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IMRO + 100 = FYROM? The politics of Macedonian historiography

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Book cover The New Macedonian Question

Part of the book series: St Antony’s Series ((STANTS))

Abstract

On 3 November 1893 in the Ottoman Vilâyet capital of Selânik, nowadays known as Thessaloniki, seven Christian Orthodox intellectuals, speaking the eastern variety of the southern Slavic tongue founded a national-revolutionary and conspiratorial organisation in opposition to the ruling Sultan with the title of the ‘(Internal) Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation’, abbreviated as IMRO. Their goal was the establishment of their own state, first in the form of territorial autonomy within the Ottoman Empire as a step towards independence. One hundred years later, on 8 April 1993, the United Nations admitted a state called the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, shortened to FYROM, as its 181st member.2 The strongest political party of this new UN member state, the ‘Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation — Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity’, abbreviated as VMRO-DPMNE, had deliberately chosen the name of the underground movement which was founded a century earlier.3 So does today’s FYROM represent the fulfilment of the political agenda of the IMRO that existed towards the end of the nineteenth century? Is there a direct link to the VMRO-DPMNE of the twentieth century? Are we now seeing the result of a belated process, lasting over one hundred years, from the foundation of a nation to the formation of a state?

I used to think that the profession of history, unlike that of, say, nuclear physics, could at least do no harm. Now I know it can. Our studies can turn into bomb factories like the workshops in which the IRA has learned to transform chemical fertiliser into an explosive.

Eric J. Hobsbawm, 19931

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Notes

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Authors
  1. Stefan Troebst
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Balkan Studies, Thessaloniki, Greece

    James Pettifer (Visiting Professor) (Visiting Professor)

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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Troebst, S. (1999). IMRO + 100 = FYROM? The politics of Macedonian historiography. In: Pettifer, J. (eds) The New Macedonian Question. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230535794_5

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