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Table
of Contents
(a) When
were the Macedonian Slavs converted to Christianity? 17
(b) When
did Slavonic literacy develop in Macedonia? 20
(c) What
political and strategic moments dictated this Byzantine mission and what were
relations with Bulgaria like? 25
(d) What
was the language of Cyril and Methodius: Old Bulgarian or Old Macedonian? 26
(a) Why
did the Macedonian name appear as late as the 19th century? 38
(b) Why
was it the Macedonian name that was accepted? 40
Index of Geographical Names 369
Blaze Ristovski has built and
developed a distinctive methodological approach in his interpretation of the
history of the Macedonian people. This approach incorporates an essential
component adopted from positivism: the scholarly method and the struggle for
truth in facts and in dealing with facts. From what the Germans called Geistesgeschichte (the History of the
Spirit) it has taken the interpretation of historical facts as a spiritual
substratum, as a dynamic human fundamental. Accordingly, this Macedonian
historical thinker analyses and follows the history of the Macedonian people as
a history of Macedonian culture. Blaze Ristovski believes that the entire
spiritual opus of the Macedonians is the foundation and firm support for their
historical survival. This approach in his book Macedonia and the Macedonian People is not an arbitrary invention,
but a consequence of the tragic destiny of the Macedonian people through
history, who were driven and sometimes dominated by alien histories.
For a long time, up to the
Antifascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM, 1944),
with no state institutions of their own, the Macedonians had found shelter in
their own culture, developing first as a people and later forming a nation.
Forced to create its own national culture without its own nation-state, the
culture of the Macedonian people was characterized by several specific
features. It was undoubtedly the result of its creative genius, but was also
used as a means in its struggle for freedom. The model of this type of culture
is best expressed by Fichte and his famous idea of Kultur zur Freiheit (Culture for freedom). It is this fate of the
Macedonian culture that contributed to the fact that, in the case of Macedonia,
national culture grew as a key element of what we can call a Macedonian
ideology. For this reason, the protagonists of the struggle for the development
of national consciousness and popular unity in Macedonian history were not so
much its political strategists but primarily its cultural figures: poets,
writers, linguists and collectors of folklore — in a word, the Macedonian
intelligentsia.
In this situation, bearing in mind
the ethnic relatedness among the South Slavs, the closeness between their
languages, their shared faith, geographical links, etc., Ristovski is aware
that the history of the Macedonian people cannot be explained and interpreted
without the examination of South-Slav culture, where similar or even identical
cultural initiatives and aspirations developed during the long historical
process. Consequently, he most often applies the comparative historical method
in the analysis of these initiatives and aspirations. He compares and studies
precisely those endeavours which have given Macedonian culture an indigenous
trait and an indigenous national individuality. Hence his book is basically
concentrated on revealing and presenting what I would call the history of Macedonian history in its Balkan and South-Slav
context.
Thus the principal aim of
Academician Ristovski in this work is his endeavour to interpret and study
Macedonian history in its quintessence, always bearing in mind that the
quintessence of the history of the Macedonian people is its culture and
spiritual continuity. Politics, for instance, is dominated by discontinuity. In
politics everything is ephemeral and occurs on a day-to-day basis, making it
changeable and transient. States and their political orders change following
the logic of some inexorable rhythm: they appear and then disappear from the
historical scene, followed by new ones that trace the same path. These are
followed by even newer ones, and so on. Policies and states do not intermingle
with each other. On the contrary, they are opposed to and destroy each other.
The spiritual continuity of a people can be followed only in its culture, where
it develops uninterrupted. For this reason, it is only there that a people can
show its united and indivisible personality.
Ristovski starts precisely from this
irrefutable fact and carries out the idea of his book by following the history
of the Macedonian people in an undeviating and uninterrupted spiritual
continuity — the result of the millennium-long survival of the Macedonians in
their highly exposed position in the Balkans, where the fury of the destruction
of great achievements raged. This book is indeed a detailed survey of the
Macedonian spiritual and historical experience over the centuries. It is a
profound cross-section and a comprehensive study of those fundamental
Macedonian periods in which and through which the being of the culture of the
Macedonian Slavs crystallized, over the centuries, as a
Macedonian-Slavonic-Byzantine culture: from the process of their conversion to
Christianity and the creation of Slavonic literacy, through Macedonian national
and cultural development during the Macedonian Revival of the 19th century,
when the Macedonians strengthened their consciousness through their own
creativity, through the cultural ideas of the `Lozars' and the national
programme of the Macedonian Scholarly and Literary Society, and through
Macedonian national thought and culture in the period between the two world
wars.
Ristovski's book Macedonia and the Macedonian People is
built upon a coherent concept in the establishment of the spiritual and
historical continuity through which the individuality of the Macedonian people
and its culture was formed. This can best be seen by the structure of the book
itself. Namely, he completes his study of the Macedonian national and cultural
thought with the start of the Second World War, as he designates the ASNOM
years — the most significant period in the history of the Macedonian people —
as an organic continuation of the long struggle of this people for national
liberation. It was a period in which the Macedonians finally succeeded in
establishing a Macedonian state, though only in a part of the historical,
ethnic and cultural territory of Macedonia.
The originality of this book, among
the other important books by Ristovski devoted to this field, lies precisely in
the ambition of its author to subject what is considered `most disputed' in
Balkan historiography concerning the representation and presentation of
Macedonia to historiographic and culturographic analysis. Ristovski studies
Macedonian culture and language and the development of the Macedonian people as
an individual entity within the Slavonic and Balkan context, all of which have
been organically linked with the great spiritual achievements of the great and
unrepeatable — even in terms of world history — Macedonian 9th century. This
was a time when a new Slavonic civilization and culture was born in Macedonia,
spreading throughout the Slavonic world. The second part of the book deals with
the building and strengthening of historical and cultural consciousness among
Macedonians in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This most recent book of Ristovski's
comes at a time when it can often be heard in some circles that Macedonia, the Macedonian
people and Macedonian culture is, to put it mildly, a phenomenon that was
created from nothing in the mid-20th century, as if by some arbitrary act:
someone came up with the idea — for which there is no support in history — of
creating a Macedonian people, a Macedonian language and Macedonian culture, and
he created them. Ristovski replies to this ominous sound of trumpets, blown by
seraphic Balkan trumpeters, with rare intellectual calm. He puts forward his
concept — which requires exceptional knowledge in the field of Balkan studies,
and where this erudite Macedonian writer and historian is certainly on his own
territory — of the indestructible continuity of the Macedonian idea, of its
organic genesis and emergence and spiritual growth in a continued,
millennium-long Macedonian nocturne, and of the spiritual survival of the
Macedonians in time and space. His basic theoretical position can be summed up
in the following way: Macedonia in its present form would never have existed
had it not been an inseparable part of history, had its long struggle had no
continuity of its own in that gigantic epic that it created in history, in
search of itself and of its own spiritual and cultural identity.
When touching upon the question of
continuity in the emergence and historical evolution of the Macedonian people
and its culture, we are undoubtedly delving into the realm of the spirit and
the world of ideas. For this purpose, it is these — this spiritual substance
and this cultural dimension of the Macedonian historical continuity — that
Academician Ristovski analyses. As a history of the history of Macedonia, his
book explores the achievements of the Macedonian creative spirit. For this
reason, it does not concentrate on battlefields. It does not deal with the
long-lasting struggles, old and new, such as the eye-gouging battle of Mount
Belasica, nor does it deal with harsh bloody slaughters such as those near the
rivers Vardar, Crna and Bregalnica. It does not describe the death masks of the
heroes or traitors, nor is it obsessed with the bitter destiny of the many
commanders and comitadjis, outlaws and vassals. No, there is nothing of that
kind in this history of Macedonian history. On the contrary, there is something
encyclopaedic in it, a profound knowledge, something which can be seen only in
the rare historiographic books that evaluate and re-evaluate historical facts
not merely from the viewpoint of the positivist approach and what is known as
the `school of facts', but also and essentially from the viewpoint of the soul
of the people, from the point of view of the spiritual, popular sense of the
Macedonian which has been deeply interwoven within this people and has
glimmered in them throughout the centuries. Journeying through the various
cultures and periods that have roared under the mysterious Macedonian sky, this
book explores the spiritual imprint, forgetting no endeavour and no name which
has been made part of it. It recalls and historically reflects those major
Macedonian ideas and their protagonists that have intertwined with each other
over the centuries, building the original and indigenous Macedonian historical
fresco-painting.
Ristovski's book Macedonia and the Macedonian People may
also be regarded as a kind of cultural archaeology which, describing the
Macedonian cultural past as a basic argumentum
ad hominem, frees it from all alien deposits and colours. On most of its
pages, if not all of them, it maintains, with a moderate, objectivist approach,
a dialogue with hundreds and hundreds of books from the Balkan plethora of
historiographies, some of them relevant, but most written in favour of the
victors and filled with an inexplicable hatred towards and scorn of everything
Macedonian. There are only rare examples written in favour of the defeated
Macedonians, the people who had to express their defeats in folk song or tale,
in legend or story, or in an unfinished testament.
I believe that the principal value
of this book of Ristevski's is the fact that, in contrast to an earlier period
in Macedonian historiography, it hides nothing, nor does it try to exclude or
change what historical sources give as the ethnic or national attributes of the
Macedonians. Amidst the insane Balkan historical jumble it is indeed an
impartial and objective book, or it aims to be so as far as is possible in this
region. It aims to pit facts against facts, and not wishful historical
thinking, which has become a recognizable trait of a large number of
incompetent Balkan historical fanatics. I am referring to no one in particular,
and to no one side. I am referring to all of them, to all those who still
remain prisoners of their national ideologies.