[QUOTE="QQabitmoar"]
I would prove you wrong. But if I do, this thread is gonna degrade into a political debate, since I just happen to be from Greece. Anyway, you are terribly wrong, everything indicates that the ancient Macedonians were, in fact, as Greek as it gets. Modern Macedonia (see, unlike most Greeks I realise it's stupid to call them FYROM now...) are Slavs. Revise your history abit.
Political debate incoming...
Screw it, imma just go sleep.
SrpskiVojnik
Language has little to do with the origin of Macedonians because genetically, Macedonians are more native Balkanite than Slavic (Macedonians and Russians are not same). Additionally, the idea of a Greece didn't even exist back then. Only the Romans called the peninsula Greece. The name was later used to unify all peoples living on the southern portion of the Balkan peninsula during the 19th century into a nation-state supported by the British with romanticist views of ancient Balkans. All this only occurred because the Christians there didn't like the idea of living in a Islam-dominated Empire and wanted to live in a Christian country instead. Before then, the people who lived in the Eastern Roman Empire (note. the concept of a Byzantine Empire never existed as it was only a name given by modern scholars to describe the Eastern Roman Empire) after the fall of Rome only called themselves Roman and continued to do so until the fall of Constantinople. So, any idea of real continunity between ancient Greeks and modern Greeks is laughable.
Did I imply anywhere that there's a continuity between modern and ancient Greeks? The history of the Balkans is a total mess, we are more Slavik and Albanian than anything else. But the concept of Greece existed back then. Not as a nation, as the concept of nation didn't exist, but as a people. Try reading some ancient Greek writers, they recognised themselves as Greeks, despite being divided in city-states and constantly in war with one another. Any city-state, colony, they recognised themselves as Greeks, not as part of a nation, but as part of a genral civilisation. They used to call anyone who wasn't Greek a 'barbarian', not with the same meaning it has today, it just meant non-Greek back then. Sure, they were Athenian, Spartan, Conrinthian first, but they knew they were also Greek.
As for modern Greece, when the revolution started in the 19th century, influenced by the ideas of the French revolution, the people back then saw themselves closer to the Byzantine (I know about the term without you needind to tell me about, Byzantio was a Greek colony in the area before the Roman Emperror Constantine moved the capital there in the 4th century) Empire than Ancient Greece. To them, the Parthenon was just a bunch of rocks that they had even made into a church for a while. As for the state, it was because of the notion of the 'Eastern Problem', how the great powers of the time wanted to divide the Ottoam Empire, which was in a very long and steady decline since the death of Emperor Suleiman.
The British had the best offer, but the overall creation of the state back then wasn't after the rebels achieved considerable victories, which led to the slauguter of Christians in major Ottoman cities, which led to the rebels slaughtering Muslims wherever they found them, and that pretty much said to the great powers of the time, Britain, Russia, Prussia, France, that there couldn't be a diplomatic solution to the problem. Thus, when the rebellion was about to be subsided by the Ottomans, the combined French, British and Russian fleets intervened.
Also, the Eastern Roman Empire was heavily influenced by the Greeks of the time. To the point that, Emperor Heraklius I think it was, changed the official language of the state to Greek, from Latin in the 7th century. All emperors since then also had Greek names.
Anyway, it seems you misinterpreted some parts of my previous post, and just in case you didn't know, there's some bad blood between modern Greece and the country of Macedonia of the name (there's a large region in Greece already called Macedonia) and them changing history left and right.
Now, where do I sign up for the Longest Wall of Text Ever contest?
And before you ask, yes, I really am that bored.
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