Macedonia is particularly egregious because its genesis as an ethnic group is still within living memory and would make as much sense as Pennsylvanians declaring themselves the last true Vikings, erecting statues with horned helmets and talking about retaking their true homelands.

All other major ethnic groups in the Balkans have at least two or more generations from their creation, either synthetic or organic, and as such are as easy to take seriously as any other ethnicity, be it Han or English.

Sure, but in a couple of hundred years it will feel normal. This has happened many times before.

Yes, but this didn't happen centuries ago, this happened in the 1960s to 1990s.

> this didn't happen centuries ago, this happened in the 1960s to 1990s

The point is every ethnic group was made up by people at some point. Most retroactively. There isn't a rational reason to prefer old over new ethnic identities.

There is a difference between larping and culture. If you can't understand that you're probably larping thinking its culture.

> you can't understand that you're probably larping thinking its culture

We’ve been telling others their culture isn’t real for about as long as we’ve been inventing ethnicities.

Culture is what you do when you stop thinking. When everyone in a group does the same thing when they stop thinking you have a nation.

Give it another 60 years and Macedonians will be on par with Israelis for a made up nation that is now real. We aren't there yet because there are people alive and well in their 40s who know just how made up it all is, since they were the ones that made it up.

This is a very hard concept to explain to liberal americans because they have no culture or nation. Thinking the wrong thoughts gets you excommunicated and what those wrong thoughts are changes constantly. So they have to constantly think about what acceptable behaviour is.

But actual larping is a culture

The Macedonian culture seems to me to have become distinct from Serbian and Bulgarian cultures by around WW1 at the latest. At the very least, all of the ethnographers being used to divvy up the Balkans recognized them as a distinct ethnicity at that time.

I don't understand this comment about Macedonians. They seem like a pretty distinct ethnic group, as evidenced by the unique language and culture. That was not just created out of thin air in any kind of recent time.

Are people upset about them adopting the name?

> Are people upset about them adopting the name?

Yes. Macedonians of antiquity were Greek. "Northern Macedonians" are Slavic. Greeks are very protective of their identity.

People who have not much else, are generally very protective of their identity.

> Are people upset about them adopting the name?

Yes. Oh yes are many Greeks peeved about the name of Macedonia, claiming that it means the country now called North Macedonia has designs on the Macedonia region of Greece.

Modern Macedonians are Slavic-speaking people, who moved into the region ~1500 years ago. Ancient Macedonians (whose most famous person was Alexander the Great) were a Greek-speaking people.

The Greeks are very upset, which is why the country recently renamed itself.

And what exactly is distinct and unique about their language and culture?

Judging by the username I'll guess this is coming from the Bulgarian perspective? Then again you could argue that most of that region is half-Turk :-)

Not exactly. I was born and raised in Bulgaria, but my direct ancestors did run a printing house, as well as a lot of revolutionary work, in Macedonia during the late 19th and early 20th century. So I would have been a Macedonian if not for the violent suppression of the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie uprising :) Additionally, what bothers me with the "Bulgarian perspective" is that Bulgaria chickened out on Macedonia on multiple occasions, yet some people go around saying "Macedonia is Bulgarian". Well, you can't have your cake and eat it, right? After the Young Turk Revolution, even my family (Bulgarians through and through) seems to have gotten frustrated with Bulgarian politics and started leaning towards independent Macedonia. So, I'm totally okay with the situation as-it-is.

As for Balkan people being half-Turk, I have to disagree. You probably meant the Bulgars? They were some 30,000 men and their families, and were quickly assimilated into the local population (mostly slavicized, romanized Thracians). Check out the yDNA/mDNA haplogroups for Bulgarian (or Macedonian, they're almost the same) people, then compare this to (for example) Tatars, and you'll quickly see there's not much in common.

Sorry for the wall of text, but since you asked.. :)

My Turk comment was somewhat inspired by me realizing just how many of our words across the ex-Yu region are Turcisms. I had this epiphany when I watched the show Diriliş: Ertuğrul on Netflix, and couldn't go 60 seconds without hearing a familiar word that I never would have guessed the source of.

Now as for the uniqueness/culture, I'm biased having an ex-Yu background, where we tended to have a culture of equality/inclusivity and things like labels or instructions or competitions tried to represent all the constituent languages, and we always ended up with the 4 interchangeable ones (Croat/Serb/Bosniak/Montenegrin) and the 2 unintelligible ones (Slovene and Macedonian). From that perspective the Macedonian SR was quite unique and also famous for its distinct culture and natural beauty. However, I could not tell how close it was to regions outside its borders - presumably it was a spectrum, the way most Slavic influence is a spectrum both across culture and language. It seems that you have by far a better data sample set for comparison :-)

> many of our words across the ex-Yu region are Turcisms

Oh, I got you now, komşu. I guess we picked up most of these during the Ottoman rule.

> I'm biased having an ex-Yu background

Btw Bulgaria was very close to joining the party in 1934, and again in 1947. Would have meant nicer Socialism. But also probably wars in the 90's. So I'm not sure what to think of it.

> Macedonian SR was quite unique and also famous for its distinct culture and natural beauty

Yeah, beautiful country, good people. Can't wait to hike there again once international tensions settle a bit... which can take 2 or 200 years.

> Slavic influence is a spectrum both across culture and language

Right, at the end of the day, we all essentially speak dialects of Old Church Slavonic (aka Old Serbian/Croatian/Bulgarian/Macedonian depending on who you ask).