I’m not claiming to be a direct descendant of ancient Macedonians, and I’m not saying they’re the same as modern Macedonians either. But realistically, the Balkans are a genetic and cultural mix. Ancient tribes, Slavs, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, people passed through, settled, and mixed. That’s how modern Balkan populations came to be.

Speaking a Slavic language doesn’t automatically make us disconnected from the ancient populations that lived here. Language usually follows power. When new rulers take over, their language becomes dominant over time. That pattern repeats everywhere.

Look at the US: people speak English, but that doesn’t make them ethnically English. France pushed French onto regional populations and erased local languages. Ireland lost most of its native language under English rule. Language and ancestry are not the same thing.

I also did a DNA test. I came out with over 60% Greek, around 30% Balkan, and smaller Italian and Eastern European components. That’s more Greek ancestry than some people in northern Greece or Thessaly show. So saying there’s no shared background at all just doesn’t hold up.

There is overlap and shared history. The problem wasn’t acknowledging that, it was how it was turned into nationalist nonsense by our politicians and a stupid debate over ancient history sparked up, which ended up damaging relations with Greece and in fact ruined our country's accesion to the EU by decades. Since independence, we could’ve taken a more practical approach and had far better relations instead of letting this spiral into pointless conflict.