FYROM Propaganda

The SMS received on the journey
to, dated 27 June 2014

For quite some time now the governments of FYROM have been making use of various forms of propaganda in order to justify their use of the name Macedonia and substantiate their attempts to fabricate a new "Macedonian" history that serves their political interests.

During the European summer of 2014, a friend of ours was travelling by bus to a destination in Central Europe from Thessaloniki. The journey involved crossing the borders of several Balkan countries, including FYROM.

Passing through the Greek village of Evzoni (Εύζωνοι), Kilkis prefecture, and arriving at the Greece-FYROM border, the following SMS from T-Mobile reached our friend's phone: 

"Welcome to Macedonia, the cradle of civilization [1]. During your stay we strongly recommend you visit the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle [2] and the Memorial House of Mother Teresa in Skopje [3], the Memorial Center of Toshe Proeski in Krushevo, the Museum on Water in Ohrid and the Ancient Observatory in Kokino."

We would like to make the following observations.

The same messages were received
on the journey from, here dated
7 July 2014

[1] What provokes firstly is not so much that the Yugoslavs refer to their country as Macedonia, but that they now consider it the cradle of civilization. This is a big call to make. According to the Oxford dictionary, cradle in this context means "A place or process in which something originates or flourishes." What could the Yugoslavs be referring to here? What could possibly have originated or flourished in their country, which was officially established only in 1991, following the breakup of Yugoslavia? Could it be democracy, theatre, or science? Philosophy, perhaps? No, these originated and flourished in ancient Greece, which many today consider to be the cradle of Western civilization. Unable to find an answer, we did a search on Google for cradles of civilization, but struggled to find anything listing "Macedonia". The only cities or countries we found other than Greece were Rome, Mesopotamia (Sumer), Egypt, and China.

[2] The Macedonian Struggle (in Greek Ο Μακεδονικός Αγώνας) was a series of escalated tensions between 1904-08 (others consider these to have begun earlier) in which two sides, Greek and Bulgarian, fought for control over the region of Macedonia. There is no doubt that Yugoslavs participated in the various battles, for many did indeed live in villages today belonging to modern-day Greece and Bulgaria, but to suggest that the Struggle was for FYROM and that their nation (which, at the time, did not even exist) and their people played a key part in the Struggle is simply unhistorical and absurd.

[3] It is true that Mother Teresa, who was canonized a saint just this year by the Roman Catholic Church, was born in Skopje. She was not, however, born to Yugoslav parents. She was Albanian, an important ethnic group today in FYROM, considering that it constitutes, believe it or not, 25% of the country's overall population (which is currently estimated at a mere 2.1 million).

These deceiving messages were received in mid-2014. Two years have passed since then, and it would be no surprise if they're still being sent out today to every person with a phone entering or, as they'd like to see it, visiting their country, the "cradle of civilization". FYROM propaganda at its finest.