From: schoinas@fox.cs.wisc.edu (Yannis Schoinas)
Subject: Re: Macedonian World Congress
Organization: U of Wisconsin Madison - Computer Sciences
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 23:46:09 GMT

sachz@montebello.ecom.unimelb.EDU.AU (SAS) writes:


>             M A C E D O N I A N   W O R L D   C O N G R E S S

>            Organizational Members Located Throughout the World

Thanks Sasa,

Nice piece of fantasy. Actually, I prefer R.Howard's stories but
this piece shows that the author is very imaginative. My only
advice to him is to try not to contradict himself. It is possible
to construct a reasonable world (my favorite is F. Herbert's Dune)
but you must be very careful. 

To tell you the truth it is difficult to characterize this piece
of literature. It's not exactly fantasy. Of course, there are the 
good and the bad guys, there are the brave heroes but where is the 
beautiful princess, the romance? And it's certainly isn't alternate
history. Alternate history requires to start from a real point in 
history and then take the wrong turn. Anyway, I will consider it 
just an imagination exercise.

Seriously, thanks for showing the validity of the Greek claims.
I suspect you have quite enough courage to be able to show that 
there are people from your country believing such fantastic tales.
Believe me, I feel sorry for them.

And a few points that I find interesting:

>   Since 1913, official Greece has been trying to banish native
>Macedonian names of villages, towns, cities, and rivers in Aegean
>Macedonia. For example, the Macedonians are being instructed to
>forget Voden and use the name Edessa and to drop the name Solun in
>favour of Thessaloniki. The people whose ancestors have over the
>millennia plowed the earth and grazed their sheep and goats in the
>Bistrica and Vardar valleys are forced to learn from dead writers a
>dead language the "proper" names for their rivers.

He,he,he. The author must had a really hard time to get his PhD if 
he abused logic in such a way. Basically, he contradicts himself.
Since the story claims that the Macedonians were always living
in the same land for millemnia and millemnia who invented the dead
names? I am pretty sure that the ape ancestors of homo sapiens could 
not write.  It is important when you are writing serious SF(generic) 
literature to avoid internal inconsistencies.

Just to note that Edessa is probably of Phrygian origin.

...

>   Alexander could not think of himself as a Greek, for his mother
>was from Epirus, a land more Illyrian than Hellenic, and his earthly
>father was a Macedonian whom the Greeks of his day called "a
>barbarian". More importantly, Alexander told the Egyptians that his
>heavenly parent was their god Ammon. After he conquered Mesopotamia,
>Persia, and the Indus Valley, he believed he was a god commanding
>his Greek subjects to accept his divinity.

Seriously, Alexander thought of himself Greek enough to want to identify 
with Hercules, the only defied panhellenic Greek hero.

Actually, I didn't know that Hercules was the only panhellenic hero until
very recently that I went to a talk on ancient Greece and Rome by an Austin
professor of classics. 

						 Bye,
						Yannis.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia,alt.politics.europe.misc