Έλαβα τις προάλλες ένα μήνυμα από έναν πολύ αγαπητό μου φίλο από την Αμερική, μορφωμένο αλλά τελείως άσχετο με τα Βαλκανικά πράγματα, με το εξής περιεχόμενο:
Somebody in my office is from Macedonia. How is Macedonian related to Greek?
Can you read of speak Macedonian?
Was Salonica ever part of Macedonia?
Έκατσα και του έγραψα μια κάπως εκτενή απάντηση, που ίσως μπορεί να χρησιμέψει σε όσους αντιμετωπίζουν καλόπιστες ερωτήσεις αγγλόφωνων ή αγγλομαθών ξένων σχετικά με το Μακεδονικό, γι'αυτό και την παραθέτω κι εδώ.
With your innocent question about Macedonia you have just opened a BIG can
of worms. Sit back and prepare for a longish explanation.
In ancient times, Macedonia was the name of a kingdom north of Mt.
Olympus, which certainly included the area where Salonica was built around
300 B.C. Whether its inhabitants were Greek is a controversial question,
though modern evidence points to the affirmative. What is certain is that
it was under very strong Greek cultural influence: the official language of
the court and the only language used in writing was Greek, indeed Attic
Greek (i.e. the variety spoken in Athens, not some local dialect), the
reigning dynasty traced its ancestry back to the kings of Argos, and the
great Athenian playwright Euripides spent his later years there, writing
and staging plays for the court - which must therefore have been in a position to
appreciate them.
Ancient Macedonia hardly interacted with Southern Greece until the time of
King Philip, in the 4th century B.C. Philip got himself involved in
inter-Greek wars, and after his death, his son Alexander the Great (who had
had Aristotle as his teacher) conquered all of Greece and went on to build
an empire extending from Egypt to Pakistan. And there is no question that
it was the GREEK language and culture that he brought to these lands. Which
is why, when the matter comes up, I like to say that "Alexander the Great
was every bit as Greek as Napoleon was French." (After all, Corsica had
been sold to France only a few years before Napoleon's birth, and his
mother Letizia only barely spoke French!)
In the Hellenistic world that emerged from Alexander's conquests, the
ancient Macedonians disappeared as a distinct people (as did the Phrygians,
Lydians etc. and indeed also the ancient Greek tribes such as the Dorians,
Aeolians and Ionians), merging into the Greek nation. The word "Macedonia"
remained in use as a geographic term, denoting the region extending from
Mt. Olympus northwards.
In the Middle Ages, Slavic tribes invaded the Balkans, settling all over
the place (even in Southern Greece), including in Macedonia, though the
cities - notably Salonica - remained Greek. South of Mt. Olympus they were
gradually hellenized, so that no identifiable Slavic populations remained
in modern times, even though the Peloponnesus (the big peninsula SW of
Athens) is still full of Slavic place names. North of Mt. Olympus, the
population remained ethnically mixed, and became even more so with the
arrival of the Turks (who conquered most of the Balkans and even pushed as
far as Vienna in 1529!) and the Spanish Jews (who formed a majority in
19th-century Salonica), not to mention the Vlachs, who are a whole
different story, which I will spare you this time. This is why in Italian
and certain other languages "macedonia" also means a mixed salad!
In modern times, as the various Balkan nations began to form (Greece
became independent in 1830, Serbia had achieved independence even earlier,
Bulgarian national consciousness developed extremely fast around the
middle of the 19th century), they all laid claims on the geographic area
still belonging to the Ottoman Empire and known to Western geographers as
Macedonia (the areas east and west of it, up to the Adriatic and the Black
Sea respectively, were known as Epirus and Thrace). Following a successful
war in 1878, Russia imposed on Ottoman Turkey the Treaty of San Stefano,
whereby an independent Kingdom of Bulgaria was to be set up that would
incorporate all of Macedonia. The other great powers of the time refused to
let Russia create such a huge client state and forced a revision of that
treaty, whereby the area of the new kingdom was sharply curtailed and
Macedonia remained under Ottoman rule. Bulgarians have been dreaming of San
Stefano's Great Bulgaria ever since...
There followed a long struggle, which ultimately turned viciously violent,
between Bulgaria and Greece (and Serbia) for the hearts and minds of the
Slavic-speaking Christians of Macedonia. An unexpected result of that
struggle was the emergence of a movement that claimed "Macedonia for the
Macedonians" - which even started an ill-fated insurrection in 1903. Greeks
believe that that was merely a front for Bulgarian expansionism, and that
the "Autonomous Macedonia" they called for would promptly be annexed by
Bulgaria (as had happened in 1885 to another autonomous entity set up by
the revision of the Treaty of San Stefano); but there is no doubt that this
also marked the emergence of a separate national consciousness among SOME
Macedonian Slavs.
In 1912-13, an alliance of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria (and Montenegro)
attacked Turkey and conquered all of Macedonia, which they divided among
themselves. As they quarreled about the spoils, Greece and Serbia teamed up
on Bulgaria and in a short but viciously fought war drastically reduced its
share. Hoping to recover Macedonian (and Thracian) territory, Bulgaria
joined the German side in World War I, and thus ended up losing even more
land. They repeated that attempt in World War II, again finding themselves
on the losing side (though, curiously enough, finally rewarded with a slice
of Rumanian territory).
Thus the geographical region called Macedonia was carved up between Greece
(main city: Salonica) and Serbia (main city: Skopje), with a small part
going to Bulgaria.
Greece went on to try and liberate/conquer more Turkish territory in the
aftermath of World War I, but failed disastrously. The peace treaty that
followed provided for a compulsory exchange of populations between the two
countries: thus Greece got rid of most of its Moslems (Thracian Moslems
were allowed to remain), but had to accommodate 1.5 million Greek refugees,
who were mostly settled in Greek Macedonia. Thus, its population was very
largely hellenized. (There was also a semi-voluntary exchange of minorities
with Bulgaria).
Unfortunately for Serbia, there were hardly any Serbians in the part of
Macedonia it had conquered. The Government tried to persuade the Slavic
locals that they were "South Serbians", but met with rather little success,
and the local population welcomed Bulgarian occupation in both World Wars.
When Tito reorganized Yugoslavia on a federal basis in 1944, he elevated
the local Slavic population to the status of a nation, equal in principle
to the other nations of Yugoslavia (Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, to which
the "Moslems" of Bosnia-Hercegovina were later added), which he called
"Macedonians"; and their territory became the "Socialist Republic of
Macedonia", with, as its official language, a literary norm based on the
local dialects, which was named "Macedonian" (and which is very close to
Bulgarian, despite deliberate efforts to maximize the differences).
This created a most unfortunate ambiguity, which was doubtlessly
deliberate: if there is a "Macedonian" nation with its own language, which
has attained statehood within Yugoslavia, then the people of Greek (and
Bulgarian) Macedonia are an enslaved minority, awaiting its
liberation/reunion with the motherland! This is utterly false - the
overwhelming majority of the population of Greek Macedonia is Greek - but
is often maintained, explicitly or covertly, by ex-Yugoslav Macedonian
circles to this day. Which is why Greece has been bitterly (and sometimes
stupidly) opposed to the international recognition of the Republic of
Macedonia (independent since the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991) under that
name.
To conclude: if your colleague says he is "Macedonian", he is most
probably a Macedonian Slav, from the formerly Yugoslav "Republic of
Macedonia". A Greek, talking to a non-Greek, would simply say he was Greek,
and only if questioned about his district of origin might specify that he
was Macedonian (i.e. from the Greek province of Macedonia, whose capital is
Salonica and whose population, including my wife's parents, largely came
from what is now Turkey in 1922). I don't speak or understand the language
called Macedonian, which is very close to Bulgarian. And Salonica was never
a part of a COUNTRY called Macedonia, though for over 2000 years it has
been the main city in the geographical region by that name.
