Text File

From: sachz@montebello.ecom.unimelb.EDU.AU (SAS) Subject: Macedonian World Congress Message-ID: <9235315.29848@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> Organization: Dept. Engineering Computer Resources, Melbourne Uni. Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 04:23:58 GMT Lines: 409

M A C E D O N I A N W O R L D C O N G R E S S

Organizational Members Located Throughout the World

Macedonia, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, England, Belgium, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Norway, Brazil, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Turkey, Austria and South Africa.

PHONE/FAX 904-676-2466 P.O. BOX 2826, ORMOND BEACH, FLORIDA, U.S.A 32175

Therefore:

The Claims put forward by Greece that the ancient Macedonians were Greeks, that their native language was Greek, and that Macedonia was a region of Greece are all false. The historical truth is that Greece was inhabited by Greeks, Macedonia by Macedonians. The presence of Greek settlements along the coast of Macedonia which Philip II destroyed anyway did not change Macedonia's ethnic character. Likewise, a very much stronger and longer Greek presence in Egypt did not transform that African land into a region of Greece. The ancients knew where Greece ended and where Macedonia began. They believed that Mount Olympus was in Macedonia, Mount Parnassus in Greece. Thus the geographer Strabo calls Olympus "the highest mountain in Macedonia". It still is.

Author:

Jacques Bacid, Ph.D. Columbia University, 1983, has taught Slavic languages, Balkan, and East European history at the University of Oregon. He writes and lectures on these subjects. Jacques Bacid is a chairperson of the Illyrian Committee. He is an American Croatian.

For additional information, write to the following:

Illyrian Committee or Macedonian World Congress P.O. Box 1948 P.O. Box 2826 Cathedral Station Ormond Beach, FL New York, NY 10025 32175-2826 USA USA

The enclosed is not intended to defend the right of the Macedonian people to call themselves by this name; the civilized world has acknowledges this right. Highlighted here are some signposts from Macedonia's past and its relations with neighbouring Greece. This document is written in the form of a court-case presentation to allow readers to see clearly the absurdity of Greek allegations against the people of Macedonia.

THE CASE

Greece alleges that:

1) The Macedonians should not be recognized as Macedonians because the Macedonians have been of Greek nationality since 2000 B.C.

2) Those Macedonians whose language belongs to the Slavic family of languages, must not call themselves Macedonians because 4000 years ago the Macedonians spoke Greek and still speak nothing but Greek.

3) Macedonia has no right to call itself by this name because Macedonia has always been and is today a region of Greece.

The people of Macedonian affirm that:

1) The ancient Macedonians were a distinct European people, conscious and proud of their nationality, their customs, their language, and their name. The same applies to their descendants today.

2) The ancient Macedonians regarded the Greeks as neighbours not as kinsmen. The Greeks treated the Macedonians as foreigners ("barbarians") whose native language was Macedonian not Greek.

3) Macedonian was never a region of Greece. On the contrary, Greece was often subject to Macedonia. In 1913, Greece and her Balkan allies partitioned Macedonia, and if today a portion of Macedonian belongs to Greece, it is by virtue of an illegal partition of the whole and occupation of a part of Macedonia.

These assertions will be shown to be true in the eyes of history.

MACEDONIANS AND GREEKS THROUGH THE AGES

Throughout antiquity, the Chasia and Kamvounia mountains, Mount Olympus, and the vale of Tempe separated Macedonia from Greece. On the north, Macedonia extended as far as the Vardar watershed and along the Struma and Mesta valleys, past the city of Blagoevgrad to the sources of the Bistrica River in the Rila Mountain in today's Bulgaria. Macedonia covered a land area of c. 26,000 square miles.

In the course of the second pre-Christian millennium, the ancient Greeks descended in several migratory waves as goatherds and shepherds from the interior of the Balkans into Greece. Some passed through the Morava-Vardar Valley and across the plain of Thessaly on their way south, while others went south through Epirus. More recent scholars point to Asia minor as the original Greek homeland.

There is no evidence that prehistoric Macedonia was ever occupied by Greeks.

The Bronze Age Mycenaean Greek civilization, names so after the city of Mycenae on the Peloponnesus, thrived from c. 1400 to 1100 B.C. in mainly Greece and on the Aegean islands. Archaeological finds from Macedonia are meagre and sporadic; scholars believe that ancient Macedonia lay beyond the cultural and ethnic borders of Mycenaean Greece.

The ancient Macedonians claimed kinship with the Illyrians, Thracians, and the Phrygians, not with the Greeks. In fact, the Brygians of Macedonia were believed to be the European branch of the people who in Asia Minor were known as the Phrygians.

Ancient Macedonia was home to many tribes and nations. Homer did not know the Macedonians by this name. Of the many Macedonia peoples, Homer only mentions the Paeones who lives in the heart of Macedonia. In the Trojan War, the Paeones joined the besieged Trojans, an indication that they were not Greeks. Greek and other historians frequently mention the Brygians. Their name derives from the Macedonian word 'breg', "hill/mountain". The Brygians were the "hillsmen" of Macedonia. Another remarkable people were the Mygdones, who lived in Aegean Macedonia, in Asia Minor, and in Upper Mesopotamia.

Greek migrants came to Macedonia, Thrace, and Illyria after they had exhausted the possibilities of settlement in Asia Minor, Italy, France, Spain and Scythia, known today as Ukraine and Russia. Some famous ancient Greeks went to Macedonia and Thrace in search of livelihood or adventure. These included Pythagoras, Euripides, Herodotus, and Aristotle's ancestors. However, the Greeks did not consider Macedonia especially attractive for permanent settlement. Neither did the Macedonians welcome them as openheartedly as did the Italians and Scythians. Perhaps Aristotle who left Macedonia while still a young man would have never gone back had the Macedonia King Philip II (360-366 B.C.) not hired him to be his son's tutor. In any case, by the middle of the fourth pre-Christian century, Greek settlers were expelled from Macedonia, their cities, including Aristotle's native Stagira, razed to the ground by Philip, and Aristotle died in exile in Greece.

The ancient Macedonians regarded the Greeks as potentially dangerous neighbours, never as kinsmen. The Greeks unanimously stereotyped the Macedonians as "barbarians" and treated them in the same bigoted manner in which they treated all non-Greeks. Herodotus, the Father of History, relates how the Macedonian king Alexander I (498-454 B.C.), a Philhellene, that is, "a friend of the Greeks", and logically a non-Greek, wanted to take part in the Olympic games. The Greek athletes protested, saying they would not run with a barbarian. The historian Thucydides, himself half barbarian, considered the Macedonians as barbarians. Demosthenes, the great Athenians statesman and orator, spoke of the Macedonia king Philip II as:

"... not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honours, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave." [Third Phillipic, 31]

The Macedonian "barbarian" defeated Greece at the battle of Chaeronea in August 338 B.C. and appointed himself "Commander of the Greeks." The date is commonly takes as the end of Greek history and the beginning of the Macedonian era.

[Greece did not regain its independence until 1827 A.D.]

Greeks prospered under the Macedonians, but they prospered in Egypt and West Asia, not in Greece and not in Macedonia. Though the Macedonians expelled the Greeks from Macedonia and Thrace, they permitted them to settle throughout their vast empire in Asia and Africa. Antiochia and Alexandria, to name just the two most important cities established by Macedonians, grew into great cosmopolitan metropolises where Europeans, Africans, and Asians traded goods, ideas, and insults conversing mainly in Greek, the 'lingua franca' (common language) of the Macedonian empire.

Other significant historical signposts include:

* Greece was conquered by Macedonia at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C.

* Both Macedonia and Greece were annexed by the Romans to their empire after the battle of Pydna in 168 B.C.

* Under the Romans, the Greeks continued to prosper in the Levant, Asia Minor, and Egypt, less so in Greece and not at all in Macedonia. While the Romans did not establish any province by the name of Greece or Hellas, there were two Macedonia's in their Empire: 'Macedonia Prima', known today as the Aegean Macedonia, and 'Macedonia Salutaris', known today as the Vardar and Pirin Macedonias. The two Macedonian provinces formed the Diocese of Macedonia, to which the Romans attached all of modern Greece and Albania. Latin was the official language in Roman Macedonia, from 168 B.C. until the demise of Roman rule at the end of the sixth Christian century.

* After the establishment of Christianity, the Macedonians and Greeks shed their ethnicity in favour of the new identity as Christian and Roman citizens. Those who spoke Latin called themselves 'Romani'. Those who spoke Greek, whether they were Macedonians, Greeks, Armenians, or Arabs, referred to themselves as 'Rhomaioi', a Greek word for Romans. Those who used Slavic language were known as 'Slovene'.

* In the sixth century, the Paeones, now called Slavs, came back and captured all of Macedonia from the East Romans, with the exception of a few coastal cities. Macedonia maintained its independence and resisted attacks by the Armenian and Syrian dynasties who held power in New Rome (Byzantium) and by the shamanist and nomadic Bulgars who roamed the steppes of the Dobrudja with their herds. Since the sixth century, the native Macedonian language had been the dominant speech of the land. It was first systematized in the middle of the ninth Christian century by SS. Cyril and Methodius, the apostles of the Slavs who were born in Thessalonica, Solun. The Macedonian language has functioned as the principal literary, liturgical, and colloquial language of Macedonia ever since.

* In 867, the first European dynasty assumed power in medieval East Rome. The dynasty is called Macedonian because the parents of its founder, Basil I, originated from the Byzantine province of Macedonia. The Macedonian rulers in Byzantium spoke Macedonian and Greek and thought of themselves as Macedonians and Rhomaioi. In the tenth century, another dynasty came to power in Macedonia proper and reached its apogee under Tsar Samuilo at the turn of the millennium.

* In 1014, the Macedonian Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Basil II defeated Tsar Samuilo and soon annexed Macedonia to his East Roman state. Under the Macedonian rules and their successors in Byzantium, the Macedonians retained their language, customs, and their church organization.

* The East Roman Empire was destroyed by the Crusaders in 1204. During the next two and a half centuries, the Macedonians fought foreign invaders, adventurers, and bandits who tried to dominate their land. The Ottoman Turks established their rule in Macedonia in the fifteenth century. The Turks used the name 'Rumelia' for their possessions in the Balkan Peninsula in the belief that they had once belonged to the Roman (Byzantine) Empire.

* In 1827, the Christian European powers intervened on behalf of Greek rebels and forced the Turks to grant them independence. In 1832, the same powers established the first modern Greek state, chose Prince Otto of Bavaria to be "King of the Hellenes", and sent him to Athens.

* Macedonian entered this century as a province of the Ottoman Empire, divided among the Solun, Bitola, and Kosovo vilayets. The region was occupied primarily by Macedonians. The census in the three vilayets taken by the Ottoman state in 1905 found 3,181,690 inhabitants. Other than to Macedonians, this region was home to many Albanians, Turks, Romi, Vlachs, Jews, and Greeks.

* After the Ottoman state was weakened by internal troubles, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece attacked their former masters. In this war, called the First Balkan War, the Turks lost Macedonia. The victorious Balkan kingdoms convened in Bucharest in August 1913 to divide the spoils. By the Treaty of Bucharest, Macedonian was partitioned. Greece was awarded Aegean Macedonia and renamed it "Northern Greece"; Bulgaria annexed Pirin Macedonia and abolished the Macedonian name, and Serbia took Vardar Macedonia and renamed it "Southern Serbia."

* The Republic of Macedonia was created out of the ashes of the Second World War by Josip Broz Tito, the anti-fascist leader of Yugoslavia, who recognized the Macedonians as a distinct people with their own nationalist, language, and culture when he created modern Yugoslavia. Macedonia became a sovereign state by a popular referendum held in September 1991 when the majority of voters chose independence.

MACEDONIAN AND OTHER LANGUAGES

During the reign of Alexander the Great, the Macedonians spoke their own native language.

The question of the use of the Macedonian language was raised by Alexander himself during the trial of Philotas, one of his generals accused of treason. Alexander said to Philotas:

"The Macedonians are about to pass judgement upon you; I wish to know whether you their native tongue in addressing them." Thereupon Philotas replied: "Besides the Macedonians there are many present who, I think, will more easily understand what I shall say if I use the same language which you have employed, for no other reason, I suppose, than in order that you speech might be understood by the greater number." Then said the king: "Do you not see how Philotas loathes even the language of his fatherland? For he alone disdains to learn it. But let him by all means speak in whatever way he desires, provided that you remember he holds our customs in as much abhorrence as our language." [Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander the Great of Macedon, VI. ix. 34-36]

The trial of Philotas took place in Asia before a multi-ethnic public, which had accepted Greek as their common language. Alexander spoke Macedonian with his conationals, but used Greek in addressing West Asians.

Like Illyrian and Thracian, ancient Macedonian was not recorded in writing. However, on the basis of about a hundred glosses, Macedonian words noted and explained by Greek writers, some place-names from Macedonia, and a few names of individuals, most scholars believe that ancient Macedonian was a separate Indo-European language. Evidence from phonology indicates that the Macedonian language was distinct from Greek and closer to the Thracian and Illyrian languages.

Linguistic continuity between the ancient and modern Macedonians is shown by the survival of Philip's original native name. Philip was known abroad as 'Philippos'. The native Macedonian and Thracian form of his name was recorded in the name of the Thracian town which he has conquered and named 'Pulpudeva', "the city of Philip". In the language of its Slavic citizens it is known today as 'Plovdiv'. The cosmopolitan form of the city's name is 'Philipopolis', a learned rendering of the native name. Another example of this continuity involves the ancient capital of Macedonia, Edessa. The Macedonians knew this city as 'Voden' long before linguists discovered that the Slavic name was a translation of the original name and that both meant "watertown." The Greeks, on the other hand, unless they study linguistics, do not know the meaning of the name.

Since 1913, official Greece has been trying to banish native Macedonian names of villages, towns, cities, and rivers in Aegean Macedonia. For example, the Macedonians are being instructed to forget Voden and use the name Edessa and to drop the name Solun in favour of Thessaloniki. The people whose ancestors have over the millennia plowed the earth and grazed their sheep and goats in the Bistrica and Vardar valleys are forced to learn from dead writers a dead language the "proper" names for their rivers.

The little stream which issues from Mount Olympus and flows into the Aegean Sea by the town of Katerini is labelled 'Mavroneri', "black water", on maps made by Greek cartographers. However, the same river appears as "Crna Reka', a native Macedonian name meaning "black river" on maps made before 1913. Perhaps the village of Nezero on the southern slopes of Mount Olympus, has not yet been given a Greek name because it has escaped the attention of Greek linguist purists. The name in fact derives from the Slavic word for "lake". Of course, when Zeus and his divine company lived on Mount Olympus, the lake had another name. But, ever since mortal Macedonians have lived there, the lake has been called 'Ezero', meaning "lake".

SUMMARY

It is common knowledge that the northern boundary of ancient Greece ran from the modern city of Preveza (a Macedonian name, meaning "ferrytown") or from Korfu to the Vale of Tempe south of Mount Olympus. In antiquity, Macedonian was a northern neighbour of Greece, never a province of Greece.

Alexander spoke Macedonian and was proud of his ethnicity. However, the Macedonian language of his day was not used as a literary idiom. The first native written language of Macedonia is the idiom called Macedonian or Old Church Slavic.

Though Alexander spoke Greek, loved Homer, and respected his tutor Aristotle, there is much evidence that he hated and despised the Greeks of his day. He thoroughly destroyed Thebes. His Asian empire is correctly called Macedonian, not Greek, for he won it with an army of 35,000 Macedonians and only 7,600 Greeks. The Greeks distinguished themselves on the side of the Persians. For instance, at the battle of Issus, Alexander's European army was opposed by a large Asian host which included about 30,000 Greek mercenaries who fought for the Persians. During his campaign in Asia, Alexander dismissed the messenger who had brought him news of a war among the Greeks, saying: "Why should I trouble myself with battles of mice"?

Alexander could not think of himself as a Greek, for his mother was from Epirus, a land more Illyrian than Hellenic, and his earthly father was a Macedonian whom the Greeks of his day called "a barbarian". More importantly, Alexander told the Egyptians that his heavenly parent was their god Ammon. After he conquered Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Indus Valley, he believed he was a god commanding his Greek subjects to accept his divinity.

It is possible that the native Macedonian name "Mygdones" was the basis of the name "Makedones," which then became the collective name for all the different peoples of Macedonia. It is by the latter form that the various peoples of Macedonia became universally known. Even if the ancient Greeks did take part in the shaping and popularizing of this name, this does not give today's Greece the copyright to the name "Macedonia".

[end]