Trollzyn the Infinite wrote:North Macedonia literally practices historical revisionism by stealing Greek culture and claiming it as their own. According to them, Ancient Macedon was a Slavic Kingdom and the Macedonian Slavs are directly descended from Alexander the Great despite the fact that literally nobody knew what the fuck a Slav was back then because they didn't even properly exist.
Honestly, I can understand being upset about a neighboring nation claiming your ancestral legacy as their own and claiming you're the one who stole it instead.
It's somewhat more complicated than that.
I've recently had to peer review a couple of papers on the archaeology underlying the dispute, on the basis of my own publications on the archaeology of nationalism and national identity.
There are several competing versions of the ancient and medieval history of the territory currently encompassed by modern North Macedonia. For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dominant narratives were whether northern Macedonia was full of Bulgarians speaking a slightly declasse peasant version of Bulgarian or slightly misguided Serbs who had to be brought back to Belgrade's welcoming bosom (the rest of Macedonia was contested with the Greeks, who ultimately came to control the bulk of ancient Macedonia, but we'll focus solely on modern North Macedonia here). Indeed, the primary reason for the outbreak of the Second Balkan War in 1913, almost immediately after the First Balkan War of 1912-1913, was Bulgarian dissatisfaction with its share of Macedonia, and a specific feeling that Serbia had broken a secret agreement over the division of territory in what we now call North Macedonia.
It was only with the rise of Tito's government that the idea that there was a separate Macedonian national identity went mainstream, in part to weaken the Serbian component of Yugoslavia, in part to dampen Bulgarian irredentism, and in part in line with the common 20th-century communist government practice of reifying previously abstract ethno-linguistic concepts into the basis of hypothetically autonomous sub-national 'republics'.
When Yugoslavia broke up, the combination of historical Serbian and Bulgarian claims on North Macedonia, combined with the existence of a significant Albanian minority in the new republic, led to previously fringe concepts on the origins of Macedonia and Macedonians as a separate national group going mainstream.
The dominant strand in Macedonian 'antiquisation' isn't that Ancient Macedonia was a Slavic kingdom; there's no serious dispute that the Slavs didn't arrive in the Balkans until the 6th century AD. Rather it rests on two twin pillars:
A) that the ancient Macedonians were not Greeks but rather a distinct ethnicity (here Demosthones's claim that Macedonians were barbarians tends to get quoted a lot), albeit one that most would concede gradually adopted aspects of Hellenistic civilisation.
B) that the Slav migrations in the early medieval period didn't replace the existing Macedonian population, but rather led to a process of acculturation whereby the ordinary Macedonians came to adopt the language of the interlopers, but nonetheless retained their identity as descendants of the ancient Macedonians.
By themselves, neither of these positions is individually outrageous or wholly outside the realm of mainstream academic debate. There is scope for discussing both of these points.
However, when combined and taken to their illogical extremes, they're taken as 'proof' that the modern North Macedonians are the
only true heirs to ancient Macedon (the Greeks in this hypothesis are the true interlopers), and therefore have the sole right to use the heritage and symbols of ancient Macedon.
That's far, far more problematic - not least because the modern concept of a Macedonian national identity is so recent - and the basis of justifiable Greek concerns about what Macedonian nationalist 'antiquisation' means for Greek Macedonia. Not that the Greeks were entirely innocent here themselves, but it's fair to note that until very recently - when common sense seems to have finally prevailed on both sides - successive governments in post-independence Skopje would often embrace positions on history, heritage and the use of national symbols that were not unjustifiably considered more than a little provocative down in Athens.