What is the controversy with Macedonia.?

Question

The Greeks say that the people who live in todays republic of Macedonia are not of the same ethnic group as the ancient Macendonians. Is this ture? if so then can anyone explain. If it is not true can you elaborate.

Answer 1

The Greeks are not the ones that say that! The official Policy of that Slavic state is that they are not related to ancient Macedonia and that they are Slavs! (Actually the country's name is Makedonija but they use as international name the Greek name Macedonia and they cause confusion!).
Here are some official statements from the Slav Macedonia government! (I have to repeat that this are official country statements!)
First of all lets see what the (well respected by the Greeks also) first President of Slav Macedonia has said!
“We are Slavs who came to this area in the sixth century ... we are not descendants of the ancient Macedonians" (Foreign Information Service Daily Report, Eastern Europe, February 26, 1992, p. 35). Also, Mr. Gligorov declared: "We are Macedonians but we are Slav Macedonians. That's who we are! We have no connection to Alexander the Greek and his Macedonia… Our ancestors came here in the 5th and 6th century" (Toronto Star, March 15, 1992).
But was only Mr Gligorof? No! They constant rufuse the conection with real Macedonia in Greece and Alexander! Let’s see some more statements: on 22 January 1999, Ambassador of the FYROM to USA, Ljubica Achevska gave a speech on the present situation in the Balkans. In answering questions at the end of her speech Mrs. Acevshka said: "We do not claim to be descendants of Alexander the Great … Greece is Macedonia’s second largest trading partner, and its number one investor. Instead of opting for war, we have chosen the mediation of the United Nations, with talks on the ambassadorial level under Mr. Vance and Mr. Nemitz." In reply to another question about the ethnic origin of the people of FYROM, Ambassador Achevska stated that "we are Slavs and we speak a Slav language”.
Quite clear statements I have to say!
Lets continiue! There are actually a lot of statements but i can see that a lot of Slav Macedonians dont know them!
On 24 February 1999, in an interview with the Ottawa Citizen, Gyordan Veselinov, FYROM'S Ambassador to Canada, admitted, "We are not related to the northern Greeks who produced leaders like Philip and Alexander the Great. We are a Slav people and our language is closely related to Bulgarian." He also commented, “There is some confusion about the identity of the people of my country".
And one more! Moreover, the Foreign Minister of the FYROM, Slobodan Casule, in an interview to Utrinski Vesnik of Skopje on December 29, 2001, said that he mentioned to the Foreign Minister of Bulgaria, Solomon Pasi, that they "belong to the same Slav people.”
As you can see the country's policy is to claim their Slavic origin and no connection to the ancient Macedonians who were Greeks!
Let me also write down why the Ancient Macedonians where a Greek tribe!
For the moment i will not post a detailed description of the proofs that ancient Macedonia was Greek but I will post what the most respected historians say about that! Lets start with the most respectfull, the world authority in history of Macedonia:
Nicholas G. L. Hammond, ‘Philip of Macedon’
Duckworth Publishing, February 1998
"Philip was born a Greek of the most aristocratic, indeed of divine, descent... Philip was both a Greek and a Macedonian, even as Demosthenes was a Greek and an Athenian...The Macedonians over whom Philip was to rule were an outlying family member of the Greek-speaking peoples."
"As subjects of the king the Upper Macedonians were henceforth on the same footing as the original Macedonians, in that they could qualify for service in the King's Forces and thereby obtain the elite citizenship. At one bound the territory, the population and wealth of the kingdom were doubled. Moreover since the great majority of the new subjects were speakers of the West Greek dialect, the enlarged army was Greek-speaking throughout."
And "What language did these `Macedones' speak? The name itself is Greek in root and in ethnic termination. It probably means `highlanders', and it is comparable to Greek tribal names such as `Orestai' and `Oreitai', meaning 'mountain-men'. A reputedly earlier variant, `Maketai', has the same root, which means `high', as in the Greek adjective makednos or the noun mekos. The genealogy of eponymous ancestors which Hesiod recorded […] has a bearing on the question of Greek speech. First, Hesiod made Macedon a brother of Magnes; as we know from inscriptions that the Magnetes spoke the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language, we have a predisposition to suppose that the Macedones spoke the Aeolic dialect. Secondly, Hesiod made Macedon and Magnes first cousins of Hellen's three sons - Dorus, Xouthus, and Aeolus-who were the founders of three dialects of Greek speech, namely Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic. Hesiod would not have recorded this relationship, unless he had believed, probably in the seventh century, that the Macedones were a Greek speaking people. The next evidence comes from Persia. At the turn of the sixth century the Persians described the tribute-paying peoples of their province in Europe, and one of them was the `yauna takabara', which meant `Greeks wearing the hat'. There were Greeks in Greek city-states here and there in the province, but they were of various origins and not distinguished by a common hat. However, the Macedonians wore a distinctive hat, the kausia. We conclude that the Persians believed the Macedonians to be speakers of Greek. Finally, in the latter part of the fifth century a Greek historian, Hellanicus, visited Macedonia and modified Hesiod's genealogy by making Macedon not a cousin, but a son of Aeolus, thus bringing Macedon and his descendants firmly into the Aeolic branch of the Greek-speaking family. Hesiod, Persia, and Hellanicus had no motive for making a false statement about the language of the Macedonians, who were then an obscure and not a powerful people. Their independent testimonies should be accepted as conclusive (N.G.L. Hammond, The Macedonian State, p.12-13

And Malcolm Errington, ‘A History of Macedonia’
(University of California Press, February 1993, pg 3)
"That the Macedonians and their kings did in fact speak a dialect of Greek and bore Greek names may be regarded nowadays as certain."
"Ancient allegations that the Macedonians were non-Greeks all had their origin in Athens at the time of the struggle with Philip II. Then as now, political struggle created the prejudice. The orator Aeschines once even found it necessary, in order to counteract the prejudice vigorously fomented by his opponents, to defend Philip on this issue and describe him at a meeting of the Athenian Popular Assembly as being 'Entirely Greek'. Demosthenes' allegations were lent on appearance of credibility by the fact, apparent to every observer, that the life-style of the Macedonians, being determined by specific geographical and historical conditions, was different from that of a Greek city-state. This alien way of life was, however, common to western Greeks of Epiros, Akarnania and Aitolia, as well as to the Macedonians, and their fundamental Greek nationality was never doubted. Only as a consequence of the political disagreement with Macedonia was the issue raised at all."
"The Molossians were the strongest and, decisive for Macedonia, most easterly of the three most important Epirote tribes, which, like Macedonia but unlike the Thesprotians and the Chaonians, still retained their monarchy. They were Greeks, spoke a similar dialect to that of Macedonia, suffered just as much from the depredations of the Illyrians and were in principle the natural partners of the Macedonian king who wished to tackle the Illyrian problem at its roots."
And Robin Lane Fox - "Alexander the Great"

"he was still in a world of Greek gods and sacrifices, of Greek plays and Greek language,though the natives might speak Greek with a northern accent which hardened 'ch' into 'g','th' into 'd' and pronounced King Philip as Bilip".
Page 30.
"Philip's mother had been a Lyncestian noblewoman" - "rebellious kings of Lyncestis who traced their origins to the notorious Bacchiad kings of Greek Corinth"
Page 32.
"Olympia's royal ancestry traced back to the hero Achilles, and the blood of Helen of Troy was believed to run on her father's side"
Page 44.
"The Macedonian kings, who maintained that their Greek ancestry traced back to Zeus, had long given homes and patronage to Greece's most distinguished artists"
Page 48.
"But Alexander was stressing his link with Achilles... Achilles was also a stirring Greek hero, useful for a Macedonian king whose Greek ancestry did not stop Greeks from calling him a barbarian"
Page 60.
"No man, and only one hero, had been called invincible before him, and then only by a poet, but the hero was Heracles, ancestor of the Macedonian kings"
Page 71.

"War, Philip had announced, 'was being declared against the Persians on behalf of the Greeks, to punish the barbarians for their lawless treatment of the old Greek temples"
Page 92.
"among the conservative Greek opinion there would be no regrets that Alexander the Greek leader was invading the barbarians"
Page 101.
"To his ancestors (to a Persian's ancestors) Macedonians were only known as 'yona takabara', the 'Greeks who wear shields on their heads', an allusion to their broad-brimmed hats"
Page 104.
"As for the hired Greeks in Persian service, thousands of the dead were to be buried, but the prisoners were bound in fetters and sent to hard labour in Macedonia, 'because they had fought as Greeks against Greeks, on behalf of barbarians, contrary to the common decrees of the Greek allies'"
Page 123.
"Alexander son of Philip and the Greeks, except the Spartans...", as "Sparta did not consider it to be her fathers' practice to follow, but to lead"
Page 123.
"In spirit, Alexander made a gesture to the Lydians' sensitivities, though his Greek crusade owed them nothing as they were not Greeks."
Page 128.
"Alexander was not the first Greek to be honoured as a god for political favour..."
Page 131.
"Alexander was recognized as a son of Zeus after his visit"
Page 201.
"it was the Delphi of the Greek East and as a Hellene, not as Pharaoh, Alexander would be curious..."
Page 204.
"supported the belief that he was the Greek gos Zeus's son"
Page 214.
"when his Macedonians mutinied at the end of their marching, they were said to have ridiculed him and told him to 'go fight alone with his father', meaning Zeus, not Philip"
Page 216.
"The occasion was not lost on Alexander: at Susa, he sacrificed to Greek gods and held Greek gymnastic games..."
Page 253.
"In return he left behind Darius's mother, daughters and the son whom he had captured at Issus, and appointed teachers to teach them the Greek language."
Page 254.
"Alexander was still the Greek avenger of Persian sacrilege who told his troops, it was said 'that Persepolis was the most hateful city in the world'. On the road there, he met with the families of Greeks who had deported to Persia by previous kings, and true to his slogan, he honoured them conspicuously, giving them money, five changes of clothing, farm animals, corn, a free passage home, and exemption from taxes and bureaucratic harassments."
Page 256.
And even Borza who was not sure at first if the Ancient Macedonians were Greeks he now has come to the same conclusion as anyone else:
Eugene N. Borza, ‘Makedonika’
Regina Books, Claremont CA
"Our understanding of the Macedonians' emergence into history is confounded by two events: the establishment of the Macedonians as an identifiable ethnic group, and the foundation of their ruling house. The "HIGHLANDERS" or "MAKEDONES" of the mountainous regions of western Macedonia ARE DERIVED FROM NORTHWEST GREEK STOCK; THEY WERE AKIN BOTH TO THOSE WHO AT AN EARLIER TIME MAY HAVE MIGRATED SOUTH TO BECOME THE HISTORICAL "DORIANS", and to other Pindus tribes who were the ancestors of the Epirotes or Molossians. That is, we may suggest that NORTHWEST GREECE PROVIDED A POOL OF INDO-EUROPEAN SPEAKERS OF PROTO-GREEK from which were drawn the tribes who later were known by different names as they established their regional identities in separate parts of the country."
"First, the matter of the Hellenic origins of the Macedonians: Nicholas Hammond's general conclusion (though not the details of his arguments)that the origin of the Macedonians lies in the pool of proto-Greek speakers who migrated out of the Pindus mountains during the Iron Age, is acceptable."
And these Richard Stoneman, Ulrich Wilcken ,John V.A. Fine ,A. B. Bossworth ,Ernst Badian ,Charles Edson,Thomas Martin,Hermann Bengtson ,Paul Cartledge ,A.R. Burn ,Peter Green ,Mary Renault ,J.M. Roberts,R. M. Cook,Francois Chamoux ,Bevan ,Peter Tsouras ,Lewis Vance Cummings ,D.G Hogarth ,L.S. Stavrianos
Martin Sicker ,Graham Shipley ,Richard Gabriel,Michael Cage,Samuel Eddy ,René Grousset ,Anthony E. David ,Donald R. Dudley THEY ALL AGREE THAT ANCIENT MACEDONIANS WERE GREEKS. Simple as that!!

Answer 2

Because Greece occupied big part of Macedonia.
Before Alexander who occupied Elin Tribes they fought between self , Alexander respected foreigner cultures and didn't arraigned foreigner cultures.To say Macedonia is part of Greece is same how to say Macedonia is part of Iran, Alexander had half Persian son.
Big migrate never happen, people migrate whole time in little groups, in 6 century in Balkan come Slavs and Tatooms mix with Slavs , that Tatooms accept Macedonian Language and culture (Bulgarians) can you see that Bulgarian speak like little Macedonian babes? and too different words in Bulgarian Language.)Pirin Macedonia speak with Macedonian dialect.
Patrida means lends is from father.We say Mother Language, people mixed and language not stop changing.
Greek is more Turkish from father, that means Greece without Aegean Macedonia belongs Turkey, because strategy of Ottoman Empire for Greek people, interesting that Empire had different strategy in different lends.Greek helped Ottoman Empire to destroys Republic of Krusevo, there is evidences for this fact and killed Macedonian in Aegean Macedonia.But, if they want to be Greek, that is them own right, but why they stolen Macedonian History and give own self rights negate Macedonians? Because they occupied big part of Macedonia.
Slavs have to much brilliant scientists like Nikola Tesla, it is onset to be Slavs, but Macedonians are Macedonians, they are not Greeks or Slavs.
Mr Kiro Gligorov is Macedonain Roman (Vlav), he is not Slavs and Vardar Macedonia was under Serbia in his childhod , Serbian compulsiond Macedonian to learn and speak Serbian language and learn Serbian History. To much lays for Macedonian from neigbors, because that some of Macedonians are in confusion and there are big vishes to be friend with neighbors who obviesly don't like that.
Find who sponsored most of progects in Univercity of California and few in others ones in US against Macedonia .
http://www.makedonika.org/processpaid.aspcontentid=ti.2001.pdf
http://www.historyofmacedonia.org/ConciseMacedonia/Documents.html