skopje, Macedonia’s left-wing government renames Alexander the Great Airport to Skopje International in order to quell tensions with Greece. Also, the main highway will now bear the name “Prijatelstvo,” which means friendship, as a gesture of peace toward the country’s southern neighbor.
Macedonia and Greece have been at odds for more than 25 years over the name Macedonia, which was traditionally a region of Greece. Macedonia is vying for inclusion in the EU and NATO, and progress toward those goals cannot be accomplished as long as their is friction over the naming issue. Historically Macedonia, the ancient birthplace of Phillip The Great and his son Alexander, is a Greek province which borders the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). The country is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991.
Meanwhile, Greece reportedly welcomes the initiative by the former Yugoslavian state. This story at The Guardian tell of the Balkan state considering alternative names such as Upper Macedonia or New Macedonia. Over the weekend hundreds of thousands of Greeks took to the streets in protest of austerity and this naming fiasco. The initiative by Skopje is the first time since 1993, that Macedonia has made such concessions. Both nations’ leaders are under intense pressure to resolve the Balkan nation’s being held up from joining Nato and the EU.
Macedonia joined the United Nations in 1993 with the provisional name “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” because its neighbor Greece objected to the one-word name saying it implied a territorial claim to a Greek province of the same name.
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It all started with the uneducated goat herder writing poetry about his village. Georgi Pulevski claimed that he was a direct decendent of Alexander the Great. I tend to think he was a decendent of Alexander the Goat. Like Ljubčo Georgievski he had an about face and claimed to be Bulgarian. In fact he stated he regretted not being able to execute the unification of Bulgaria and Ottoman Macedonia. Antiquization was replaced by a pan Slavic united Bulgaria. Georgi Pulevski went from being a goat herder to a stonemason to a founder of Macedonism to a Bulgaphile upon his death. Goergievski and Pulevski are similar in this regard. They both renounced their new found religion and came to their senses. With the death of the uneducated stonemason the Bulgarians of Vardar Macedonia were cured until the unimaginable happened – TITO. A half caste Croat/Slovene redefines the Bulgarians of Vardar Banovina as Macedonians. The Diaspora left their little villages with a suitcase and a story. Tito’s story. Just when it couldn’t get any worse Todov and his deluded intellectuals addicted to Pulevski poetry brainwash their population. FYROM is born. Gruevski is the second coming of Pulevski.
The ethnic Bulgarian will always be the ethnic Bulgarian. The ethnic Greek will always be an ethnic Greek. Language defines both of us. The Antiquization story is flawed. This why FYROM today has failed. Let’s not nation build on an uneducated stonemason. Read his work as a literary piece rather than a historical piece. Be proud of your Bulgarian ethnicity and don’t allow historical distortions. You are what you speak and the FYROMIAN Slavs speak Bulgarian.