OVERHAULING MACEDONIA’S HISTORY
Revising national narrative harder than changing name
FROM piles of toys cluttering the attic of his family home here, Nikola Cvetoski eventually extracts the Legend of Ancient Macedonia.
He said with this big, red book written by a local politician and published two years after Macedonia’s 1991 independence, “society told us that everything we had been taught was no longer the truth”.
“Suddenly, schools demanded that students buy this book,” fumed the 65-year-old retired mechanic, who grew up during Josip Broz Tito’s regime when Macedonia was part of communist Yugoslavia.
Macedonia’s history textbooks now look set for another overhaul as the Balkans country closes in on a settlement with neighbouring Greece in a decades-long, bitter dispute over the right to call itself the Republic of Macedonia.
But revising the national narrative, built up over more than two decades, may be harder than changing the country’s name.
Under Tito, a common Yugoslav identity was promoted that eclipsed learning at school in Macedonia about the likes of ancient warrior king Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alex-ander the Great, and his father Philip II.
But after the war-torn former Yugoslav Federation disintegrated during the 1990s, Macedonia saw a return of old nationalist sentiments that had been hushed by Tito’s regime.
Historian Todor Cepreganov said there was a “renewal of a national romanticism” in Macedonia, which would be boosted by rightwing leader Nikola Gruevski’s grip on power from 2006 to 2016.
As a result, Macedonian history textbooks started to look quite different.
By the 2011 edition, pupils aged 11 and 12 learnt how, in the Macedonian state under Philip, the ancient king had “conquered the Hellenic colonies”. And that his son, “Alexander the Macedonian”, had “managed to defeat them (the Greeks), forcing them to recognise his authority”.
Indeed, even if reconciliation now looks on the cards with Greece in the name row, both countries continue to stake a claim to Alexander the Great.
For more than a quarter of a century, Greece and Macedonia have rowed over the right of the former Yugoslav republic to call itself Macedonia, which Athens objects to because it has its own northern province of that name.
Greece fears the name, Republic of Macedonia, may imply territorial ambitions, and accuses Skopje of trying to usurp the heritage of the ancient Macedonians and stake a claim to Alexander the Great.
After recent talks between the two neighbours, a resolution may now be close. But the longer-term challenge could be how to recast the way Macedonians have been taught — literally through their history textbooks — to view and feel about their own history and culture.
For national celebrations, Macedonian children are dressed in clothes resembling those from ancient times. Some of their parents, meanwhile, view Macedonians not as Slavs, but rather direct descendants of Philip and Alexander.