E.N.Borza and Macedonia

E.N.Borza, "On the Shadows of Olympus" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),

"This larger Macedon included lands from the crest of the Pindus range to the plain of Philippi and the Nestos River. Its northern border lay along a line formed by Pelagonia, the middle Axios valley and the western Rhodopi massif. Its southern border was the Haliac- mon basin, the Olympus range and the Aegean, with the Chalcidic peninsula as peripheral... We thus have a conception of Macedonia both more and less extensive than Hammonds's -less in that IT REDUCES EMPHASIS ON THE north western LANDS that lie today WITHIN THE YUGOSLAV STATE, but more in that it takes into greater account the territory east of the Axios. It is a definition BASED on the political DEVELOPMENT of the MACEDONIAN STATE OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME,..."
page 29-31

The macedonians themselves may have originated from the same population pool that produced other Greek peoples
page 84

"There is NO reason to deny the Macedonians' own tradition about their early kings and the migrations of the Makedones. "
page 84

"The basic story as provided by Herodotus and Thucydides minus the interpolation of the Temenid connection, UNDOUBTEDLY reflects the Macedonians' own traditions about their early history "
page 84

""Their daughter, who would be the half-sister of Alexander the Great and, later the wife of Cassander, was appropriately named Thessalonike, to commemorate Philip's victory in Thessaly. In 315 Cassander founded at or near the site of ancient Therme the great city that still bears her name. ""
page 220

""It is difficult to imagine that Philip's policy toward Greece was an end in itself. Once his Balkan borders had been secured his general course seems to have been directed toward the establishment of stability in Greece, NOT CONQUEST. ""
page 230




"Macedonia Redux", Chapter 16, The Eye Expanded: Life and the Arts in Greco-Roman Antiquity, Frances B. Titchener and Richard F. Moorton, Jr., editors

""During medieval and modem times, Macedonia was known as a Balkan region inhabited by ethnic Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs, Serbs, Bulgarians, Jews, and Turks. ""

""The emergence of a Macedonian nationality is an offshoot of the joint Macedonian and Bulgarian struggle against Hellenization. With the establishment of an independent Bulgarian state and church in the 1870s, however, the conflict took a new turn. Until this time the distinction between "Macedonian" and "Bulgarian" hardly existed beyond the dialect differences between standard "eastern" Bulgarian and that spoken in the region of Macedonia.""


""Modern Slavs, both Bulgarians and Macedonians, cannot establish a link with antiquity, as the Slavs entered the Balkans centuries after the demise of the ancient Macedonian kingdom. Only the most radical Slavic factions—mostly émi-grés in the United States, Canada, and Australia—even attempt to establish a connection to antiquity. """

""...the Macedonians are a newly emergent people in search of a past to help legitimize their precarious present as they attempt to establish their singular identity in a Slavic world dominated historically by Serbs and Bulgarians. """

""The twentieth-century development of a Macedonian ethnicity, and its recent evolution into independent statehood following the collapse of the Yugoslav state in 1991, has followed a rocky road. In order to survive the vicissitudes of Balkan history and politics, the Macedonians, who have had no history, need one. They reside in a territory once part of a famous ancient kingdom, which has borne the Macedonian name as a region ever since and was called ''Macedonia'' for nearly half a century as part of Yugoslavia. And they speak a language now recognized by most linguists outside Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece as a south Slavic language separate from Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. Their own so-called Macedonian ethnicity had evolved for more than a century, and thus it seemed natural and appropriate for them to call the new nation "Macedonia" and to attempt to provide some cultural references to bolster ethnic survival. ""


""It is difficult to know whether an independent Macedonian state would have come into existence had Tito not recognized and supported the development of Macedonian ethnicity as part of his ethnically organized Yugoslavia. He did this as a counter to Bulgaria, which for centuries had a historical claim on the area as far west as Lake Ohrid and the present border of Albania.""