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Victor Friedman on Macedonia - Interview with Balkanalysis

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 Professor Victor Friedman is one of the world’s foremost experts on Balkan languages, and has been studying them for almost four decades, since 1993 as a linguist at the University of Chicago. Professor Friedman has a special place in his heart for Macedonia, which he first visited in 1971. This year finds him back in the country, as the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Grant from the US Department of Education and a research grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.(All opinions expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the funding organizations.) Balkanalysis.com Director Christopher Deliso caught up with Professor Friedman recently in Skopje for an interview. Their engrossing and wide-ranging conversation, covering everything from linguistic history, politics and lobbying to national identity and multiculturalism, is reproduced below for our readers. Christopher Deliso: Victor, thanks for taking the time to discuss your ideas and your research, ...
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Macedonian History in October

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 The Macedonian people and Macedonia have a rich centuries-old tradition and a large number of important events that are permanently engraved in the collective national memory of the Macedonian people, confirming and reflecting the uniqueness of the Macedonian people and their centuries-old identity. To refresh the memories of some of them, the oldest Macedonian daily newspaper Nova Makedonija regularly publishes the column "Dates to Remember", where every month they highlight events related to Macedonian history and prominent Macedonian actors. Today we are devoting to the events in Macedonian history in the month of October. As you will see, the month October is almost entirely focused on the Second World War... October 1, 331 BC - Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, defeats Darius III of Persia in the Battle of Gaugamela.  It was the second and final battle between the two kings, and is considered to be the final blow to the Achaemenid Empi...
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Is there a connection between Scotland and Macedonia?

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  Is there a connection between Scotland and Macedonia? Interestingly, we have to mention here that we talk about connections that some of the Scots themselves trace with the ancient Macedonians. So we can discover the following statement on the homepage of the well known scottish Gordon Clan: The origin of the Gordon clan in Scotland was not Gaelic. The Gordon clan is originally from Normandy, where their ancestors are said to have had large possessions. From the great antiquity of the race, many fabulous accounts have been given of the descent of the Gordons. Some derive them from a city of Macedonia, called Gordonia (close to modern day Gevgelija) .  Some Scottish sources seem to testify to an origin from the city of "Gordonia" (near Gevgelija, near the Macedonian-Greek border). Sir Walter Scott also tells us that the Scottish forces under William Wallace would "resemble those of the Macedonian phalanx": The favourite Scottish order of battle somewhat resembled t...
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Yugoslavia and Macedonia as victors in World War II

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  Macedonian historians on the course and results of the war Generally little is known in the West about Yugoslavia during World War II, and next to nothing about Macedonia. In this respect, Shoa.de hopes for a certain “aha effect” when it publishes several translations from a lengthy documentation that the Skopjе daily newspaper “Utrinski vesnik” published as a supplement to its weekend edition of May 7th and 8th, 2005. It is about two aspects:  First, about the "tough nut" Yugoslavia, which was apparently easily "cracked" by German, Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops in April 1941, but which afterwards proved to be almost insurmountable thanks to the partisan struggle under Marshal Tito.  And secondly: In the course of this struggle, the oldest cultural nation of the Slavs, the Macedonians - who gave the world the Slavic cultural donors Cyrill and Method, Clement and Naum etc. - after centuries of occupation by Byzantium, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia ...
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For the Greeks, Macedo was a derogatory name

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  The work "Friedrich August Wolf's Lectures on Ancient Studies, Volume Four", published in 1835, is the subject of our short article today. Friedrich August Christian Wilhelm Wolf, as he was known in full, was a German classical philologist and scholar of antiquity. He is considered the founder of classical and modern philology. The following is a quote from page 28 (translated): Macedonians should not be considered Greeks; the ancients did not count them among them and called them barbarians; in fact, Macedo was a derogatory name . They differed from the Greeks in their customs and had many barbaric characteristics long after the Greeks were already civilized. The first time we see Macedonia shine is in the time of Archelaus in Socrates. He had a court where Greek culture prevailed and a lot of young people around him. There was no culture in the country itself; this was only achieved in Philip's time. The Greeks did not easily count among themselves peoples who had...
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The Peoples of Europe in Linguistic Classification - 1925

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 Again we have a nice map relevant to Macedonia. This German map dates from 1925.  The title of the map, of course, immediately reveals what the map is supposed to represent: The peoples of Europe in linguistic structure (Die Völker Europas in sprachlicher Gliederung). The map was designed by Prof. Dr. Arthur Haberlandt. It was drawn by E. Monzert. The map was published by Strecker and Schröder in Stuttgart.  The map is part of the "Illustrierte Völkerkunde" (Illustrated Ethnology, second volume) published in 1926. Publisher was the physician, ethnologist and ethnographer Dr. Georg Buschan. On this map we see the peoples of Europe listed, as well as their languages they used to speak. The authors make a rough grouping based on the language families. See the following image, which shows the Balkans as well as the description for the languages. There we can see that Macedonia is marked in the Slavic-speaking area. And also that the area is marked with the number 67. The leg...
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Hellenism owes its renaissance to a non-Greek!

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 In the ongoing debate about whether the ancient Macedonians or Alexander the Great were Greeks, we would like to recall the Lexicon of Lost Peoples. There we find a concrete reference to this question. But first, let's look at a short bio about the author of the work. About Harald Haarmann Harald Haarmann (born April 16, 1946 in Braunschweig) is a German linguist, cultural scientist and author. He studied general linguistics, various individual philological disciplines and prehistory at the universities of Hamburg, Bonn, Coimbra and Bangor. Haarmann received his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1970 and completed his habilitation at the University of Trier in 1979. He has taught and researched at various German and Japanese universities and is a member of the research team at the Research Centre on Multilingualism (Brussels). Since 2003 he has been Vice President of the Institute of Archaeomythology (headquarters in Sebastopol (California), USA) and Director of its Europea...
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