“Don't tell me that I don't exist”:

Karolis Dambrauskas,Emilia Baradziej

doi:10.14434/aeer.v37i1.32023

Abstract

This article discusses the ways national identity is constructed and practiced in North Macedonia. Based on data collected in 2015 during fieldwork in the Macedonian city of Bitola, and, especially, in the village of Trnovo and the city of Ohrid, the article explains how various notions of Macedonianness are constructed and politicized.To do this, several analytical prisms characteristic to the field of nationalism studies are used. The Macedonians' need for having their constructed identity recognized has its roots in Macedonia's turbulent national and international political environment. Even so, the evidence collected in the interviews with local informants will highlight how Macedonianness is often practiced by marking the rejection of other national identifications. In particular, the article demonstrates how the idea of antique national roots marks an attempt to re-use available historical materials on two different levels: to boost national pride and to legitimize political claims made by some Macedonian politicians.

Highlights

This article discusses the ways national identity is constructed and practiced in North Macedonia
The politicians tried to appropriate different notions of Ilinden and merge it with the diaspora policy. This reappropriation was carried through voluntaristic memory politics, exemplified by the attempts of Macedonia’s antiquization through such projects as Skopje 2014, touristic campaigns that promote Macedonia as ‘the cradle of civilization’ or individual efforts to trace the footprints of Macedonian language left in other languages
These attempts to construct national roots from various parts of antiquity were a response to various contemporary challenges faced by Macedonian state and society

Summary

Observing Macedonian identity

This inquiry is based on data collected in Summer 2015, through interviews with residents of the cities of Bitola and Ohrid, and the village of Trnovo, near Bitola. Such assumptions could be supported by statements like “We are united to defend the name of our country and identity of our nation” expressed by one of the official speakers during the St. Ilinden's celebration. Local right-wing politicians spoke in the name of all ‘Macedonian brothers and sisters’, irrespective of the time and place they lived They referred to all of the following as Macedonians: Philip II of Macedon, who knew nothing about such Christian saints as St. Ilinden, participants of the 1903 Ilinden Uprising against the Ottomans (not against the Greeks!), those who fled the region after the Greek Civil War, and those Macedonians who today live in Macedonia or abroad. The speakers spoke of all of them as one imagined Macedonian community living, in what Benedict Anderson called homogeneous time (Anderson 1991)

On the idiosyncratic notion of Macedonianness

The imagined community and its needs

Findings

Conclusions