07.27.09
FYROM or Macedonia
This country was an ocean of calm drivers after the fretting that we did on the roads of Kosovo. Its only 18km from the border into the capital Skpoje. The northern suburbs of teh place are generally nasty slums full of beggars and people that won’t take no for an answer. Most of teh poor here are the Roma. The have been an incredibly vilified race over the last thousand years or so but I have not come across a group of people that seems to do less to lift their terrible reputation as beggars and thieves. Its pretty bad and it took most of teh trip into the country to lift the bad taste that it left. The centre of Skopje wasn’t bad and there is definitely a well developed sense of its own fashion. I must say that I didn’t think that itwas all that hot but those wearing it seemed to think that they were the cat’s meow.
After that we headed out over the countriside, which obviously could have been the bread basket of a civilisation and no wonder that Alexander the great like the area. The generosity got more and more as we crossed the country with random strangers buying us dinner in Stip and trying to organise other riders to join us for a bit. We also started in the local news for the city of Delcevo and did an interview in front of the cameras and all. haha. I’m a bit of a whore for the spotlight but Nic really doesn’t like the public eye so much so it was funny watching her when the reporter kept putting the microphone for her comments.
I think that I’ve decided to side with the greeks on the naming of the county. The name of Macedonia belongs to a broader area and the slavs moved in much later and have now kinda stolen the name which belonged to the greek people. Its a shame because the people there have a new country that deserves a cool name and Macedonia is heaps cooler than FYROM (former yugoslav republik of Macedonia) but what can you do. Maybe they should have a cool country name competition or something. Eitherway I know that will propable offend many people from the area and they really don’t deserve that as they were awesome and really looked after us.
Well bye for now.
Tc
MM said,
August 3, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Well, your analysis on the name issue is very shallow.
First of all, our identity is Macedonian, it’s not like we woke up one day and said – “Hey, lets steal a name and an identity”. Second, while the ancient Macedonians were certainly in the Hellenic sphere, it’s highly debatable whether they were Greeks. They were actually called barbarians by the Greeks, which meant that they spoke “bar bar” (meaning in a language incomprehensible to the Greeks).
Also, it’s ludicrous to claim that we are just Slavs. Did the Ancient Macedonians vanish in thin air when the Slavs came? No, there is no ethnically pure nation, and neither we nor the greeks can claim historical continuity with the Ancient peoples. We have mixed too much over the centuries.
And the bottomline is, our identity is Macedonian. It may have developed a bit later than some of our neighbours, but does that make it any less valid? We have lived on this land for millenia, and now we don’t have a right to be called according to it’s name? And how can these modern-day vile attacks on our name, identity and language by the Greeks be justified by something that happened 2 millenia ago? How can the Greek megalomanian and downright faschist behaviour be justified?
They are just spreading hate and radicalizing the region.