Aegean Macedonia
 | This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia's layout guidelines. (December 2015) |
 | This article's factual accuracy is disputed. (November 2025) |
.svg)
Aegean Macedonia (Macedonian: Егејска Македонија, romanized: Egejska Makedonija; Bulgarian: Егейска Македония, romanized: Egeyska Makedonia) is a term referring to the region of Macedonia in Northern Greece. In the Republic of North Macedonia, it has sometimes been used in the irredentist context of a United Macedonia. Refugees from the region have also referred to themselves as "Aegean Macedonians" and their homeland as "Aegean Macedonia."
History
[edit]The term "Aegean Macedonia" arose after the Balkan Wars and refers to the part of the area, ceded then from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek state, i.e. Greek Macedonia.[1][2] Yugoslavs and Bulgarians have used the term "Aegean Macedonia" instead of "Greek Macedonia".[3]
In the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and in the Macedonian diaspora, the term "Aegean Macedonia" came into wider use after the Greek Civil War among refugees for whom it identified their place of origin.[4][failed verification]
During the Yugoslav period and after North Macedonia's independence in 1991, Macedonian irredentists have also used the term to claim the region as part of a "Greater Macedonia," printing textbooks with maps depicting an enlarged Macedonia including parts of Greece and Bulgaria.[5] As a result, the name has not been recognized in Greece[6] where it is seen as a challenge to Greek sovereignty over the area.[7]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Joshua A. Fishman, ed. (2011). The Earliest Stage of Language Planning: "The First Congress" Phenomenon. De Gruyter. p. 160. ISBN 9783110848984.
- ^ R. J. Crampton (2014). The Balkans Since the Second World War. Taylor & Francis. p. 28. ISBN 9781317891178.
- ^ George C. Papavizas (2015). Claiming Macedonia: The Struggle for the Heritage, Territory and Name of the Historic Hellenic Land, 1862-2004. McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers. p. 257. ISBN 9781476610191.
- ^ Keith Brown (2003). Macedonia’s Child-Grandfathers: The Transnational Politics of Memory, Exile, and Return, 1948-1998. University of Washington. p. 26.
- ^ Ian Worthington; Joseph Roisman, eds. (2011). A Companion to Ancient Macedonia. Wiley. p. 582. ISBN 9781444351637.
- ^ Dmitar Tasić (2019). "The Institutionalization of Paramilitarism in Yugoslav Macedonia: The Case of the Organization Against the Bulgarian Bandits, 1923–1933". The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. 32 (3): 392. doi:10.1080/13518046.2019.1646952.
- ^ Hall, Jonathan M. (2014). Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian. University of Chicago Press. p. 104. ISBN 978-0226096988.
The claim on the part of the Slavic Republic to the name Macedonia and to its inhabitants' descent from the ancient Macedonians represented, at best, "a theft of national 'property', heritage, and identity", and, at worst, a thinly veiled irredentist aspiration to the territory the Slavs termed Aegean Macedonia.