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REASONS WHY THE WATCHTOWER
THE TERM "MACEDONIA" AND ITS DERIVATIVES ARE NOT JUSTIFIED
FOR THEIR STATE AND NATIONAL IDENTIFICATION

Vice Admiral R.E. P. KAVALIEROU H.E.

The persistent efforts of Skopje to impose on the international community, and especially in Greece, the Greek historical names "Macedonia" and "Macedonians" for their state and national identification are well known. This shameless usurpation of the identity of the Macedonians, which is also the identity of the Greeks, as well as of the Greekness of the Name, Language, History and Culture of Macedonia, which can in no way be accepted, does not particularly surprise us because it began 60 years ago. What does surprise us is the recent recognition of Skopje by the USA with this Greek name, because it is uncharacteristic, inappropriate, offensive, dangerous, to the detriment of Greece, and certainly inconsistent with its previous positions and actions on the issue.
Irrefutable historical facts and documents prove that the renaming, with Stalin's consent, in August 1944 by Tito, from Southern Serbia to "Macedonia", had two goals: the first goal was the identification and weakening of Serbia, and the second and most important, the detachment of the Northern Greek Province of Macedonia to control the Aegean, especially the very important city and port of Thessaloniki, and the subsequent creation of the pseudo-Macedonia of the Aegean. It seems that the USA forgot the then clear and effective stance as well as its subsequent actions.
Specifically, the USA opposed this action of Tito and reacted immediately with the Secretary of State of the Roosevelt Administration, Edward R. Stetinius Jr., who, in his circular number 868014/26-12-44, stated the following: "This Government considers that any reference to the "Macedonian Nation", "Macedonian Homeland" or "Macedonian National Consciousness" is unjustified and demagogic, does not represent national or political reality, while it sees, in its present revival, a possible cloak for aggressive actions against Greece. The official policy of this Government is to take the necessary measures against those who will assist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria in creating a "Macedonian Question" to the detriment of Greece."
This policy was reinforced by later Presidents and even the US legislatures. The above statements proved prophetic since Tito and Stalin did indeed launch an offensive against Greece to which the US responded with the TRUMAN Doctrine and aid to Greece in 1947, in order to protect its territorial integrity from communist occupation. The above US view/position was also reinforced, among others, by the UN, Pope John Paul and the confessions of Stalin and Dimitrov.
Below, the main reasons that do not allow the use of the names "Macedonia", "Macedonian" and "Macedonian" by the new state will be briefly repeated:
a. It is not right for a country, which is part of a geographical region, to arbitrarily designate itself, in an official manner, as the representative of the entire region.
b. It does not represent either a national or political reality given that these names are purely Greek in origin, and that there is no Macedonian tribe. The use of these names in ancient Greece, even in designations such as "Kingdom of Macedonia of Philip II or Alexander the Great" indicated a geographical area and not an ethnicity. Macedonians like Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, Cypriots, etc. were all Greeks.
c. It can support territorial claims against neighboring countries, as has happened many times before.
d. There is no homogeneity in the population of the new state. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, October 28, 1992, page 19, by CMWOODHOUSE, a well-known historian and former member of the British Parliament who served Great Britain in Greece during and after the Second World War, the population consists of 40-45% Slavs, 30% Albanians, 10% Greeks and 10% Gypsies and others.
e. Everyone can perceive the falsification of the history of Macedonia in the following false claims/arguments that have been fabricated by Skopje officials in order to support their efforts to impose the use of the name Macedonia and its derivatives:

• • That Macedonians are not Greeks but a separate ethnicity.

• • That their language is not Greek, but the idiom spoken in the Skopje region.

• That Macedonia extends northward far beyond the boundaries of historical Macedonia, in such a way as to include actual Slavic regions that had never been parts of Macedonia in antiquity and which were in fact parts of ancient Dardania.
• That the ancient Macedonians were not Greeks, but a separate nation related to the Illyrians and Thracians.
• That when the Slavs descended into the Balkans, during the 6th and 7th centuries AD they merged with the non-Greek descendants of the ancient Macedonians and thus a new nation, the Slavo-Macedonians, was created.
• That the descendants of these medieval Slavo-Macedonians are the current Macedonians of Skopje.
• That in Bulgaria and Greece there are residents who belong to this "Macedonian Nation" who form oppressed minorities whose rights must be recognized.
• That anything called "Macedonian", morals, customs, culture, etc. is not Greek, but a creation of Macedonians of the Skopje type.

Of course, all these claims, under no circumstances, can withstand criticism because they are completely questionable both by historical and ethnological as well as cultural or sociological criteria.
The arguments against using the names "Macedonia" and "Macedonian" are substantial and, compared to the claims of the Skopjeites, are overwhelming and decisive.
The fabricated claims of the Skopjes, mentioned above, were and are constantly being put forward by the officials of Skopje not only when it was a federal state but especially and more persistently now that it is an independent state. Although they do not withstand even elementary criticism since they are false and unjustified, the following evidence will prove that the arguments refuting them are substantial, overwhelming and decisive.
Macedonia alone, with its millennia of old glory, will not allow history to be changed. Just hearing the names of Aristotle and Alexander the Great and their contribution to the history of mankind, the former with his wisdom and the latter with his martial virtue, bravery, excellent politics and greatness, should be enough to bring to their senses all those who try to distort its history.
Macedonia has always been and still is the most advanced bulwark and bastion of Greece.
All historical sources agree regarding the geographical location of ancient Macedonia, whose boundaries were as follows:

• • The Aegean Sea and the mountains Kamvounia, Pieria and Olympus to the south.

• • Lakes Ohrid and Prespa and the Vamvouna, Skomio and Rhodope mountains to the north.

• • The Nestos River to the east and the Grammos and Pindos mountains to the west.

The inhabitants of this region, the Macedonians, belonged to one of the most ancient Greek tribes. Their closest relatives were the Thessalians and especially the Magnesians with whom they shared Aeolian ancestry.
The language they spoke belonged to the most ancient types of Greek and was related to the dialects of Aeolian, Arcadian, Cypriot and Mycenaean.
The religion of the Macedonians was the same as the religion of other Greeks, and their myths and traditions were the same as those found throughout the Greek world.
King Philip II of Macedonia and his son Alexander the Great – to whom the Skopjeans are diligently trying to give a “Slavo-Macedonian” identity – acted not simply as Greeks but as Panhellenic Leaders in the sense that they put into practice the old idea of ​​forming a unified Greek state by merging the Greek city-states.
In the periods that followed, and especially after the appearance of the Slavs and Bulgarians in the Balkans (6th and 7th centuries AD), the geographical region of Macedonia as previously defined continued to be the bulwark and bastion of Hellenism, just as it had been in antiquity.
The Old Testament, ancient writers, modern researchers, countless inscriptions on statues, tombs, columns with Greek names and votive offerings, thousands of coins, not only in Macedonia and the rest of Greece but also in foreign countries such as Libya, Egypt and Asia, all the way to India, categorically confirm that the Macedonians, as Greeks, had the same gods, the same religious cults, and that they were the ones who spread their language, which was Greek, and the Greek spirit throughout the then known world.
The Old Testament contains irrefutable and irrefutable evidence in its texts. In one of them, the Prophet Daniel, about 200 years before the birth of Alexander the Great, predicted that “the King of the Medes and Persians would be defeated by a Greek King, and that this first great King would be succeeded by four Kings from the same Kingdom.”
Ancient writers and historians also provide countless pieces of evidence. The first historical reference is given by Homer who in the Iliad mentions the names of various Pelasgian and Greek tribes that lived in Macedonia.
Strabo states: "Of course Macedonia is part of Greece."
Herodotus writes: "The descendants of Perdiccas, the first King of the Macedonians, are Greeks, as they themselves wish and as I myself know."
Thucydides states that: "The Macedonians are made up of various Greek tribes under various Kings."
Polybius says: "What and how great honor should belong to the Macedonians who for most of their lives never stopped fighting against the Barbarians for the safety of the Greeks."
Arrian, in his book "The Ascent of Alexander", mentions that after the Battle of the Granicus, Alexander did the following: "He sent to Athens, the first city of all the Greeks, and not to Pella, which was the capital of Macedonia, three hundred suits of armor and other Persian spoils, to be entrusted to the patroness Athena with the dedication "Alexander to Philip and the Greeks, except the Lacedaemonians, from the Barbarians who inhabit Asia". He also says that 2000 Greek mercenaries of the Persians, whom he captured, he sent as prisoners to Macedonia to work there as slaves "because, despite the common glories of the Greeks, being Greeks, they fought against Greece on behalf of the Barbarians".
With these actions, Alexander, in addition to his disappointment at the non-participation of the Spartans in the Panhellenic campaign against the Persians and the very few cases in which Greeks fought on the side of the Persians, mainly shows how proud he felt of his Greek origin, that he considered his achievement to be purely Greek and that the other Macedonians should have felt the same since Alexander did not make any special mention of them.
Pausanias confirms that the Macedonians were members of the Delphic Amphictyony, saying: "In my time the Amphictyony was thirty. The regions of Nicopolis, Macedonia and Thessaly each sent six representatives" since, as is known to all, only Greeks were members of the Amphictyony. Pausanias also confirms that the Macedonians participated in the Olympic Games, where only Greeks could compete, with many participants and many winners.
Johann Gustavus Dreisen, a prominent German philologist and historian who wrote about Alexander the Great, emphasizes that: "both Philip and Alexander carried and transmitted to the peoples of Asia not the Macedonian civilization, because it was never independent, but the Greek civilization."

When maps reveal the truth

The attempts made by the Skopjeites to provide evidence for their claims, by constructing fake maps, have not yielded results. No matter how hard one tries, one will not find, anywhere in the world, maps printed before 1944 that show the word "Macedonia" or any other country except Greece.
How baseless the arguments of the Skopjeans are in their attempt to advance their claims that there is a "Macedonian Nation" is demonstrated by the following ethnological and historical maps:

• • The ethnographic map of ethnicities in Macedonia during the period 1912-1926, which was printed in 1970 by New Cambridge Modern History.

• • Kieport's ethnographic map printed in Berlin in 1818.

• • The ethnographic map created by the Italian Amendore Vergili in 1908 based on the Turkish census conducted by Hilmi Pasha.

• • The Stanford map.

• • The historical map of Greece published in Baltimore by E.Z. Coal in 1824, in whose note the publisher describes Macedonia as part of Mainland Greece while noting that its northern borders lie beyond the city of Monastir.

• • The map published by the famous Historian-Geographer ORTELIUS in 1579, referring to the missionary journeys of the Apostle Paul, where the Greek territory appears unified, including Macedonia.

• • The ethnographic map of the Balkans published in Paris in 1878, which shows the great superiority of the Greek population over all other ethnicities without any indication of the self-proclaimed Macedonians.

None of these maps, or any others issued before World War II, make any reference to a separate "Macedonian Nation" for the simple reason that there was no such nation before Tito invented it.

There is no Macedonian language.

The attempts of the Skopjeites to present evidence that the so-called "Macedonian language" is the dialect spoken in the Skopje region cannot convince anyone. Their language, which contains an independent Slavic language, was completely unknown until 1944. And no matter how hard one tries, one will not find anything to prove its existence. The language used by the Slavic-speaking inhabitants of southern Yugoslavia and southwestern Bulgaria was known as a dialect of Bulgarian.
After the creation of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, for obvious political reasons, a very large number of philologists and scholars of philology were recruited in order to create a separate written language.
Taking the already spoken Bulgarian dialect as a starting point and borrowing extensively from Greek, Serbian, Russian and other Slavic languages, they created a philological language called "Macedonian", which was recognized by the Yugoslav Constitution as one of the three official languages ​​of the country. The fact that there is not a single text or inscription in this language before 1944 proves, without a doubt, that it has no connection with the ancient Macedonians and their descendants who always spoke Greek.
The fact that the ancient Macedonians spoke the same language as the other Greeks is also evident in the work of the Roman Historian Livy, who writes that the assembly of the Greeks in Aetolia in 200 BC was attended by "representatives from the Aetolians, the Acarnanians, and the Macedonians, who all spoke the same language."
There is no official text in the recent or recent past that mentions "Macedonia" or "Macedonians". Neither the Treaty of Berlin nor the Treaty of St. Stephen make any reference to this possibility. The official Turkish census of 1905 gives numerical data on the populations of the geographical region of Macedonia, which was divided into the Vilayets of Thessaloniki and Monastir, shows a great predominance of Greeks while making no reference to "Macedonians" for the simple reason that none of the respondents declared such an origin.
A fact that has been accepted even by Slavic historians is that the settlement of the Slavs in the Balkans took place in the 6th century AD and that their cultural history begins during the 10th century AD. The founders of the cultural history of the Slavs were two Greek monks from Thessaloniki, Cyril and Methodius, who during the 9th century, starting from Macedonia, taught the Slavs the Greek-based Cyrillic script and the Christian faith of the Greek Orthodox Church. Thus, the first essential sources of their cultural life and history are Byzantine Greek.
This fact alone deprives the Slavs of the right to claim any historical connection with the Balkans before the 6th century AD and any cultural connection before the 10th century. The Skopje theory that Cyril and Methodius were Slavo-Macedonians, which is at least funny, received a strong blow from Pope John Paul II, who on December 31, 1980, distributed to the entire Catholic Church a declaration in which Cyril and Methodius are commemorated as "the Greek brothers" and established as protectors of Europe.

Facts that do not excuse ignorance

The well-known fact that the Old Testament was first translated into Greek.
The Christian religion took advantage of the fact that the Greek language, thanks to Alexander and his successors, had become universal and used it as the main means of its dissemination so that it could be understood by the various nations.
The three Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles were originally written in Greek, while the Gospel of Matthew, which was written in Aramaic, was translated into Greek very early on.
The fact that the Apostle Paul began his Apostolic tours from Macedonia.
The explanation is that because Alexander the Great and his successors had spread Greek culture and Greek education abroad, Greek was spoken in Paul's home and he himself had been taught Greek sciences.
Holzner in his book referring to Paul writes: "Once upon a time, the young hero (Alexander) came from Macedonia at the age of 22 and brought the gifts of the West, the Greek language and Philosophy, to the East. Now the West claimed the most precious gift from the East, the teaching of the Nazarene…..."
The history and cultural heritage of Macedonia as a "Hellenistic era" influenced the history of humanity.
As stated in a special study of 1955 by the Institute of Foreign Affairs and LUND University of Sweden, the history of Macedonia is not only the history of the Greeks but also of all Europeans, given that the Macedonians spread Greek culture throughout Europe and the entire world.
The position of the European Union
In December 1991 and June 1992, the European Union, in the conditions it set for recognizing the new state of Skopje, included the condition that the word Macedonia not be used in its name.

Following the above, the usurpation by the Skopjeans, even as a synthetic of the Greek name "Macedonia", for their state and national identification is not justified, nor is it permitted. The deliberate ignorance or neglect of historical reality, by third countries, small or large, to serve any of their interests, is also not permitted. We could discuss some concession if they brought us even one written or unwritten monument, map or other find, before 1944 that is not Greek.