2013/01/01 by Tchavdar Marinov · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Balkans: History, Politics, Society
paper · doi:10.1163/9789004250765_007
openalex publication_date 2013/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
This chapter offers a new perspective on one of the most heated nationalist debates in Europe: the Greek/Macedonian/ Bulgarian dispute over Macedonia's past. It specifically concerns the legitimacy of modern identity and is centered on the Who are the Macedonians? The chapter suggests that Balkan national ideologies - Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian and - are historically entangled, to the extent that, in many respects, they constructed each other. The main premise of the chapter is that the national ideologies involved in the Macedonian question should be studied not merely as conflicting claims but as intertwined narratives, myths, symbolic forms and also social actors and institutional continuities that, since the nineteenth century, have evolved together and thanks to each other. The courageous Bulgarians who helped Alexander in his military campaigns reappeared in the 1850s in a work of the revolutionary Georgi Rakovski, author of quixotic theories about the Bulgarian ethnogenesis. Keywords:Alexander; Balkan national ideologies; Bulgarian; Greek; identity; Serbian