U.S. State Department, Foreign Relations (vol. viii) Washington, D.C., Circular Airgram (886.014/26 Dec. 1944)

"The Secretary of State to certain Diplomatic and Consular Officers. The following is for your information and general guidance, but not for any positive action at this time. The Department has noticed with considerable apprehension increasing propaganda rumours and semi-official statements in favor of an autonomous Macedonia, emanating principally from Bulgaria, but also from Yugoslav Partisan and other sources, with the implication that Greek territory would be included in the projected state. This Government considers talk of Macedonian "nation", Macedonian "Fatherland", or Macedonian "national consciousness" to be unjustified demagoguery representing no ethnic or political reality, and sees in its present revival a possible cloak for aggressive intentions against Greece"

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Extract from the article "The World According to George Soros"
By Connie Bruck, New Yorker Magazine, 23 January 1995

..... The Macedonia that excited Soros was a province of Yugoslavia once known as Vardar Banovina; it was renamed the Republic of Macedonia in 1945 by Marshal Tito. Its populace varied, the largest portion being Slavs, whose ancestors had arrived in the region a thousand years after the most famous Macedonians of all, Philip II and his son, Alexander the Great. However, Tito- coveting the large Greek region of Macedonia -encouraged the irredentist idea of all Macedonians sharing a distinct identity. He then supported the Communist-led Democratic Army in the Greek Civil War, a brutal conflict that tore the country from 1946 to 1949. ..... Gligorov says that Macedonia has no territorial ambitions, but the Greeks have not been comforted. In 1992 and 1993, Gligorov's government issued new school textbooks that showed "geographical ethnic boundaries" encompassing the whole of Greek Macedonia; the country's flag carries the symbol of the empire of Alexander the Great; and a preamble to its 1991 Constitution pledges it to protect Macedonians everywhere. ..... The executive director of the Soros foundation in Skopje, Vladimir Milcin, maintains that he, too, is committed to the principles of an open society. But it is difficult to reconcile a dedication to pluralism with the demagogic passion that Milcin exhibits on the question of Macedonian ethnic identity. He gave me propagandist literature on Macedonia and Greece (including a pamphlet of excerpted texts entitled "Modern Greeks Are Not Descended from the Ancient Hellenes"). .....

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John Foster Fraser in his book Pictures From The Balkans (published in 1906) describes his experience from his visit to Monastiri (today Bitola). The extracts are from chapter 20.

The town of Monastir, capital of the vilayet of Monsastir, lies just about half way between Bulgarian and Greek territory. North, the majority of Macedonians are Bulgar, south the majority are Hellenes. The villages meet, cross, and mix in the Monastir vilayet. The reason, therefore, we hear so much about disturbances at Monastir is not because the Turks there are more wicked than Turks elsewhere, but because there is a persistent feud between Greek and Bulgarian political religionists.
.....
Monastir is an undistinguished, motley sort of town of some 60,000 inhabitants, 14,000 of them Greek, 10,000 of them Bulgarian, four or five thousand Albanian, two or three thousand Jew, and the rest Turk.
.....

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