History Article: Macedonia and Tzar samuil.

[Kyriakos]

^You lost me at your opening sentence, which preluded a humourless post :\

 

[Future PM]

FFS everyone, let's not descend into nationalistic dick-measuring. It's the Balkans, you're all just fodder for invading Turkish, German, and Russian hordes anyway. Accept it and move on.

 

[schlaufuchs]

FFS everyone, let's not descend into nationalistic dick-measuring.

It's the Balkans

Sorry, but you've already failed.

 

[Future PM]

Sorry, but you've already failed.

In the Balkans, nationalistic dick-measuring is every nation's favourite pastime. So yeah, I'm fighting an uphill battle. With the hill in question being Everest.

 

[Phrossack]

There are two kinds of people who argue bitterly about ancient history. One kind is competing academics in the field. The other kind consists of angry young men who find little in the present to make them proud of their countries in the present, so they find consolation in the fact that some warlord from their country who called himself king killed a bunch of people really well a long time ago. Then they post a bunch of maps of the territorial extent of their country in bygone days and bicker with each other in the YouTube comments section of every video even tangentially related to their pet country.

 

[gay_Aleks]

I believe, that I could attempt to make a new trend - instead of posting maps of how one king gained much territory, I shall post a map of how another one managed to lose it all.

Coincidentally, the latter one is always the successor of the former. That's odd.

 

[Mize]

I kind of doubt that will work. Plus, you picked the wrong thread to start the trend - Samuil literally lost it all, but only after taking a lot of it back himself, yet still he's a huge hero to and competed over by both Bulgarian and Macedonian nationalists today.

Also, (controversial Bulgarian history teacher/public figure) Emil Jassim appears to have started something similar by basically making fun of the popular 'Bulgaria on three seas' nationalist slogan a couple of months ago by pointing out that, during its 1330+ years of existence, Bulgaria has been an independent political entity for barely half of that, and that the total time throughout history it had access to the Black, Aegean and Adriatic coasts all at once amounts to something like 20 years. Also, mind that those 20 years happened in the middle ages and are separated by a few centuries. This is how pathetic nationalists are on the Balkans.

 

[Traitorfish]

There are two kinds of people who argue bitterly about ancient history. One kind is competing academics in the field. The other kind consists of angry young men who find little in the present to make them proud of their countries in the present, so they find consolation in the fact that some warlord from their country who called himself king killed a bunch of people really well a long time ago. Then they post a bunch of maps of the territorial extent of their country in bygone days and bicker with each other in the YouTube comments section of every video even tangentially related to their pet country.

You forgot miniature war-gamers. They're what you might call the "missing link" between footnote-happy academia and priority-challenged nationalism.

I kid, I kid. Obviously, not all miniature war-gamers are like this; most of them spend their time in bitter struggle over WH40K canon instead, obvs.

 

[Domen]

Spoiler :

Is the explanation for why there's few Bulgarian Macedonians (the compromise term I'm using) in the Pella region now similar to why there aren't any in Kaliningrad or the parts of Germany given to Poland after the Second World War?

Yes, about half of Slavs were deported and few hundred thousand Greeks (mostly from Turkey) came. Macedonia claims that there are still many Slavic Macedonians left in the region, but Greek censuses don't count them as such.

I gathered some more data on this. Yes - ethnic structure of the region was altered (the area became mostly Greek) thanks to population movements (deportation of minorities and influx of Anatolian Greeks), rather than assimilation / acculturation of ethnic minorities. This chart shows ethnic structure of the region before WW1 - as you can see Greeks were only the 3rd most numerous ethnic group. More numerous than Greeks were Slavs (I called them Slavs because I don't want to engage in discussion on whether they identified as Bulgarians, Serbs, Macedonians or whatever) and Turks:



After WW1 at least 618,200 immigrant Anatolian Greeks settled in Macedonia (patterns of settlement of Anatolian Greeks throughout Macedonia and other regions of Greece can be seen in maps posted below, 1st map shows the proportion of Anatolian immigrants to local populations in each region):

Proportion of immigrants from Asia Minor (by region):

Direct link to map: http://s17.postimg.org/950e2lsn3/105_2.png

Spoiler :

And settlements of immigrants from Asia Minor (dots):

Direct link to map: http://s30.postimg.org/i4mqwhsgh/181_6.png

Spoiler :

Comparing the size of Greek population of southern Macedonia before WW1 (236,800) and the number of Anatolian Greek immigrants after WW1 (618,200) shows that Anatolian Greeks outnumbered Macedonian Greeks 3 to 1 in that area, and they significantly changed the ethnic makeup of that territory.

Simultaneously with the influx of at least 618,200 Anatolian Greeks, at least 130,010 of local Slavic inhabitants (out of 370,371 - rounded to 370,400 in my chart above) were deported from southern Macedonia towards northern regions of what later became Yugoslavia and to western Bulgaria. Deportations of Turks also took place. Jews (most of whom lived in the city of Salonica) were later wiped out in WW2, further decreasing the number of non-Greek minorities.

Possibly much more Slavic-speakers than 130,010 left that region after WW1 - but not all of them necessarily in organized deportations.

My next finding is that the exodus after WW1 was not the last one - because during and after the Greek Civil War (1946 - 1949) over 100,000 more Slavs from Greek Macedonia had to emigrate to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, further decreasing the size of Slavic minority in Greece.

Yet some Slavic minority in southern (Greek) Macedonia still exists - for example according to the report of Human Rights Watch "Denying Ethnic Identity. The Macedonians of Greece", in 1992 over 65% of inhabitants of the district of Florina (Φλώριν&#945 described themselves as Slavic Macedonians.

But the Greek government refuses to recognize the existence of such an ethnic minority in Greek national territory, just like it denies foreign citizens of what it calls FYROM the right to identify as "Macedonians", claiming that Greece has exclusive rights to this name due to its Iron Age heritage.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the Greek state in general does not recognize the existence of any ethnic or national minorities in its territory. It seems that according to the modern Greek government, fully 100% of Greek citizens are (and must be) ethnic Greeks.

==============================

Sites of three Ancient cities - Pella, Salonica and Athens - had respectively Slavic, Jewish and Albanian majorities in the 1800s. Whether those peoples violently replaced Iron Age Greeks during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, or assimilated them peacefully, or became majority in yet another way - is a question for historians and geneticists. But from ethical perspective it should not matter, because two wrongs don't make a right.

And this doesn't mean that Alexander the Great was an Albanian (large part of inhabitants of modern Republic of Macedonia are Albanians, there is also a Gypsy minority - so if Macedonian nationalists claim that their republic is a successor of Alexander's Empire, then perhaps ethnically Albanian and Gypsy citizens of their republic are successors of that empire too - or maybe not, maybe just Slavic-speakers, and not Albanian minority?).

Sites of three Ancient cities - Pella, Salonica and Athens - had respectively Slavic, Jewish and Albanian majorities in the 1800s. Whether those peoples violently replaced Iron Age Greeks during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, or assimilated them peacefully, or became majority in yet another way - is a question for historians and geneticists.

In another thread, Dutchfire wrote:

Fertility rates can be vastly different in population groups. E.g. recent immigrants from Turkey/Morocco have more children than native Dutch, Palestinians have more children than Israelis, Catholics in the Netherlands had way more children than Protestants in the period 1900-1960

Dutchfire is right here. Some population groups can even have subreplacement fertilities. We know subreplacement fertility from our developed countries in our times, but subreplacement fertilities existed also in the Ancient world, in Greek and Roman civilizations during their respective silver ages:

Polybius wrote (around year 140 BC, when lamenting Greek civilization's decline):

"In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and general decline and decay of population... This evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life."

And Cassius Dio (155 - 235 AD) cited the following speech of one of Roman emperors:

"Yet not even so, by threatening or urging or postponing or entreating, have I accomplished anything. You see for yourselves how much larger a mass you constitute than the married men, when you ought by this time to have furnished us with as many more children, or rather with several times your number. How otherwise shall families continue? How can the commonwealth be preserved if we neither marry nor produce children? Surely you are not expecting some to spring up from the earth to succeed to your goods and to public affairs, as myths describe. It is neither pleasing to Heaven nor creditable that our race should cease and the name of Romans meet extinguishment in us, and the city be given up to foreigners, - Greeks or even barbarians. We liberate slaves chiefly for the purpose of making out of them as many citizens as possible; we give our allies a share in the government that our numbers may increase: yet you, Romans of the original stock, including Quintii, Valerii, Iulli, are eager that your families and names at once shall perish with you..."