Louise --
Maybe the most (in)famous use of classical/ancient history in recent Balkan
controversies has been the wrangle between Greece and the Former Y. Rep. of
Macedonia/Skopje about the name "Macedonia" and the use of the "Star of
Vergina" on the new Macedonian flag. Excavations in the '70s, mainly by
Manolis Andronikos, turned up some pretty spectacular tombs in the northern
area of modern Greece. One gold larnax has a very beautiful "star" design
on its cover -- this has since become canonized as the "star of Vergina,"
symbol of the Greek "Macedonians," and you can find it on everything from
coins to food containers. The FYROM used claims of direct descent from the
Macedonians of Philip and Alexander's day to support use of the name and
the symbol; modern Greece claims Philip and descendants for its own and
disputes the claim of FYROM's descent. This has apparently been going on
for a couple of hundred years for military and political reasons -- don't
know nuthin' 'bout modern history, sorry.
Here's a web site with a pretty vitriolic treatise on the subject (and many
beautiful images): http://www.hri.org/Martis/contents/index.html
What's interesting to me about it is that the modern Greek claim to
Macedonian descent would seriously piss off any Athenian of the 4th century
BCE -- Demosthenes and Aeschines had their little chats about people they
certainly did not consider "their" kind of Greeks. So the current
controversies over "Macedonians" pretty much ignore ancient thought on
Greekness (if any), on barbarians, on Macedonians and Those Other
Northerners ... 4th C BCE ideas of the borders of the northern Greek
kingdoms/states are very flexible and have little to do with modern
cast-in-stone national boundaries. Never mind whether we have any basis
for the claim that the people living in Greece today are in any way
biologically related to the "real" ancient Greeks, however you (or they)
define(d) them ... There is clearly a lot of modern mythmaking going on,
with real, concrete physical current consequences.
Does anyone want to correct or add to that? And I would be interested to
hear more about Albanians, "ethnic Albanians," and their travails, esp.
underlying ideas of ethnicity. Albania is a fascinating place in antiquity
...
Cheers
Cze
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Constanze Witt
Instructional Technology Specialist
UT Austin Classics Dept; Waggener Hall 17, C3400
Austin TX 78712
[log in to unmask], (512) 471 8684, fax (512) 471-4111
http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/
"I am as concerned as the next woman about the global recession, but what
I want, what I really really want is one of those new curvy, sexy iMac
computers - God, they're gorgeous." Suzanne Moore, The Independent
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