Posted on 06/19/2024 7:39:23 AM PDT by Cronos
The center of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, a Balkan country born just 33 years ago as an independent state, is awash in history.
A statue of Alexander the Great looms over the central square. One of his father, Philip II of Macedon, towers above a nearby piazza atop an oversize pedestal. The city is also littered with tributes in bronze, stone and plaster to generations of other heroes from what the country sees as its glorious and very long history.
The problem, though, is that most of the history on display is claimed by other countries. Present-day North Macedonia, has no real connection to Alexander the Great, who lived 2,000 years ago down the road in what is now Greece, and many of the other historical figures honored with statues are Bulgarian.
...North Macedonia’s identity-building has long infuriated Greece, which claims ancient Macedonia as part of its own heritage and has a region named after it. Also angry is Bulgaria, another neighbor very possessive about some of the historical figures, particularly a 10th-century Bulgarian ruler, whose statues now crowd the center of Skopje.
...Alexander was born in a city now in Greece. He did not live on the territory of what is today North Macedonia, historians generally agree, or speak its Slavic language. Slavs arrived in the area hundreds of years later
...after the disintegration of Yugoslavia as nationalists began looking for ways to strengthen their fragile new state.
...As part of a deal with Greece in 2018, it agreed to call itself North Macedonia, a name the Greek government accepted as sufficiently distant from the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia and Alexander the Great.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You might find this interesting: https://www.mpg.de/18495750/0330-evan-origins-of-the-avars-elucidated-with-ancient-dna-150495-x
How dare you say that!
Blood Feud!
I think Bosnia and Herzegovina should get involved too. If for no other reason than I like to see people have to type Bosnia and Herzegovina.
mark
Iron Maiden. Duh
Those Lebanese guys are Caucasian, racially speaking-their ethnicity is a different matter-they look a lot like any garden variety Italian or other person of Southern European ancestry-in fact the guy in the 2nd row without glasses looks a lot like my brother-before his hair turned gray-even the beard is the same. We are Hispanic-ancestors from Spain, not Lebanon...
I don’t get why Macedonians are insisting that Alexander is “theirs” exclusively when he was born in Greece. Maybe people in that part of Europe just like to argue over things like that...
If you can believe Herodotus, the ancient Greeks did not consider the Macedonians to be Greeks (apart from the ruling family), and scholars disagree on whether the ancient Macedonian language was a dialect of Greek or a separate language. Clearly Greek was widely understood--the Athenian poet Euripides died at the royal court and the people there must have been able to understand his plays. We lack texts in Macedonian.
Alexander the Great was not popular with the Greeks of his own time, especially the Athenians, Spartans and Thebans (he destroyed the city of Thebes). The Spartans fought a war against the Macedonians while Alexander was off fighting the Persians.
I don't understand the modern Greek obsession with Alexander when there are many ancient Greeks more deserving of admiration--Homer, Solon, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Leonidas, Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, Archimedes and many others.
the ancient “Macedonian kingdom” was a multi-national kingdom with a Greek ruling class and a Thracian/Dacian people.
the modern FYRO Macedonia is Bulgarian-Slavic people and they do have a lot of history until the conquest / captivity by the Ottoman Turks.
The current Greeks are not ethnically “Christianized Turks”
heck, even the modern day Turks have only about 5% TurkIC genes.
In recent anthropological studies, both ancient and modern Greek osteological samples were analyzed demonstrating a bio-genetic affinity and continuity shared between both groups. There is also a direct genetic link between ancient Greeks and modern Greeks.
Though one could also note a Greek genetic link in modern day Macedonians as well (a small one but not zero)
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