Ghost on the throne by James Romm

[momce]

Thats correct, and you cant connect to antiquity, these artificially constructed multi ethnic "baptised Greeks" simply based on a few words in their bastardised language they may share with the ancient Hellenes.

Well if Greece could teach the Turkish New arrivals and many Macedonians in the early to mid 90's to speak and think they are related to Pericles, Demostenisa or Socrates, then it would have been a piece of cake for the Germans and Brits to cajole the Albanian speakers shortly after the creation of Greece. Hey....if these western godfathers had told this multi ethnics they were sons of Superman, Batman and boy wander, you guys would be walking around in capes now thinking you are true super heroes and saying shit like "UP UP AND AWAY" and "HOLY FINANCIAL CRISIS" instead of "SKASE RE VLAKA"

Ease up there sunshine before you break in to the Greek national anthem and start saluting (or doing the Nazi salute)

Political climate has changed drastically (Though obviously by your show of pride, Greek mentality has remained) This Rock called "Greece", is no longer that important and critical since the iron curtain fell. No more fear of Communism spreading from Eastern Europe and swallowing Greece.

So true. Greece has lost its value to its creators. Thats why these people are so confused.

[momce]

@ Risto

I said "political reason." As I explained in my previous posts (if you don't read them carefully, I can well understand). Katharevousa was a concomitant attempt with other efforts to artificially connect the modern state directly with the ancient world avoiding over 3 thousand years of Greek-speaking history. All this was in effort to creating a founding national myth for the new nation.

Clearly, the addition of katharevousa forms and vocabulary was part of the attempt to link and perpetuate further this artificial connection. That is obvious as I have said before and as I repeat above.

However, you err in saying that modern Greek identity was formed SOLELY by the creation of katharevousa and some ancient vocabulary.

This is easily demonstrated because most of the military leaders who fought for the independence of the Greek state did not speak a word or have any knowledge of katharevousa.

I do not place Makryiannis "at the fore of Greek identity". He is only a typical example. Kolokotronis, the leader of the revolt, did not speak or know katharevousa, Karaiskakis did not speak or know katharevousa. The soldier/peasants who followed them and fought and risked and lost their lives for an independent Greece did not speak or know katharevousa. More, most leaders and peasant fighters, like Makryiannis himself, were not even literate. They neither knew or heard of Katharevousa.

For the 1000th time: Modern Greek consisted and consists still of many words of Albanian, Slavic, Turkish, Italian and other languages. Throughout its history, the Greek language, like all living languages, has evolved and changed and incorporated. Only a dead language does not change. For the umpteenth time: Modern Greece is composed of the languages and people of many other ethnicities, Albanians, slavs, Vlachs, Italians, Arabs, etc, etc. In this respect, it is exactly like all other modern nation states.

I'm sincerely at a loss as to how I can make the above statements, which I have often repeated, clearer.

So you admit they were half-Greeks. Was the greek part originally or something else and where is the missing link.

[Mistracona]

@ Risto.

What I said and have repeated is "artificial" is the national myth of a DIRECT connection between modern Greece and the ancient world thus ignoring the 2 thousand years of the history of the Greek-speaking people.

Again and again: the Greek revolution was supported by many other linguistic grouping including Albanians, Slavs Vlachs and even Turks. I gave the celebrated example of Bouboulina as one of many.

What I clearly pointed out was that among the Greek-speakers (the Greeks) who fomented the revolution, the leaders and those who followed them clearly had a Greek identity but did not speak a word of katharevousa nor did they have the benefit of the many hundreds of "Rosetta Stone" language institutes that the British and Germans set up in the country to teach all the peasants a foreign language which the Brits and Germans themselves did not understand.

[Mistracona]

@ Risto:

There is a peninsula in southern Europe that was the seat of an ancient civilisation. That peninsula was overrun by many invaders and conquerors over the course of many centuries. In the 19th century, after a war for independence, a modern state was artificially created that was composed of Albanian, Slavic, Arabic and many other ethnic and linguistic groups. Today the capital of that modern state has many ruins and monuments of that ancient civilisation. A citizen of that modern state can look at the inscriptions written in the ancient form of his language on those monuments and read and partially understand their meanings. He can do this without any special instructions in that ancient tongue. Today this country is a member of NATO, the European Union and the euro. It is going through a financial crisis mostly due to the failed political system and the criminal corruption inherent within it.

That country, of course, is Italy.

[momce]

@ Risto:

There is a peninsula in southern Europe that was the seat of an ancient civilisation. That peninsula was overrun by many invaders and conquerors over the course of many centuries. In the 19th century, after a war for independence, a modern state was artificially created that was composed of Albanian, Slavic, Arabic and many other ethnic and linguistic groups. Today the capital of that modern state has many ruins and monuments of that ancient civilisation. A citizen of that modern state can look at the inscriptions written in the ancient form of his language on those monuments and read and partially understand their meanings. He can do this without any special instructions in that ancient tongue. Today this country is a member of NATO, the European Union and the euro. It is going through a financial crisis mostly due to the failed political system and the criminal corruption inherent within it.

That country, of course, is Italy.

Yes, but no one claims the Italians are Romans, so why do modern "Greeks" claim they are continuous with ancient Greece...

[Mistracona]

"Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"


It's been a slice! (old Beatnick term meaning 'great fun'),

M.

[Mistracona]

I just got this Xmas card from one of this site's favourite historians, Eugene Borza. Hey, who is this guy talking about things like this:


Quote:
…the Macedonians are a newly emergent people in search of a past to help legitimize their precarious present as they attempt to establish their singular identity in a Slavic world dominated historically by Serbs and Bulgarians.

Quote:
The twentieth-century development of a Macedonian ethnicity, and its recent evolution into independent statehood following the collapse of the Yugoslav state in 1991, has followed a rocky road. In order to survive the vicissitudes of Balkan history and politics, the Macedonians, who have had no history, need one. They reside in a territory once part of a famous ancient kingdom, which has borne the Macedonian name as a region ever since and was called ”Macedonia” for nearly half a century as part of Yugoslavia. And they speak a language now recognized by most linguists outside Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece as a south Slavic language separate from Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. Their own so-called Macedonian ethnicity had evolved for more than a century, and thus it seemed natural and appropriate for them to call the new nation “Macedonia” and to attempt to provide some cultural references to bolster ethnic survival.

Quote:
It is difficult to know whether an independent Macedonian state would have come into existence had Tito not recognized and supported the development of Macedonian ethnicity as part of his ethnically organized Yugoslavia. He did this as a counter to Bulgaria, which for centuries had a historical claim on the area as far west as Lake Ohrid and the present border of Albania.

“Macedonia Redux”, Eugene N. Borza, The Eye Expanded: Life and the Arts in Greco-Roman Antiquity, Frances B. Titchener and Richard F. Moorton, Jr., editors

OK, OK, so he was a well-regarded historian and professor of histroy who was a specialist on the ancient Macedonians, but still.....

I guess the real question is, Who are you? But you don't know the answer to that either.

[Mistracona]

from Loring Danforth, a great supporter of the Republic of Macedonia (as am I) whose book was once graced by the red Sun of Kutlesh:

"The history of the construction of a Macedonian national identity does not begin with Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C. or with saints Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century A.D., as Macedonian nationalist historians often claim, nor does it begin with Tito and the establishment of the People’s Republic of Macedonia in 1944 as Greek nationalist historians would have us believe.

It begins in the nineteenth century with the first expressions of Macedonian ethnic nationalism on the part of a small number of intellectuals in places like Thessaloniki, Belgrade, Sophia, and St. Petersburg. This period marks the beginning of the process of “imagining” a Macedonian national community, the beginning of the construction of a Macedonian national identity and culture."

[Loring Danforth,The Macedonian Conflict. Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World,page 56]

[Mistracona]

from Wikipedia:

"Identities

See also: Macedonian Question and Macedonian nationalism
The large majority of Macedonians identify as Orthodox Christians, who speak a Slavic language, and share a cultural - historical "Orthodox Byzantine-Slavic heritage" with their neighbours.
The concept of a "Macedonian" ethnicity, distinct from their Orthodox Balkan neighbours, is seen to be a comparatively newly emergent one.[51][52][53][54][55][56] The earliest manifestation of a Macedonian identity emerged in the late 19th century, and this was consolidated by Yugoslav governmental policy from the 1940s.[57][58][59][60][61]"

[Mistracona]

from The Encyclopedia Britanica:

"The population of the Republic of Macedonia is diverse. At the beginning of the 21st century, nearly two-thirds of the population identified themselves as Macedonians. Macedonians generally trace their descent to the Slavic tribes that moved into the region between the 6th and 8th centuries ce."

[Mistracona]

Macedonia From the Settlement of the Slavs to the Ottoman Empire

Council for Research into South-Eastern Europe
of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Skopje, Macedonia, 1993

"As a result of the great migration of peoples a large number of Slavs moved from their ancient fatherland (the territory between the Baltic Sea, the Carpathians and the rivers Dnieper and Dniester) and by the close of the 5th century they had Slavicised the regions on the left bank of the River Danube. Thus the River Danube became a natural frontier between Byzantium and the Slavic world.

From the beginning of the 6th century the Byzantine dominions were subject to frequent massive movements and attacks on the part of the trans-Danubian Slavs. From then onwards the territory of Macedonia (which was governed as a province of the Illyric prefecture whose capital was Salonica) was exposed to continual spoliation by the Slavs. These attacks became particularly frequent from the mid-6th century, when the Slavs began to take over Byzantine territory. From the 60's of the 6th century the territory of Macedonia was also raped and pillaged by the Avars who had settled in the Pannonian plain."

[Mistracona]

"We are not related to the northern Greeks who produced leaders like Philip and Alexander the Great. We are a Slav people and our language is closely related to Bulgarian."
"There is some confusion about the identity of the people of this country."

[ROM Ambassador to Canada, Gyordan Veselinov in an interview with the Ottawa Citizen, 24 February 1999]

***
"We do not claim to be descendants of Alexander the Great." "We are Slavs and we speak a Slav language."
[ROM Ambassador in Washington, Mrs. Ljubica Acevshka, 22 January 1999]



17. "It should be remembered, to begin with, that there is no Macedonian race, as a distinct type. Macedonians may belong to any of the races of Eastern Europe or Western Asia, as, indeed, they do. A Macedonian Bulgar is just the same as a Bulgar of Bulgaria proper, the old principality, that in October, 1908, at Tirnova, was proclaimed independent of Turkey. He looks the same, talks the same, and very largely, thinks the same way. In short, he is of the same stock. There is no difference, whatsoever, between the two branches of the race, except that the Macedonian Bulgars, as a result of their position under the Turkish government, have less culture and education than their northern brethren."
[Arthur Douglas Howden Smith, "Fighting the Turk in the Balkans: An American's Adventures with the Macedonian Revolutionists", 1908, p. 4-5]

[Mistracona]

Vive la République de Macédoine libre!

[Nexus]

Eugène Borza is, indeed, a "well-regarded historian and professor of history who was a specialist on the ancient Macedonians" and as you see, his works about ancient Macedonia are very popular here . But i don't think that he's also specialist about modern macedonia, and there is many inexactitudes in this quotes.

About Loring Danforth, i agree with him : [...]"The history of the construction of a Macedonian national identity[...]begins in the nineteenth century with the first expressions of Macedonian ethnic nationalism[...]". He is totally right. We can say exactly the same for Greece, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria. The process of creation of nation-state is a very recent process in the Balkans, certainly because the peninsula have been for thousand years under occupation of many empires.

The concept of distinct, different "ethnicity" is relatively recent in the Balkans. Indeed the construction of a macedonian nation is "new", but that doesn't mean that before this construction there were no macedonians. There were macedonians in Macedonia, but theirs realities were just the Ottoman oppression, the need to survive etc ...

And about the so-called Slavic "migrations" or "invasions", this is more correct to call them Sclavene invasions and to connect them with the today Slavic-speaking peoples is not very correct too ... It's a pathetic "shortcut" used today by the anti-macedonians who ignore totally this part of our history my friend. It's a confusion, a simple misinterpretation of the events of the 6-8th centuries, thanks to the 19th century scholars for that , especially the russian ones.

Oh please do no put politic quotes here, i hate so much that !! And i want to say to Mrs. Ljubica Acevshka that i'm not slav, i'm just a Macedonian, and i speak not a slav language, but the Macedonian, who belongs to the balto-slavic family of languages.

And i agree with Arthur Douglas Howden Smith, there is no Macedonian race, there is no races at all. There are just humans . Peace and Love bro.

Vive la république de Macédoine libre !

[Mistracona]

Cher Nexus:

Not that it is in the last important or that anyone cares, but I certainly do not doubt the national identity or feelings of the people of the republic of Macedonia. They enjoy a celebration of their identity and national independence that is important to them. It is possible for someone of good will to share to some extent the joy of others and wish them well.

As I have tried to explain in my posts, the creation of the state of the republic of macedonia has followed and is following the typical state formation of all nations, including Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Ethiopia and Japan.

From a strictly historical point of view, since that is so often brought up by posters on this site, I am asking for any credible evidence that the modern Republic and its people have any connection to the ancient kingdom. The government of the republic has spent tens of millions of euros creating massive statues to figures from the ancient kingdom of Macedonia and names airports highways and stadiums after these figures. Clearly, it insists on a collective identity with the ancient kingdom.

My question is: where is any evidence that this is remotely true? And how can we square it with the abundant and overwhelming evidence that there is absolutely no connection between the modern state, geography, language, people or culture and the ancient kingdom? Is it a self-deception?

Never mind the Greeks. The posters here have determined who the Greeks are. The Greeks are Albano-Slavo-Turko-Gypsy thieves and liars, the hysterical lunatics of Europe. OK, that's settled, so we can put that aside for now.

Now who are the people of the republic of Macedonia? And how exactly are they connected to the ancient kingdom of that name?

Amitie comme toujours,