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Comment by mishkovski | Hacker News Reader

The Slavic majority in Macedonia has a name, Walter Mayr. It is Macedonians. Western media’s ignorance of one small nation’s struggle for recognition really puzzles me. Yes we are Slavs but you don’t call Russians Slavic majority in Russia. After more than a century of neighbour's aggressive politics to stifle Macedonian’s national awakening the least I expect from the media is to call the majority of my home country Macedonians.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonians_(ethnic_group)

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Slavic Macedonians are Bulgarians though.... and Macedonia is a made up buffer state with two different ethnicities (Slavic and Albanian), and a name that borrowed it form completely different region and time, which most of it is connected with Greece anyway.

Hence Greece was blocking NMKD to join Nato, because of the name and cultural appropriation, Bulgaria is currently blocking the ascenction to EU for similar reasons, and the Albanians there really want to join Albania if they had the chance.

It is kinda of a made up country... but so is Belgium and some others. Lets see how it goes in the long run, but if one day it disolved, where the west part goes to Albania and the Central and East part goes to Bulgaria, it makes perfect sense.

The fun fact, is that there are two villages in Albania that have a large slavic composition, and the borders were drawn in 1912 before the making of the macedonian state.

They all say they speak 'bullgarski' and consider themselves bulgars, and not Macedonian.

What you wrote just proves my point about what Macedonia’s neighbours do.

I’m Macedonian and I don’t consider myself Bulgarian. I find it funny that others think that is ok to tell other people what they are. Makes no sense.

"national awakening", umpf. People still think this is a positive thing these days.

It was/is important for young nations and you don’t have to associate it with negative things only.

Ui, "young nations", that sounds like a wonderful excuse. Of course, since these nations are young, almost infants actually, they need protection, right? Like small children sitting in a school bus? The first thing that came to mind when I read "young nations" was israel. A wonderful young state mostly occupied with killing off the people who were living on that land prior before the british decided to give it away. Wonderful thing such young nations.

To be fair, the Bulgarians (and Macedonians) haven't done much killings since the two balkan wars before ww1. They tend to co-exist mostly peacefully with their neighbors, especially the last 15 years.

The serbians have been the ones trying to kill almost every other ethnicity around them. They are the bad guys of the region, yet they tend to claim victimhood the most (from NATO, to Croatians in WW2, to XXX ethnicity...).

In the recent history Macedonians were rarely in the business of killing or bothering other people.

Not to mention the blatant usurpation of the greek word "macedonia" without any linguistic, ethnic connection to it (ancient macedonians were greeks, not slavs).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Macedonians

Nobody mentioned Ancient Macedonians.

The ancient kingdom of Macedon is geographically located in Greece:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_(ancient_kingdom)#/m...

That region is still called Macedon and the modern inhabitants of that region are themselves called Macedonians. As opposed to the slavic macedonians, they do have strong historical, linguistic and ethnic connections to the term. Do you see the problem here?

As you can see from the map Macedon was partially occupying territory of the modern country Macedonia. But what is more important than arguing about Ancient Times is respecting the national identity of the people that live today. The history of the name is complicated and we don’t share the same views with the Greeks but that is not the reason to fight over a name. Everyone in the world knows Greece. And nobody thinks they can’t use or consider the name Macedonia part of their history. What is interesting is why majority of Greeks feel threatened of their neighbour’s self identity.

I'm not talking about the Greeks, undoubtedly they also have their own concerns. But from a historical, scholarly or researcher perspective, you can't deny that this situation is very confusing. As an American who is interested in history and Ancient Greece, I can't in good conscience refer to your country as Macedonia in conversation. I always use the formal name "North Macedonia" and pretty much always have to explain the history behind that name.

This is as insufferable as someone refusing to refer to Athens, Georgia or London, Ontario without the state/province name, even in casual conversation near the place. Or saying that morpho butterflies aren’t actually blue, they just look blue.

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