The argument regarding the name ""Macedonians-Macedonia"".

We have seen that the name Macedonia was assigned to Southern Serbia, hose inhabitants had hitherto been called Bulgari by the Bulgarians and Bugari by the Serbs. This name was arbitrarily applied by Panslav propaganda with the devilish purpose of using it as an argument in support of the annexation of Greek Macedonia by the FYROM.

But that the Slavs should Give themselves the name ""Macedonians"", that they should call their newly founded state ""Macedonia"" is no less inappropriate and historically unacceptable, than if the Turks who now inhabit the lands of anvient Ionia and Aeolia, decided to call themselves Ionians and Aeolians respectively and on the strength of those names endeavoured to establish a claim on anygeorgraphical extension of the ancient Ionians and Aeolians into Greek territory.

And yet it is on the basis of this argument that the FYROMacedonians claim as their national heritage the entire geographical region of Macedonia, the so-called ""Aegean Macedonia"", which has been peopled since remotest antiquity, through the middle Ages to this very day by an uninterrupted succession of Greek generations.

The Slavs choose to ignore the fact that in those remote times when the genuine Greek names «Macedonian, Macedonia, Aegean Sea», what they now so fondly call «Egejska Makedonija», came into use, their own ancestors lived in some unknown Russian steppe.

This habit to appropriate foreign names for political purposes, is by no means new. In an attempt to unite the Yugoslavs, from 1830 to 1850, the Croats assumed the name «Jllyrian» and fought for political and national ends under this foreign, pre-slavic appellation. FYROMacedonians to-day are doing exactly the same with the pre-slavic name «Macedonian».

If the historical and national rights of peoples are decided in this fashion, then who could deny the Greeks the right to reverse the argument of the Slays and to argue with equal logic, that since the Greeks have saved the southern part of Macedonia from Slavisation and kept it ethnologically and inguistically Greek, indeed a trustee of Greek civilization, just as the ancient Macedonians were trustees, members and promoters of Greek civilisation the world over, and since furthermore the inhabitants of Greek Macedonia are historically and ethnologically the heirs and successors of ancient Macedonians, it is to this Greek Macedonia that its northern, Yugoslav, extension should be annexed whether or not it is inhabited to day by many Greeks; and it is in fact inhabited by approximately two millions of pure and nationally conscious Greeks.
The Greeks nevertheless have accepted the present ethnological reality in the Balkan peninsula and respect the new rights which history has created de facto in this part of the world. They make no claims on the northern, Slavophone parts of Macedonia, and recognise as an accomplished fact the situation which history has created to their disadvantage.
They ask no more than that their northern neighbours should themselves realise that the extent of provocation for which they have been responsible has reached the limit. «There are limits which ought to be respected "" or else who could ever put an end to this vicious circle of mutual malice?

The Greeks and all sensible and objective people, whatever their nationality, regard the fate of Macedonia as decided once and for all.

Macedonia has been divided by the sword of history ethnologically, linguistically and politically into two zones:
A) the Slavic zone which to-day is contained in the State of Skopje and the Pirin region in the south-western part of Bulgaria and
B) the Greek zone which forms part of the Hellenic State. The latter is inhabited solely by Greeks. It has resisted Slavic penetration. The former can no longer claim a substantial Greek population. It is inhabited chiefly by Slavs whose right it is to attribute any name they like to themselves, if only a greater respect for their racial origins taught them to refrain from using a name so doubtlessly Greek and so closely bound up with the glorious past of Greece, as is the name of Macedonia.

The Macedonians, as is well known, spoke Greek at least from the 5th century B.C. onwards even if we accept for a moment that their language was not, originally, some older Hellenic dialect as indeed we now know for sure that it was. The Macedonians clung to Hellenic culture and according to Polybius (9,35), the ancient historian, «they never ceased fighting in defense of the security of the Greeks». Their names are well-known to us, they are all pure Greek and none is Thracio-Illyrian or Slavic. How, then, could the people who from the time they first set foot on Greek lands and throughout the Middle Ages and the period of Turkish rule were linguistically, culturally and politically Slavs, who ignored completely the geographical name Macedonia, who before the Balkan wars sent Bulgarian representatives to the Turkish Parliament, how could these people become Macedonians overnight?

How can they reconcile their new Greek name with either their Slavic language or their fanatical hatred of everything Greek?

But this is not all; the western region of the FYROM is inhabited by 600.000 Albanians who consider themselves both linguistically and in every other respect part of the Albanian nation.

Are these Macedonians too?
If so why not call by the same name the 200.000 Turcophones, the Gypsies and the Armenians?

Why not attribute this national name to the Vlachs?
But then we should first have to fashion a new definition of historical and ethnological concepts.

Source :
Giannis Babiniotis,The language of the Macedonia,Olkos, 1992, page 235-237(article from N.P.Adriotis)

ps
I have change the given figures regarding the FYROM population