Hacker News Reader

Comment by interdrift | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not as stupid as you might think. FYROM was part of Bulgaria for a very long time. Lots of history of the empires happend there, they claim that it's theirs. Same for Alexander Macedon(he's obviously greek). If you claim some identity in front of many people you must be able to support it otherwise you end up looking like a fool. Imagine a nation of such deluded by the system people.

View on HN

> Same for Alexander Macedon (he's obviously greek)

Alexander III of Macedon died in 323 B.C. That's 2,300 years ago. Turning a millennium-and-a-half footnote into a geopolitical issue is stupid.

> If you claim some identity in front of many people you must be able to support it otherwise you end up looking like a fool

Greece's per-capita GDP is three-quarters that of Europe's average [1]. Macedonia's is less than one-third that of Greece's. This is a stupid thing for two poor countries to create economic, political and geopolitical hurdles out of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

A lot of these things are not about wealth, they are about identity. Wealth is much easier to create than identity.

Things get a bit more difficult when the identity is standing in the way of creating wealth. This seems to be the case here, assuming EU/NATO memberships would be largely positive economic forces for Macedonia.

Modern Greeks have as much in common with Alexander as anybody else here. There are many historic clues that the ancient Greeks didn't understand the ancient Macedonian language, and that the Macedonians coudn't figure out how to write their language with the Greek alphabet, so they gradually (but not fully) adopted the Greek.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com