Summary Overview: Some Historical Facts on the Ground

Abstract

Macedonia is largely a land-locked Balkan region with the Serbian frontier in the north and the Albanian frontier in the west. On the east and south are the Pirin and Aegean portions of Macedonia, now parts of Bulgaria and Greece. Within these confines there is, since 1991, a new Balkan country known by its official name as The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), which Greece recognizes internally as Skopia.1 The term “Macedonia” in Greece is reserved for that region in Northern Greece that roughly corresponds to the ancient kingdom of Macedon at the time of Philip II and Alexander the Great. Later on, these borders would expand greatly in the Hellenistic era to include all three portions above. The Macedonians in FYROM have named their country Republic of Macedonia, and their official language is “Macedonian,” a Slav-oriented dialect2 that was codified as a language only in 1951 with the help of an American Harvard Slav-specialist, Horace G. Lunt. The Macedonians in Greece are rapidly being assimilated into a Greek identity (Karakasidou, 1994; 1997); and, in a parallel development, the Macedonians in Bulgaria into a Bulgarian identity (Seraphinoff and Stefou, 2008).