Upper Macedonia, Southern Vardarska, Gorna Makedonija, or Down Under Kosovo?

Much has been written lately about the future name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Makedonija, to be settled with Greece. The former Yugoslav province left the collapsing Yugoslav union, in 1991 and declared independence, taking on the misnomer of Република Македонија, transliterated as Republika Makedonija.

The Greeks, whose northernmost province is the historic Μακεδονία/Macedonia, home of Aristotle and Alexander the Great among other greats of world history and culture, demanded that their new neighbors must choose a different name, not Macedonia. The former Yugoslav province, the Greeks argued, has no more than a small part (Pelagonia and part of Amphaxitis) of historic Macedonia proper in its land, mainly along its southern provinces.

Even accepting for a moment the Skopjan unhistorical definition of where Macedonia starts and ends, and wrongly for a moment assuming that all of FYROM’s land was part of Macedonia proper, FYROM still could not be called Macedonia. Even under that definition, it only constitutes a small part of the whole area of Macedonia proper, about 30%.

The small part (FYROM, and essentially only its extreme south) of the total (geographic Macedonia) should never have been encouraged to usurp a name that characterizes the geographic whole: the historically defined Macedonia. Yet this is precisely what G.W.Bush did the first day after his second

1st U.S. museum dedicated to Greek culture opens

CHICAGO – Dolls a Greek woman made during World War II. Ice cream bowls and wooden spoons from a 1940s Greek candy store. Thousands of record albums filled with Greek music.

These items and many other beloved objects and family heirlooms have found their way from around the country to the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, which has a new place to store and exhibit them all, in a four-story 40,000-square-foot environmentally friendly building of limestone and glass that opened in early December.

The $20 million project in the city’s Greektown neighborhood, which includes temporary and