Historiography in North Macedonia
[5] However, after the Tito-Stalin split, an important break occurred and the nation's origins were traced further back in time, to the medieval empire of Samuel of Bulgaria, which was appropriated as Macedonian rather than Bulgarian.
[8] Some domestic and foreign scholars have criticized this agenda of negationist historiography, whose apparent goal is to affirm the continuous existence of a separate Macedonian nation throughout history.
[11] Via the medium of education, unsubstantiated historical claims have been transmitted to generations of students in the country, to conceal that many prominent Macedonians had viewed themselves as Bulgarians.
[13] The debates in North Macedonia concerning its relationships with Bulgaria and Greece have had significant impact on historiographic narrative in the country, introducing a new revisionist interpretation of the past.
[15] The Macedonian historical narrative is rooted in leftist and communist groups active during the Interwar period, especially in the 1930s,[16] when the Comintern issued a special resolution in their support.
[21][22] At the same time, the first rector of the University of Skopje - Kiril Miljovski - admitted that early Macedonian revivalists and revolutionaries identified as Bulgarians.
[23] With explicit state support from the Yugoslav government, historical studies emphasizing the distinctness of Macedonian nationhood were expanded.
Its primary goal was to foster an independent Macedonian national consciousness, with an "anti-Bulgarian" or "de-Bulgarizing" trend, and to sever any ties with Bulgaria.
[8] When historians from Skopje University published in 1985 their collection of documents on the struggle of the Macedonian people, they included into the excerpts of medieval chronicles a footnote for every use of the terms "Bulgaria" and "Bulgarian".
[30] In the 1960s, Macedonian and Serbian scholars typically referred to the ancient local tribes of the Central Balkan region as Daco-Moesian.
[46] In 2008, Macedonian Canadian historian Andrew Rossos published the first professional English language overview of the history of Macedonia.
However, Stefan Troebst had suggested that his narrative was influenced by the dominant views in the Republic of Macedonia, thus reflecting the latest developments in official Macedonian historiography.
[47] The governments of Bulgaria and Macedonia signed a friendship treaty to bolster the complicated relations between the two Balkan states in August 2017.
The Bulgarian government accepted an ultimate "Framework Position", warning that Bulgaria would not let the EU integration of North Macedonia be accompanied by European legitimization of an anti-Bulgarian ideology.
[52] The leader of VMRO-DPMNE, Hristijan Mickoski stated that he was concerned that the negotiation process with Bulgaria could threaten Macedonian national identity.
[56] One of the main reasons provided was an "ongoing nation-building process" based on historical negationism of Bulgarian identity, culture and legacy in the broader region of Macedonia.
[32] Revisionist historians with anti-Yugoslav sentiments have argued the politics of SFR Yugoslavia continued the pre-war oppressive Serbian policies.
[63] People such as Ivan Mikulčić, Krste Crvenkovski and Slavko Milosavlevski tried to openly oppose the popular historical myths in the Republic of Macedonia.
He also found several Bulgar settlements on the territory of the modern republic and argued the Slavs in Macedonia adopted the ethnonym "Bulgarians" in the 9th century.
[64] Milosavlevski and Crvenkovski challenged the myth of the significance of the communist partisan resistance movement against the Bulgarian Army during the Second World War.
[66][67][68] According to her, the connection of modern Macedonian identity with anti-fascism and partisans has been so deeply rooted in the society, that any historical revision of it is unimaginable.
[70] At the end of 2015, the film director Darko Mitrevski, published a nine-part article in the newspaper "Nova Makedonija" entitled "Our big forgery", criticising the Macedonian historical narrative.
[72] Whether in antiquity the Ancient Macedonians were originally a Greek tribe or not is ultimately a redundant question according to professor of anthropology Loring Danforth.
[63] Historian John Van Antwerp Fine stated that throughout the Middle Ages and Ottoman era modern Bulgarians and Macedonians comprised a single people.
[78] Per social psychologist Georgi Stankov, the historiography is based on the postmodernist approach, which erases the distinctions between "fact" and "value" and "reality" and "perception.
