Competing claims
I have two passages on Macedonia (and the wider world of the Balkans) to share from Roberrt Kaplan’s influential book Balkan Ghosts. As I said yesterday, my understanding of the Macedonian situation is tenuous, at best, and I have to review my materials before sitting down at my computer to explain it all, in writing. I was rifling through the Macedonian chapter in Kaplan’s book, feeling the light dawning once again, understanding it again, and these two explanatory historical notes popped out at me.
I am typing this by candlelight. Drinking coffee. I love the early morning.
Here is quote #1. This describes perfectly the essence of the Balkan chaos:
Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for ‘mixed salad’ (macedoine), defines the principal illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that its borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion. Because Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, had established a great kingdom in Macedonia in the fourth century BC, the Greeks believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because the Bulgarians at the end of the tenth century under King Samuel and again in the thirteenth century under King Ivan Assen II had extended the frontiers of Bulgaria all the way west to the Adriatic Sea, the Bulgarians believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because King Stefan Duhan had overrun Macedonia in the fourteenth century and had made Skopje, in Dame Rebecca [West’s] words, ‘a great city, and there he had been crowned one Easter Sunday Emperor and Autocrat of the Serbs and Byzantines, the Bulgars and the Albanians,’ the Serbs believed Macedonia to be theirs. In the Balkans, history is not viewed as tracing a chronological progression as it is in the West. Instead, history jumps around and moves in circles; and where history is perceived in such a way, myths take root. Evangelos Kofos, Greece’s preeminent scholar on Macedonia, has observed that these ‘historical legacies … sustained nations in their uphill drive toward state-building, national unification and, possibly, the reincarnation of long extinct empires.’
And here is quote #2. This reiterates what I described yesterday, only going into a bit more detail about what went down between the two World Wars.
After starting and losing two wars over Macedonia, Bulgaria’s King Ferdinant abdicated in 1919. For the next twenty years, until the outbreak of World War II, his son, King Boris III, presided over a political system in Sofia that was riven by coup attempts and other violent conspiracies connected to the loss of what Bulgarians considered their historic homeland. IMRO, radicalized by the defeats of 1913 and 1918, became a terrorist state within a state, and, helped by its skull-and-crossbones insignia, became synonymous in the outside world with hate and violent nihilism. Opium profits financed the purchase of IMRO’s weaponry. The standard fee for an IMRO assassination was twenty dollars, so Bulgarian politicians walked around with trains of bodyguards…
The terrorists, aided by Orthodox clergy, came from the Macedonian refugee population of Sofia’s slums. By the 1930s, Macedonian terrorists were hiring themselves to radical groups throughout Europe — in particular, to the Croatian Ustashe, whose chief paymaster was the fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini. A Bulgarian Macedonian nicknamed ‘Vlado the Chauffeur’ assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia — the crime that initiated Dame Rebecca’s passion for that country.
World War II provided another sickening reply of World War I and the Second Balkan War. Again, as in World War I, Bulgaria joined a German-led alliance against a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in order to regain Macedonia. Again, while forces of a German-speaking power occupied Serbia from the north, Bulgarian troops invaded and occupied Macedonia from the east. And again, Serb and Greek resistance forces, aided by the British, drove the Bulgarians back to the hated borders established in August 1913 at the conclusion of the Second Balkan War. At that point, Communist totalitarianism stopped history until the century’s final decade. Nothing of all this has yet been resolved.
