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ALEXANDER the GREAT and the MACEDONIAN CONFLICT Loring

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ALEXANDER the GREAT and the MACEDONIAN CONFLICT Loring CHAPTER THIRTEEN ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND THE MACEDONIAN CONFLICT Loring M. Danforth Alexander the Great is without a doubt the most famous Macedonian who ever lived. No discussion of Macedonia, ancient or modern, is possible without at least some reference to this brilliant general, powerful king, and conqueror of the known world. A 1996 National Geographic article on the newly independent Republic of Macedonia describes Macedonia as "the homeland of Alexander the Great," adding that "today's Macedonians ... trace their name to the empire of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC" (Vesilind 1996: 124). Comments like these raise the very issue that lies at the heart of the Macedonian conflict, the "global cultural war" (Featherstone 1990: 10) that since the late 1980s has been waged by Greeks and Macedonians in the Balkans and in the diaspora over which group has the right to identify themselves as Macedonians. The Macedonian conflict is a dispute over the name "Macedonia," the glorious legacy of Alexander the Great and the ancient Macedonians, and ultimately the territory of Macedonia itself. For in the crowded Balkan land­ scape geography and history are bitterly contested, as Greece and Macedonia both assert their mutually exclusive claims over the same places, the same symbols, and the same famous ancestors. 1 I begin this essay with a brief account of the history of the Mace­ danian conflict and a summary of both the Greek and the Macedonian positions on the issues involved. Drawing on recent theoretical work on nationalism and the construction of national identities and cul­ tures, I then examine the role of classical archaeology in creating the "symbolic capital" (Bourdieu 1977) with which Greeks and Mace­ donians each seek to legitimate their own national narratives of his­ torical continuity with ancient Macedonia. Finally, I show how both 1 For a more detailed discussion of the Macedonian conflict see Danforth 1995. 348 LORING M. DANFORTH groups attempt to promote their national interests in the worlds of academia, public opinion, and international affairs by attempting to appropriate for their own exclusive use two of the most important symbols in the Macedonian conflict-the sun or star of V ergina and Alexander the Great himself. The Macedonian Qyestion in Balkan History The Macedonian Question has dominated Balkan history and poli­ tics for over a hundred years. During the Ottoman period the pop­ ulation of Macedonia included an amazing diversity of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Toward the end of the nineteenth cen­ tury Greece, Bulgaria, and to a lesser extent Serbia, became involved in the "Macedonian Struggle," in which each state asserted its irre­ dentist claims over the people and the territory of Macedonia. At the end of the Balkan Wars (1912-13) Macedonia was divided among Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia, and the inhabitants of the area were subject to policies of forced assimilation, whose goals were to trans­ form the diverse population of the area into ethnically pure and homogeneous populations consisting exclusively of Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs. Under the Metaxas dictatorship of 1936-40 the Slavic-speaking population of Greek Macedonia, some of whom by this time had begun to develop a Macedonian national identity, experienced severe repression. After the Greek Civil War (1946-49), in which many Macedonians supported the unsuccessful Communist cause, some 35,000 Macedonians fled to Yugoslavia and other countries in east­ em Europe under extremely difficult circumstances. In the decades that followed, conservative Greek governments continued the policy of forced Hellenization. In the mid 1980s a small group of people from northern Greece asserted their existence as a Macedonian minor­ ity and began to demand increased linguistic and cultural rights. Until World War II the official Serbian (and later Yugoslav) posi­ tion on the Macedonian Question was that the Slavs of Macedonia did not constitute a distinct ethnic or national group, but were actu­ ally all "South Serbs." In 1944, however, Tito and the leaders of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia established the People's Republic of Macedonia with its capital of Skopje as one of the states of the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. At this time the existence of a .
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