MODERN GREECE: A History since 1821 - Amazon Web Services

A NEW DYNASTY AND LINGERING PROBLEMS (1862–97) 49
The Macedonian question, as the issue of the future of Macedonia
came to be known, also taxed Greece’s foreign relations. In at least four
great crises, which led to two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 and to two
world wars in 1914 and 1939, the question of the future of Macedonia
or parts of it played a significant role in Greece’s relations with its
neighbors, as well as with the great powers of the time. The land of
King Philip and Alexander the Great, which around the time of the war
of independence was considered by southern Greeks a distant land of
“Yonder” Greece, was now seen as a frontier Greek land essential to the
very existence of Greece.
The “struggle” for Macedonia became the dominant issue of Greece’s
foreign policy. What the Serbs called “Southern Serbia” and the Bulgars
“Western Bulgaria,” the Greeks considered “Northern Greece.” The
Greeks had the oldest “historical” rights to the land, at a time when the
principle of “prior tempore, fortior juris” appeared to be taken seriously,
irrespective of the inhabitants of the land. Naturally, Greece’s
competitors based their claims principally on the language of the Slav
Macedonians and their rights to the land they inhabited, as well as on
historical rights deriving from pre-Slav inhabitants absorbed by the
Slavs. Archaeology, folklore and history were mobilized to support
national rights and claims, but above all competitors, the Bulgars no
less than the Greeks and the Serbs, tried hard to get control of churches
and schools, which were in the hands of community councils and clergy.
Never before or, for that matter, ever since did Macedonia witness so
much educational and cultural activity. Every little village sported a
primary school and every town, in additional to schools, a cultural society,
Greek or Bulgarian in the south and the northeast, Serbian in the
northwest. The principal target group were and have remained ever
since the Slavs of Macedonia, which became the “Apple of Discord.”
Another target group, though not so viciously contested on account of
early Hellenization, were the Vlachs of the region, whom the Romanians
claimed as their brethren on the basis of their Latin tongue.
Unavoidably, though not without resistance, the Ecumenical
Patriarchate of Constantinople agreed to work closely with the Greek
consuls in the region. They instructed its metropolitans to appoint new
prelates who were ready to cooperate with the representatives of Athens
in the struggle against the Bulgarians in the church and school system.
A proud Ecumenical Patriarch in the person of Joachim III, was determined
to preserve the Patriarchate’s prerogatives and clashed in