Macedonia changes name, ending bitter dispute with Greece
I was born in what was then Yugoslavia (now North Macedonia). In order to get a good full perspective of this issue I think you have to talk to several Greeks and North Macedonians. This has been my perspective and experience:<p>It&#x27;s mostly split between the population -- half (probably most) of us don&#x27;t really seem to care about this issue, the other half feels pretty upset about it. It&#x27;s really important to note that not a single Macedonian I&#x27;ve ever talked to has ever claimed that Ancient Macedonia isn&#x27;t part of Greek history, I really don&#x27;t know where Greeks are getting that from. Almost everyone here goes to vacation in Greece every year, and concedes when some Greeks say &quot;Skopje?&quot; to suggest that we&#x27;re not Macedonians. We just nod and shrug it off, and say &quot;Yeah, Skopje&quot;. Most people really don&#x27;t care about this, if we did we wouldn&#x27;t be going to Greece on vacation or buy Greek products, both of which we do a fair amount of. Some of us even wonder why we&#x27;re celebrating a serial killer at all (Alexander the Great). In order to understand what&#x27;s going on, I think you need to separate yourself from what politicians are thinking and doing compared to what the people are thinking and doing. Also let&#x27;s face it, governments love to manipulate group identities to serve their interests.<p>What Macedonians are upset about is that they feel like Macedonia has a shared history and Greece doesn&#x27;t want to acknowledge it, and it&#x27;s leveraging it&#x27;s strong international influence to set us back and&#x2F;or make us look bad. We&#x27;re a small, formerly communist, landlocked country in the Balkans, we barely have any international influence at all. It&#x27;s a no-brainer that most countries will side with Greece, and why there&#x27;s EU pressure for us to change the name. We definitely wouldn&#x27;t be able to dispute Greece&#x27;s territory, especially since 1952 when Greece became part of NATO. We&#x27;re seriously no threat to them even without NATO. I don&#x27;t think this is about the name or territorial ambitions, or if it was it was like that a long time ago and is no longer relevant. It&#x27;s deeper than that.<p>People on the thread and the previous one have talked about the Balkan Wars being relevant to understanding this, and that the then conservative Greek govt in the mid-20th century suppressed a lot of North Macedonian speaking peoples living in Greek Macedonia to force them to say that they&#x27;re Greek and that they can&#x27;t speak slavic, much like how Bulgarians forced us to say that we&#x27;re Bulgarian and speak Bulgarian when we were occupied by them, or how some people think we should be part of Greater Albania, or how some Serbians view us as South Serbians, and that Greece wants to cover this up. There&#x27;s probably something there to look into, the Balkans is full of territorial grabs like that. I don&#x27;t really know anything about this part of history.<p>A lot of us just feel like we&#x27;re being bullied to an extent, and that Greece is basically being a d*ck about it. Ancient Macedonia has mostly been part of Greece, but Paeonia (North Macedonia) has for a large part of it&#x27;s existence, either been a dependent territory of Ancient Macedonia or has been fully a part of Ancient Macedonia when it was at the height of it&#x27;s power. We didn&#x27;t just pull the name out of nowhere, we&#x27;ve been called Macedonians since forever. Some of us that are upset about this think that we shouldn&#x27;t be giving in to powerful external forces and that we should just make a stand. And that by giving in we&#x27;re showing ourselves as weak and easy to manipulate, and would affect future negotiations. Some of us others think we&#x27;re being stubborn, and that we should be the bigger person and just concede, because it&#x27;s a pretty stupid dispute and I agree. A lot of us just don&#x27;t care, or if we used to care we&#x27;re jaded now after all this time and don&#x27;t care anymore.<p>We have a lot of shared history, we&#x27;re neighbors after all. We don&#x27;t have the same language, sure, but our traditional dress and textiles looks similar, our dance is similar, we both say &quot;Opa!&quot;, we have similar traditional food. We used to be the same country several times in history, during the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. I don&#x27;t think this is really about the name, it&#x27;s more about that North Macedonia is mostly made up of slavic people with a large Albanian-Macedonian population and from a formerly communist country, and Greeks just don&#x27;t want to be associated with former communists or slavic people.<p>It really sucks because I like a lot about Greek history and culture, one of my favorite college professors taught Greek Philosophy to me. Greeks gave us democracy and the best philosophers along with India and China, all of which is still extremely relevant today. I&#x27;m glad we&#x27;ve come to a consensus about the name. We&#x27;ve both wasted a lot of energy over something pretty stupid, and we really should be getting along a lot better. We&#x27;ve wasted our time with what could&#x27;ve been quality time with our families or more richer life experiences, or improving the human condition. Nationalism, tribalism and groupthink are all diseases that I hope the 21st century will rid itself of.