Macedonia is a province of Greece.
It is also the birthplace of Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great became the king of ancient Greece after subduing the city states of Athens, Thebes and Sparta. He went on to libera- te Greek cities in Asia from Persian rule and eventually con- quer the entire known world to the east of Greece.
What's so special about Alexander ?
It was not his conquests but his desire to create a world em- pire consisting of equal citizens.
"There will be no conquerors and no conquered people", Ale- xander declared.
Is that true ?
Is it perhaps a fairytale made up by the "Alexandrines" - the court's inner circle ?
Whether it is or it is n't, it sounds like a concept 3000 years ahead of the man's time and it is for this reason the Greeks take special pride in Alexander the Great and admire him.
Modern Macedonia was liberated in 1912 by the Greek army, when a four nation alliance drove the Ottoman Turks away.
Greece, Serbia-Montenegro, Romania and Bulgaria were the four allies.
In the years that followed Macedonia survived three different invaders and remained Greek:
- The Bulgarian invasion of 1913 (after the king of Bulgaria broke away from the four nation alliance).
- The German invasion of 1941-44.
- The communist invasion, from 1946 to 1949, in the wake of the Greek civil war.
The former Jugoslav province of Skopje are trying to steal the name of Macedonia from Greece nowadays.
This began in 1945, soon after the end of the second world war as a joint Jugoslav - Bulgarian operation, who by that time had become communist countries.
But Tito broke away from the USSR a year later, and had to severe his ties with the "loyal" Bulgarians as a result.
While both Jugoslavia and Bulgaria still maintained small irregural fighting units in Greece, Bulgaria gradually withdrew from the Macedonian scenario and eventually abandoned her ambitions to capture territories belonging to Greece.
The southern Jugoslavs did not however. Tito allowed them to use the name "Republic of Macedonia" for their region and as a result they switched alliances from Bulgaria to Jugoslavia soon afterwards.
As Greece was guarded by NATO they could do nothing, but in the year 1991 they decided to leave the crumbling Jugoslavian federation and at the same time drop communism and repla- ce it with the old-fashioned nationalism of the early 20th cen- tury (when they were by and large part of the axis block).
The idea was to steal the Greek name of Macedonia and make it theirs and to this end they found number of collaborators, or co-cosnpirators, in the western world, notably America, the UK and Russia.
For any citizen of the USA or the UK it is a shame to support that infamous cause.
This is because the number of graves of British and Ameri- can soldiers in Macedonia, is probably bigger than the number of similar graves in which Greek soldiers lie.
The British and the Americans had to be there to fight against the axis offensive and against communist expansionism.
Did those heroes die, for someone to turn up later and say "Hitler and Stalin were right after all when they wanted to wipe out the Greek nation" ?
The Skopjan aggression targets the international community and it's goal is to defame and intimidate Greece, while at the same time rejecting all conciliatory moves.
To this effect Skopje are constantly trying to appear with the hijacked name in the internet, encyclopaedias, history books, international activities of various types and not least the world of sport.
It is in this last but not unimportnat area of life that we mean to step in and say "NO".
