Macedonia (terminology)
The name Macedonia is used in a number of competing or overlapping meanings to describe geographical, political and historical areas, languages and peoples in a part of south-eastern Europe.
[5][6] It is cognate with the words μακρός (makros, 'long, large')[7] and μήκος (mēkos, 'length'),[8] both deriving from the Indo-European root *mak-, meaning 'long, slender'.
It was centered on the fertile plains west of the Gulf of Salonica (today north-western Greece); the first Macedonian state emerged in the 8th or early 7th century BC.
Its extent beyond the center varied; some Macedonian kings could not hold their capital; Philip II expanded his power until it reached from Epirus, across Thrace to Gallipoli, and from Thermopylae to the Danube.
[14] His son Alexander the Great conquered most of the land in southwestern Asia stretching from what is currently Turkey in the west to parts of India in the east.
However, while Alexander's conquests are of major historical importance as having launched the Hellenistic Age, Macedon as a state had no significant territorial gains due to them.
The approximate boundary between the two ran on a rough line from north of Bitola (which belonged to Macedonia Prima) to the area of Demir Kapija.
[17][18] During the 7th century, most of the Balkans were overrun by Slavic invasions, which left only the fortified towns and the coasts in the hands of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire.
They became districts during the military and fiscal crisis of the seventh century, when the Byzantine armies were instructed to find their supplies from the locals, wherever they happened to be.
By the late 14th century, the Ottoman Turks in turn had conquered the region, although Thessalonica held out under Byzantine and later Venetian control until 1430.
[26] When the Ottoman Empire started breaking apart, Macedonia was claimed by all members of the Balkan League (Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria), and by Romania.
Although the region's borders are not officially defined by any international organization or state, in some contexts, the territory appears to correspond to the basins of (from west to east) the Haliacmon (Aliákmonas), Vardar / Axios and Struma / Strymónas rivers, and the plains around Thessaloniki and Serres.
In addition, the Ottoman census, taken on the basis of religion, was misquoted by all sides; descent, or "race", was largely conjectural; inhabitants of Macedonia might speak a different language at the market and at home, and the same Slavic dialect might be called Serbian "with Bulgarian influences", Macedonian, or West-Bulgarian.
Its only inarguable limits were the Aegean Sea and the Serbian and Bulgarian frontiers (as of 1885); where it bordered Old Serbia, Albania, and Thrace (all parts of Ottoman Rumelia) was debatable.
[12] The Greek ethnographer Nicolaides, the Austrian Meinhard, and the Bulgarian Kǎnčev placed the northern boundary of Macedonia at the Šar Mountains and the Crna hills, as had scholars before 1878.
The Serb Spiridon Gopčević preferred a line much further south, assigning the entire region from Skopje to Strumica to "Old Serbia"; and some later Greek geographers have defined a more restricted Macedonia.
It covers an area of 34,200 square kilometres (13,200 sq mi)[40][41] (for discussion of the reported irredentist origin of this term, see Aegean Macedonia).
[46] Mala Prespa and Golo Brdo is a small area in the west of the Macedonia region in Albania, mainly around Lake Ohrid.
[54][55] On the other hand, as a legal term, it refers to all the citizens of the Republic of North Macedonia, irrespective of their ethnic or religious affiliation.
[45] However, the preamble of the constitution[56] distinguishes between "the Macedonian people" and the "Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Romanics and other nationalities living in the Republic of Macedonia", but for whom "full equality as citizens" is provided.
[57] The same term in antiquity described the inhabitants of the kingdom of Macedon, including their notable rulers Philip II and Alexander the Great who self-identified as Greeks.
[73] The scientific community generally agrees that, although sources are available (e.g. Hesychius' lexicon, Pella curse tablet)[74] there is no decisive evidence to exclude any of the above hypotheses.
[75] However, the volume of surviving public and private inscriptions that have been discovered shows that there was no other written language in ancient Macedonia apart from Greek.
The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) was a term used for this state by the main international organisations, including the United Nations,[79] European Union,[80]
[93] For years Greece used it in both the abbreviated (FYROM or ΠΓΔΜ)[Note 8] and spellout form (Πρώην Γιουγκοσλαβική Δημοκρατία της Μακεδονίας).
More moderate Macedonian nationalists recognize the inviolability of the Bulgarian and Greek borders and explicitly renounce any territorial claims against the two countries.
Floudas, of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, a leading commentator on the naming dispute from the Greek side, sums up this nationalistic reaction as follows: the Republic of Macedonia was accused of usurping the historical and cultural patrimony of Greece "in order to furnish a nucleus of national self-esteem for the new state and provide its citizens with a new, distinct, non-Bulgarian, non-Serbian, non-Albanian identity".
To answer this appropriately, neither the decades of persistent indoctrination [during Tito's time] should be left out of consideration, nor Greece's violent struggle since 1991 in contrast to her complacency for the 45 years before this.
[citation needed] Bulgarians and ethnic Macedonians seek to deny the self-identification of the Slavic speaking minority in northern Greece, which mostly self-identifies as Greek.
The use of the name by FYROM alone may also create problems in the trade area, and subsequently become a potential springboard for distorting reality, and a basis for activities far removed from the standards set by the European Union and more specifically the clause on good neighbourly relations.
