So delicious. Tourism would boom.

Macadonia Not?

Greece was overrun by Slavs from the north. They penetrated down to the islands and into Asia Minor. In some areas, Greek faltered and Slavic languages won out. Greek has a lot of Slavic loan words.

From the east, it was overrun by Turks. The bit of Turkey that's in Europe was entirely Greek-speaking until the Turks occupied it, settled it, and either oppressed the Greeks into assimilation or moving out. A big chunk of Asia minor was Greek--back in Homer's day, parts were completely Greek. The vestiges of Greek population that survived the anti-Christian/Kurdish Turkish-nationalist struggle during and immediately following WWI were mutually ethnically cleansed in the 1920s with large-scale population transfers.

Macedonia, historically, is a big deal to Greek national pride and in Greek history, largely due to centuries of oppression by Muslim Turks. But much of the territory was Slavicized. That part was Macedonia, but so's a reasonably sized chunk of Greece. The Greek view is that the Slavs are not Greek. Current Greek nationalist views are that because of Philip of Macedonia and Alexander the Great, Macedonia spoke Greek and is retrofitted to have been ethnically Greek (even if at the time the Macedonians were seen essentially as outsiders to the Greek polity, and if commoners spoke Greek it was probably a divergent dialect of the language; the upper class spoke Attic Greek, but there wasn't all that much Greek ethnic solidarity).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greater_Macedonia.png

At the same time, the Slavic-speaking people live in an area that has been called "Macedonia" for a long time, and if you're a Slavic speaker from Macedonia it means you're from that part of Macedonia. Macedonians have their own struggle for recognition. First under the same invader-colonial power that was the Ottomans, then merged into Yugoslavia. Bulgarian-first folk claim the area as their own, and until recently claimed Macedonian as a dialect of Bulgarian (and possibly still does). They are largely the genetic descendants of the Macedonians that were there a thousand and two thousand years ago.

They can do what they want, but I'd have argued that "North Macedonia" is as much as the Greek "South Macedonia". There was no "Macedonia" versus "North Macedonia." Still, it's what happens when you try to look back in time to find vicarious greatness in other people's actions.

It seems that every square mile of the former Yugoslavia is steeped in messed up border wars and cultural rivalry.
I must admit that I can't keep track of it all, as much as I've tried.

Last edited Fri Jan 11, 2019, 07:17 PM - Edit history (1)

It's national motto could have been: "If we don't repent and get right with Zeus, Zeuslandia is doomed."

One is Slavic and the other Greek. Not at all similar.
Always cool how languages develop.

There are plenty of Macedonians who remember what it was like to live under the Russian boot after WWII.