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Macedonia is GREECE :

Macedonia was the Byzantine Empire's most important Balkan region from every point of view, whether commercial, economic, or cultural. A centre of Greek culture, the Greek language, and the Ghristian faith, it was also a crossroads of international strategic and commercial routes and the point where East and West came together. In the late antique period, the "Diocese of Macedonia" and the "Diocese of Dacia" (the region between Macedonia and the Danube) together comprised the "Prefecture of (Eastern) Illyricum", whose centre was Thessaloniki.
Later on, in the eighth century, Macedonia seems to have formed a single military administrative division which extended from western Macedonia to the east bank of the Hebrus. However, growing military needs made it necessary to divide the region into the themes of the Strymon (in 809) and of Thessaloniki (in 809 or 836), whereupon the remaining area, from the Nestus to the east bank of the Hebrus, became the theme of Macedonia. Owing to its position, from the birth of the Byzantine state onwards Macedonia sustained constant attacks from enemies from the north. But the invasions of the fourth to the sixth century were transient phenomena and had no effect on the ethnological make-up of the population. The concomitant slaughter and pillage, however, made it easier for Slav tribes to move down to the northern Balkans after the end of the sixth century.
It was in the seventh century that the first Slavs settled permanently in the north and north-west Balkans; but in Macedonia and particularly in southern Macedonia, Slav settlements were stiil few and far between. The Slavs who settled the mountainous regions.remained isolated and unassimilated there until the tenth century; but those who settled on the plains and in other unprotected areas were soon assimilated into their Greek environment, a rapid process which was over by the end of the seventh century. The tenth century saw wars between the Byzantines and the Bulgars, in the course of which the latter took possession of north-west Macedonia and, in the last twenty years of the tenth century, cities in south-west Macedonia as far down as Beroea and Servia. In the early eleventh century, however, Basil II recovered the cities of south-west Macedania and, when Bulgaria was subdued some fifteen years later, the north-west was liberated too. With the subjugation of Bulgaria, Byzantium regained the whole Balkan region and kept it for the next 167 years.
The result, as Ostrogorsky observes, was that the Greek element inceased considerably and the numbers of Slavs correspondingly fell. At the end of the twelfth century, the Bulgarian state was re-established, anf in the early thirteenth the Bulgar ruler Kaloyan managed to seize Serres, Skopje, Naiso, Belgrade, and Branitsova. His early demise, however, in 1207 enabled the Greek Despotate of Epirus to strike his state a crippling blow from 1215 to 1219. A few years later, in 1230, the Bulgar Tsar Ivan Asen II defeated Theodore, the Despot of Epirus, and recaptured Serres and the cities of north-west Macedonia. During the reign of his successor Kaloman however, John Batatzes, ruler of the Greek Empire of Nicaea, again recovered north-west Macedonia and the cities of velbuzd (Kyustendil), Skopje, Velesa, Prilep, Pelagonia, and Prosakos.

The shores of the Macedonian plain are washed by the Aegean Sea, which has linked this region with southern Greece, the islands, and Asia Minor since ancient times. According to Thucydides (II, 99), the Macedonian state was founded in the seventh century a.c. and comprised the region bounded by Mount Olympus and the sea, and the Peneus and Haliacmon Rivers. Hesiod, writing in the same period, tells of Macedon, the first ancestor of the Macedonians, and Magnes, the founder of the Thessalian Magnesians, two brothers who lived in the area around Pieria and Olympus. Herodotus recalls the relations between the Macedonians and the Thessalians and speaks of the Dorians of Thessaly (I, 56). The kings of Macedonia were Dorians, "Temenids with ancient roots in Argos" lThuc. II. 991. and descendants of Heracles.
The few but valuable testimonies of the seventh and fifth centuries a.c. acquire a special significance now that archaeological explorations in Pieria and on Mount Olympus have revealed Mycenaean cemeteries with finds which enable us to recognise this region's relations with the north- eastern Peloponnese during the last great era of Mycenaean culture. Extensive burial grounds with a surprising number of finds provide information about the so-called "dark ages" (1000-700 B.C.) in this area.
By the fifth century B.C., the coastal Macedonians had organised themselves into a dynamic and powerful state and advanced as far as the River Strymon. At a much earlier date, they had already crossed the Haliacmon, acquired Almopia and Eordaea, and crossed the Axios too; by the sixth century a.c., they had reached Therme (which was later to become Thessaloniki).

The arrival of the Apostie Paul in Macedonia and the founding of Europe's first Christian communities at Philippi, Thessaloniki, and Beroea, were a landmark in the history of Western civilisation. Archaeological finds from the fourth century A.D., which was when Constantine the Great (306-37) decided to found Constantinople (330), separate the Eastern Roman Empire from Rome, and wed the two worlds of paganism and Christianity, show the strongly Hellenic flavour of Christianity in Macedonia.
At Philippi, for instance, a pagan heroon functioned side by side with the city's first Christian church, dedicated to St Paul; and in Thessaloniki a local martyr, St Demetrius, replaced the city's age-old deity Cabirus in the hearts and minds of the Thessalonians. Until Justinian I's time (527-65), Christianity in Macedonia was closely interwoven with the Greek and Roman tradition. Tombs found in Thessaloniki are decorated with wall-paintings which accompanied the deceased on their final journey with, symbolic representations of the promised Paradise; the angels with their wreaths and colourful banners are frequently reminiscent of the cupids of antiquity. Large and small church complexes were built in the Macedonian cities and countryside and adorned with lovely mosaic floors with images of deer (Amphipolis), doves (Akrini, near Kozani), and symbolic representations of Paradise (Heraclea Lyncestis). A few wall mosaics from this period survive in churches in Thessaloniki (in the Rotunda of St George, St Demetrius, Latomou Monastery, and Acheiropoietos) .

The bloody cycle of Turkish invasions of Macedonia, which had begun in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, ended with the fall of Thessaloniki in 1430. The latest period of foreign occupation was inaugurated by dramatic changes in the traditional system of land ownership and by the demographic compression of the Christian population, owing to the arrival of large numbers of Muslim settlers in the Macedonian lowlands. The situation drove the inhabitants to despair, provoking some to convert en masse to Islam and others to flee into the mountains. These developments stripped the Macedonian countryside of a large proportion of its productive population and also, in the early centuries of Turkish rule at least, weakened the urban centres, turning them into mere shadows of their glorious Byzantine past.
The negative ettects of Ottoman domination on Macedonia's economic development scarcely abated at all (until at least the mid-nineteenth century), owing to the chronic state of crisis in the administrative institutions, the anarchy in the countryside, and the misgovernment and high-handedness of the Sultan's representatives particularly in the provinces. Nonetheless, Macedonia's geopolitical advantages remained unatfected by time and human intervention and were eventually able to recreate the conditions necessary for economic development. This was preceded, as early as the mid-sixteenth century, by a demographic recovery, assisted by a number of historical factors. The diminished population of Macedonia's large cities, particularly Thessaloniki, was appreciably swelled in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by what was for the time a considerable number of Jewish refugees from Western Europe, as also Greek migrants from neighbouring areas (such as Halkidiki, for instance). Furthermore, the Christian population of eastern and central Macedonia, which had been decimated during the early days of the Turkish conquest, was considerably strengthened by the arrival of farmers and stock-breeders from other parts of the Greek peninsula, such as Epirus, Thessaly, and Central Greece.
These developments coincided with favourable circumstances of a more qeneral nature: the expansion of West European economic activity into the markets and ports of the Greek Levant and the creation of suitable conditions for the development of inter-Balkan trade. The Macedonians rose to these historic challenges by increasing their agricultural output and re-activating their traditional craft industries. Indeed, from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards, the merchants of Macedonia, particularly western Macedonia, took their retail businesses far beyond the bounds of Hellenic territory and the Ottoman state in order to conquer the major commercial centres of the northern Balkans and Central Europe. The long ages of domination by a people of a different faith could not distort the basic features of Macedonian history. And this is illustrated by the fact that, despite the dangerous demographic losses of the early years of Turkish rule Macedonia managed to retain a stable nucleus, consisting of precisely those people who, with their Greek language and Greek Orthodox tradition, provided the region with the most enduring examples of its historical continuity and also the basic components of its "ethnic" profile.
These components did not remain ossified, however, for they were constantly renewed by the social mobility which characterised the whole Greek world. A particularly important role was played by the Macedonians living abroad, who, as early as the turn of the seventeenth century, had begun to "transfuse" their homeland with new cultural models, new ways of thinking, and new ideologies, either from other parts of the Greek Levant or from the Diaspora. It is interesting to note that the initial recipients of these external influences were the small but dynamic communities which had been established in the mountains (particularly in western Macedonia) by early refugees from the lowlands. These communities soon displayed considerable economic and cultural progress, which was all the more impressive in view of their virtually inaccessible position. These facts also account for the enduring concern of Macedonia's subjugated Greek Orthodox element for its political future. One other basic factor contributed to this: virtually the same internal and external considerations which influenced anti-Turkish initiatives in the rest of the Greek world provoked corresponding revolutionary sabre-rattling in Macedonia too.
Furthermore, throughout the period of Ottoman rule, the Macedonians remained closely allied with the ideological developments which led to the national awakening of all the Greeks; and this illustrates the common perception that liberation from foreign domination was not a local problem, but an issue which concerned the whole Greek Nation. This was why the revolutionary movements in Macedonia were usually co-ordinated with similar efforts undertaken in the Greek provinces further south from the sixteenth century until the War of Independence

BY editor - Paschalis Drakidis

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