macedonia - hellenic ancestral lands
Gligorov interview translation : Macedonian Slavs DO NOT have any relationship with ancient Macedonians. They are NOT the descendants of Alexander the Great. [segment from the ANT television news program Jun 1992]
In his equivocal reply, fomer pres. Gligorov fails to mention the Hellenes
were originally the native inhabitants of today's Macedonia (Vardar valley FYROM) [1] and its indigenous Hellenic population had been uprooted by war.
Because Macedonia - and all the entire Balkans - suffered a turbulent history of barbarian invasions, its indigenous Hellenic population (of today's northern Macedonia) had been razed from their ancestral lands; either annihilated, enslaved, or forced to relocate to south towards the Aegean.
Also Gligorov omitted from saying [2] that today's FYROM has a mixed multi-ethnic population. This includes among others - albanians (40%), bulgarians, turks, serbs, pomaks, roma, cumans, and vlachs. None of which constitutes
its indigenous population.
Forced displacement of populations in the Balkans has continuously been recorded from the time of antiquity to the late twentieth century.
Recent expulsions include: the Serbs from Kosovo (generational program under Tito), the 350 000 Turks from Bulgaria (1989) and the Bosnian deportations (of the former Yugoslavia.) This is a simple, but sad chain of events - made out to be a complicated, yet never ending story.