SLAVIC HOMER IN SKOPJE & assorted Balkan fables: the case of the Slavic Trojans

by Miltiadis Elias Bolaris
FEB 15, 2011

HOCUS POCUS SLAVOMAKEDONIENSIS:

Bogus scholarly witchcraft in the age of Antikvizatsiyja
In notoriously unreliable sources, such as the "Slavic Nationalist Forum" (1) or the expatriate Skopjan misinformation website "MakNews" (2), it is naturally expected to stumble upon products of pseudo-scholarly emesis such as "A new theory about the Trojan era", by Tomáš Spevák, which in all seriousness proclaims nothing less than: "Ancient Trojans were SLAVS"!

The first question now is: Why should anybody waste their time answering such preposterous claims. The answer is clear: This text has been used in every internet posting imaginable to promote its obviously anachronistic case to unsuspecting readers that take its word at its face value. Why should it not? While the text is not backed up by any documentation to speak off, it does include some rather impressive quotes by none other than Homer, the poet of Iliad and Odyssey himself as well as by Tiberius Claudius, the Roman Emperor and by Professor Eugene Borza.

The "new theory about the Trojan era" starts with the following question:

Re: The Importance of Historical Truth and The Macedonian Issue

By Professor John Melville-Jones

Following the publication of the edited version of the after-dinner talk that I gave in October, a formal complaint was made to my employer (to which a polite reply was made, stressing the importance of academic freedom), and I received an e-mailed message from the United Macedonian Diaspora (which I thought, because of its name, must be a Greek organisation until I read what it had to say), together with a number of other e-mails. Many of these were merely abusive, but this didn’t surprise me, because I know from experience that when people hold strong beliefs that are based on faith not fact, and they are shown that these beliefs cannot be true, this is distressing to them, and they will very often become agitated, as they cling to their beliefs even more vigorously. None of the messages that I received addressed the issue that I raised in my talk in Melbourne, the proposed erection of the statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje. Two of them were, however, more thoughtful, and I have had some mild and civilised exchanges with their authors, as we define our positions.
Some of the points that were made were what I would call 'diversionary', such as the statement that the present population of the Greek province of Macedonia has nothing in common with its population in ancient times, being 'colonisers', referring to the fact that many of them were brought there from Turkey in the 1920s during the exchange of populations which led to Muslims being removed from...