Macedonia isn't Greece

Nicholas Hammond, a historian who is sympathetic to the Greek view that the ancient Macedonians were a Greek tribe and who has had several works published in Athens, is unable to support the Greek view on this matter. He says that by the middle of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century the majority of people in the Peloponnese were Albanian speakers. The fascinating point is that the people with whom they were competing for land were overwhelmingly not the original Greek-speaking Roman citizens, but the new breed of Greek-speaking Slavs. As Hammond says, many Greek-speaking people at that point in time were probably ethnic Slavs.

Albanians settled in Athens, Corinth, Mani, Thessaly and even in the Aegean islands. In the early nineteenth century, the population of Athens was 24 percent Albanian, 32 percent Turkish, and only 44 percent Greek. The village of Marathon, scene of the great victory in 490 B.C., was, early in the nineteenth century, almost entirely Albanian.

It reminds us of the 400-year occupation of Greek lands by the Turks and the inevitable ethnic impact. It has already been noted that in the early part of the nineteenth century the population of Athens was about one-third Turk. "Auberon Waugh ... wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the Greeks of today, with hairy popos, flat noses and bushy eyebrows, are clearly a race of Turkish descent and have nothing to do with the Greeks of antiquity sculpted on the Elgin marbles."

A common assumption is that ancient people were ethnically homogenous. As has already been noted with regard to the people of Macedonia, the kingdom was undoubtedly a great mix of people, and the diversity increased with the expansion of the Macedonian Empire.

The distinction between Romans and assimilated Slavs became blurred. As early as 766 Niketas, a (Macedonian) Slav, became patriarch of the Constantinople patriarchate.