Hellenic Macedonia Since Liberation:General Observations and Principal Phases

The contemporary period of Macedonian history has already completed 98 years of Hellenic administration. Nonetheless, this important chapter in modem Greek history has not yet received the historiographical attention which it deserves.  To begin with, the bibliography is clearly and dishearteningly deficient in terms both of quantity and quality, and this is especially true of the literature referring solely to the more recent periods. As a result, the basic points of reference continue to be the special volumes devoted to Macedonia and published on the occasion of the various anniversaries of its liberation. However, these works inevitably suffer from the shortcomings of all circumstantial publications, and, furthermore, they focus their interest primarily on one of the most important (and easiest) of the thematic targets: the city of Thessaloniki.
It is indicative ofthe situation that contemporary Macedonia has only recently begun to appear on the agenda of specialist conferences,,and even then this has occurred in such a way as to ensure that the primacy ofthe ancient and, to a lesser extent, of the Byzantine period -goes unchallenged.
This historiographical narrowness of approach can be attributed to..

Is history of a people transferable?

There are people out there ,self-identified or self-ascribed as "Macedonians" who believe that the history of a people of a neighboring country can be shared with, taken away or transferred to themselves because their country cannot exist or function without a history and, therefore, since the South Slavonian Slavic people of that country don´t have one or think that whatever little history they have is not significant enough to feel proud and honored by it. Obviously, they feel justified to use, steal or expropriate the history of their southern neighbors, namely the Greeks and , in particular, the history of the Greek people of Macedonia because not only it makes it possible for them to acquire a foreign history for themselves but, at the same time, it allows them to indulge themselves in some sort of irredentist ambitions for foreign land speculation, namely the much coveted Macedonian Greek land.

We Greeks in general and especially the Macedonian Greek people are proud and honored to have so much history despite the fact that we are a small country. So, then, we will invest any amount of effort to defend our history against the South Slavonian Slavs who think that they...

Winemakers' suit over Macedonia PDO

 A local cooperative of winemakers in northern Greece on Wednesday announced that it will file a lawsuit in Germany against distributors and super market retailers offering wines from the neighbouring former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (fYRoM) under the indication "Macedonia".
The president of the Association of Winemakers & Viticulturalists of Northern Greece (ENOABE), Yiannis Voyiatzis, noted that several retailers in Germany have already complied with European law and removed the wines from their shelves.

The term "Macedonia" enjoys a European Union-mandated Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status for wines produced in the Greek province of Macedonia, which dominates northern Greece and is the land mass linked with historical and geographical Macedonia.


"This specific geographic designation is only allowed for wines emanating from the geographic province of Macedonia in Greece," Voyiatzis.

Along those lines, he noted that the...

AMAC Offended by Insulting and Racist Comments made by Dame Krcoski

December 05, 2010

In response to the article posted by the UMD (United Macedonian Diaspora) (http://umdiaspora.org/content/view/524/1) and written by a leading member of the UMD´s operations in Australia, Dame Krcoski:

The Australian Macedonian Advisory Council (AMAC) is disappointed, but not surprised at the attack on a Winthrop Professor from the Classics & Ancient History department (University of Western Australia), Professor Melville-Jones, for his honest address in our quarterly newsletter. The professor is 1 of 7 Australian classics academics to have signed the Macedonia Evidence Petition (see http://macedonia-evidence.org/). The Petition has now been signed by 367, mostly non-Greek, academics world-wide, in order to preserve and protect Macedonian history from FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia).

Dame Krcoski (from UMD Australia) states that....

PM Gruevski´s hardline policy leaves FYROM out of NATO summit yet again

Australian Macedonian Advisory Council
November 26, 2010

FYROM Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski´s hardline policy to his country´s naming dispute with Greece has once again caused FYROM to not be invited to take part in the latest NATO summit (where new members are then invited to join the Alliance) which took place on 20 November 2010 in Lisbon.

Immediately after the summit, instead of taking responsibility for his failure once again for FYROM to be invited to join the NATO alliance (after its failure to join NATO in 2008 and a stagnant EU candidature in 2010 (http://www.ana.gr/anaweb/user/showplain?maindoc=9321518&maindocimg=9318247&service=96&showLink=true), Gruevski stated that his country "had not joined NATO, because of ´interference´ from Greece, due the name issue".

Meanwhile, the citizens of the FYROM (of whom 35% are of Albanian origin) are becoming....

Letter to Kofos by World Pan-Macedonian Associations

A Critique of Consequence

Concerns over the feasibility of special advisor to ELIAMEP Dr. E. Kofos's suggestions for a solution to the Macedonian naming dispute between Athens and Skopje

November 2010

Dear Dr. Kofos,

In regards to the Rose-Routh seminar you gave in Skopje on October 20, 2010 at NATO's Parliamentary Assembly vis-à-vis the imbroglio Greece has with its northern neighbor, and in regards to recent news reports coming out of Skopje attributed to you, we the Worldwide Pan-Macedonian Associations would like to offer you our comments. We feel that the Pan-Macedonian Associations, as the bastions of Hellenism in Macedonia, should be an important voice and an inseparable figure in the academic, political, and historical discussions on the name issue with our neighbor. We are the representatives of millions of Macedonians in Greece and the Diaspora; we are diachronic, and independent of all political parties.

We respect your efforts over the last five decades in dealing with Skopje's Macedonism however we must strongly object to the ideas that you and your colleagues in ELIAMEP have promoted to the citizens in Greece and the Diaspora, to various foreign ministers of the Hellenic Republic, and most recently to politicians and journalists in Skopje.  

Throughout your thesis you un-necessarily refer to that state as.....

Understanding the Macedonian Name Dispute and its importance to the United States

by Ioannis Fidanakis
President of Pan Thracian Union of America “Orpheus”.

It’s been 19 years since a small former republic of Yugoslavia declared independence and attempted to hijack the history, identity and name of the ancient Greek Kingdom of Macedonia. Originally known as Vardar Banovina, the region was renamed by Josip Broz Tito in the aftermath of the Second World War. The name chosen by Tito was the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, an ideal chose as it allowed him to promote the concept of an oppressed ‘Macedonian ethnicity’, in which he could develop the idea of reunification of the greater geographic region in hopes of gaining access to the Aegean Sea, through the Greek port city of Thessaloniki. With the fall of the former Yugoslavia the republic was admitted into the United Nations under the provisional name, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Much has changed since this disagreement between Greece and FYROM began in 1991. The world is a much different place now, and despite a world economic crisis Athens and Skopje continue to fight over the word ‘Macedonia’.

Most Americans are ignorant of the name dispute and those that have some type of understanding find it ridiculous to fight over a name. Their inability to understand the Greek position is the failure of Greek America to properly explain their concerns to the average American. It is with this said, that a new campaign has been launched hoping to educate and bring attention to the Greek position concerning the name dispute. Focused on....

FYROM - A COUNTRY WITH A BORROWED IDENTITY

A dispute is going on between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) on the name "Macedonia," which FYROM is using since 1991 when it broke away from the crumbling state of Yugoslavia. The dispute goes deeper than the use of the name. It is an attempt by FYROM to discredit the ancient Macedonians’ ethnicity, break the connection between  present-day Greek Macedonians and the Macedonians of antiquity, and establish a connection between FYROM’s Slavs and Albanians with ancient Macedonia. The historically, linguistically and archaeologically incorrect challenge is that Macedonia was never part of Greece and the Macedonians were barbarians who spoke a language incomprehensible to the other Greeks.
It is true that ancient Macedonia was not....

Open publication - Free publishing - More macedonia

Prospects for resolving the name issue -- presentation by Dr. E. Kofos at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s Rose-Roth Seminar (Skopje 20.10.2010)

The organizers of the seminar have asked me to discuss the “Prospects for resolving the name issue”. For someone like me, a native of Macedonia, who, for half a century, has been studying the Macedonian question or being involved with contemporary Macedonian issues, it was not an easy task. For help, I turned to the Athenian philosopher Antisthenis, a contemporary and friend of Socrates: I found his advice, «αρχή σοφίας η των ονομάτων επίσκεψις», an appropriate way to approach our problem. In English, his dictum could be rendered as, “the foundation of wisdom, is the definition of the names”

The first mistake we, the contemporaries, have made in dealing with the “name issue” was to ignore his advice. And naturally we failed.

The traditional “Macedonian Question”-- traced from the last decades of the
19th century to the mid-20th century-- was a contest mainly over territories, and as such an issue of regional and international security. During the latter part of the 20th century, up to this day, it has evolved, mainly, as an issue of identities.

Claims over territories have been dealt by wars, uprisings, persistent insecurity. On the other hand, contested identities, are hard to decipher, particularly by outsiders, who tend to underestimate, or denigrate them as “incomprehensible” or “nuisances”. Thus, our failure to decipher the different identities, hidden behind identical names, was our second error.
So let us try, today, to define the various elements of the problem.

There are three groups of identities that require clear definition before proceeding to resolve the “name issue”: .....

Hilary Clinton Defends Greece on the FYROM Name Issue

The Obama administration in Washington D.C. is pushing the  Skopian  Republic to accept the predominant name for the country which is “Vardaska Makedonija”. However the United Nations official proposal of “Northern Makedonia” remains on the table. Secretary of Foreign Affairs Hilary Clinton was very clear about the intentions of the Obama government at a recent U.S. – E.E. meetingt . During the speech from the representative of Slovenia, she intervened and strongly stated that Greece should cease negotiations with the E.U. about FYROM, and the country’s accession into NATO. Her opinion on the matter was that Prime Minister George Papandreou had stated his position, therefore it was now FYROM’s turn to respond.
She indirectly sent another message to....

AMAC: Truth must prevail in Macedonian issue

11 Oct 2010
Laura Burgoine and Fotis Kapetopoulos
neoskosmos.com

The Australian Macedonian Advisory Committee's (AMAC) annual function, last Friday, was attended by three generations of Greek Australians. Chairman Con Kouremenos welcomed guests while emphasising the changes in AMAC.

"One third of AMAC's membership comprises of third generation Greek Australians," he said.

He said AMAC is an advisory body which assists in the preservation of the truth in the face of the "falsification of history in the area of Macedonian identity".

Professor John Melville-Jones from the University of Western Australia spoke about the "importance of preserving historical truth in light of attempts to distort Macedonian history."

He relayed how he....

CSIS Recommendations as regards FYROM name issue.

The key challenge for the ROM/FYROM is to resolve its name dispute with Athens, which would help unblock the country’s path toward NATO and European Union accession. Basically, there are three stark choices: indefinite stalemate and no solution, which could destabilize the ROM/FYROM; pressing Greece to accept the current constitutional name and potentially undermine the Greek government at a time of economic and social convulsion; or convincing the authorities in Skopje to qualify the country’s name. Of the three, the name qualifier is likely to be the least destabilizing both for the ROM/FYROM and for Greece, as well as the broader region. On the basis of this premise, the United States would need to pursue the following approach:

New Macedonian books available now on-line.

The Foundation for the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle and the  www.macedonian-heritage.gr/ are  pleased to make available on line two works:

the entire two volumes of the important work "Modern and Contemporay Macedonia" edited by Ioannis Koliopoulos and Ioannis Hassiotis and published in print form by Papazisis Publishers and Paratiritis Publishing House.

The volumes consist of 32 articles written by expert scholars and provide a detailed presentation of the history, economy, society and culture of Macedonia from the Turkish occupation to the present time. The work extends to more than 1000 pages and includes more than 1000 photographs.

The link is...http://www.macedonian-heritage.gr/ContemporaryMacedonia/index.html


and

the one volume “The History of Macedonia” edited by I. Koliopoulos, which consists of 19 academic articles in pdf format written by professinal historians presenting the history of Macedonia from prehistoric times to the present.

The link is...http://www.macedonian-heritage.gr/HistoryOfMacedonia/index.html

FYROM's Foreign Policy Objectives and the Name issue.

The FYROM name issue is not simply a dispute over historical facts and symbols. It is a problem with regional and international dimensions, given that FYROM is exercising a policy of irredentism and territorial claims fuelled by the falsification of history and the usurpation of Greeces historical and national heritage. It is also a problem   of a «cultural genocide».

The first steps of the former Yugoslav "Socialist Republic of Macedonia" towards independent statehood bear the marks of nationalistic visions mixed with territorial expansionism.

It is not a coincidence that, as a result of the first democratic elections (December 1990), the party which won first place in popular votes and parliamentary seats was the "Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation" (VMRO). Its platform declared specifically its intention to work for the unification of all the Macedonian lands in one state: the "Republic of Macedonia".

Similarly, VMRO's electoral poster depicted a map of a united Macedonia which included the whole of Greek Macedonia, as well as the Pirin district in Bulgaria.

In November 1993, under the influence of nationalists, the Gligorov government prepared and passed through Parliament the Constitution of the "Republic of Macedonia". In its preamble, the Constution stated that the new republic rests upon "the statehood–legal traditions" of the "Republic of Krushevo" (1903) and of ASNOM (1944). Both events are considered in Stopje as the first steps toward the establishment of an independent and united Macedonian state. It is worth quoting certain paragraphs from the ASNOM documents of August 21, 1944:

Pr. Dennis P. Hupchick as regards the Slavmacedonian nationality and language*

An interesting historical argument arose in support of an independent (Slav) Macedonian nationality that ultimately reached its maturity only after World War II and Tito's construction of a federated Communist Yugoslavia composed of six independent "historic" republics, of which one was Macedonia. The (Slav) Macedonian nationalists quite simply stole all of the Bulgarian historical argument concerning Macedonia, substituting "Macedonian" for "Bulgarian" ethnic tags in the story. Thus Kuber formed a "Macedonian" tribal alliance in the late seventh century; Kliment and Naum were "Macedonians" and not "Bulgarians"; the medieval archbishopric-patriarchate of Ohrid, which Kliment led, was a "Macedonian," not a "Bulgarian" independent church, as shown by the persistence of Glagolitic letters in the region in the face of the Cyrillic that were spawned in Bulgaria; and the renowned Samuil led a great "Macedonian," rather than a "western Bulgarian," state against Byzantium (giving Slav Macedonia its apex in the historical sun). Under control of the revived Bulgarian state, and later under the Serb Dusan, the (Slav)Macedonians had maintained their ethnic differences from their "foreign" masters, as demonstrated by their "king" VukaSin, who had died attempting to keep an independent Macedonia free from the Ottoman Turks. When ethnic-national consciousness reawakened among the Macedonian Slavs in the nineteenth century, the cultural revivalists, such as the Miladinov brothers, were consciously "Macedonian" and not "Bulgarian," in their efforts.

The obviously plagiarized historical argument of the (Slav)Macedonian nationalists for a separate (Slav)Macedonian ethnicity could be supported only by linguistic reality, and that worked against them until the 1940s. Until a modern (Slav)Macedonian literary language was mandated by the socialist-led partisan movement from Macedonia in 1944, most outside observers and linguists agreed with the Bulgarians in considering the vernacular spoken by the Macedonian Slavs as a western dialect of Bulgarian. In the interwar period (1918-39) the official language of... 

Letter from Pan Macedonian Association USA to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding US Ambassador Reeker's comments

Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton
September 9, 2010
State Department United States of America

Dear Madame Secretary,

We, the representatives of the Pan Macedonian Association USA, one of the largest Greek-American organizations are writing this letter to you because we, along with the rest of the Greek community in the United States, are extremely appalled by recent comments made by US Ambassador to Skopje Mr. Reeker in an interview regarding the position of the United States on the name issue of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (the FYROM). In a TV interview (Alpha TV Skopje) the Ambassador stated that the USA government does not provide change of the constitutional name, essentially supporting a double name solution.

According to the official US website of the US Embassy in Skopje which has posted extracts from the interview promoting it as the “US position” Mr. Reeker stated "We do not believe that the solution must involve the change of the constitutional name or the Macedonian Constitution. This is your Constitution. This is your holy text. What is needed is that both sides, Greece and Macedonia, agree to an international reference that will be used in place of FYROM".

Furthermore, Ambassador Reeker calls on the public of Skopje to embrace the US position:

Victoria University conducts offensive survey ‘in partnership’ with nationalist lobby group, the ‘United Macedonian Diaspora’

PRESS RELEASE
8 September 2010

AMAC was disappointed to discover the content of a survey conducted by the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, a research centre of Victoria University, for people of Slav-Macedonian background: http://www.cfses.com/survey-macedonia-2010.htm. According to this link, the survey was conducted “in partnership with the Macedonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Macedonian Diaspora”.

The UMD is a nationalist, US-based lobby group with its head office in Washington DC. The UMD is well-known for their supporting territorial claims by the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia against Greece and Bulgaria.

Question 1 asks for the respondent’s country of birth and gives the option “Aegean Macedonia (in Greece)”. This sort of terminology is highly inappropriate. The term “Aegean Macedonia” is a term coined by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in order to legitimise its claims on the Greek province of Macedonia and, in particular, the port of Thessaloniki.

Question 15 then asks.....

AMAC Launches Lecture Program 2010

PRESS RELEASE 7 September, 2010

Australian Macedonian Advisory Council (AMAC) Launches Lecture Program

AMAC Organises a Series of Lectures Australia-wide for West Australian classicist professor and Chicago-based expert in Macedonian studies.

The Australian Macedonian Advisory Council (AMAC) is pleased to announce it has arranged for a series of lectures concerning Macedonian history to be given across Australia by two highly esteemed scholars.

The first of those scholars is Professor John Melville-Jones of the University of Western Australia. The professor is 1 of 7 Australian academics to have signed the Macedonia Evidence Petition (see http://macedonia-evidence.org/). The Petition has now been signed by 332 mostly non-Greek academics world-wide and was sent to President Obama, it urges the President to reverse the US’ recognition of the FYROM as the ‘Republic of Macedonia’ and to ‘help the government to Skopje to realise it cannot build a national identity at the expense of historical truth’.

Professor Melville-Jones’ lecture itinerary is as follows:

THE MASSACRE AT KRUSHEVO - The Sydney Morning Herald, Tuesday 25 August 1903

Slav-Macedonian Australian newspaper prints falsifications

The perennially racist and deceptive newspaper, the ´Australian Macedonian Weekly´, has again been caught printing fabrications.

An article in the July 20 edition of the AMW, on page 35, stated that "The Australian Greens are the only political party in Australia that openly supports Macedonia's right to self-identification under its constitutional name."

The Australian Macedonian Advisory Council (AMAC) contacted the Greens´ leadership to clarify whether it had such a policy. A letter from Brett Constable, National Manager of the Australian Greens Party, read as follows: "Thank you for your letter of 30 July referring to the Greens policy on the identification of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The Greens do not have a policy on this issue."

This letter establishes that, contrary to...