Music from the Thessaloniki airport is already evident. The airport is named after Macedonia, the region of which Thessaloniki is the capital.
For the Greeks it is not a subject to be joked about too much. When the Republic of Macedonia declared independence at the break-up of Yugoslavia in the '91, the international case broke out. Greece opposed the identification of the new subject of international law with capital Skopje as legitimate heir to the historical name of Macedonia.
In the world it is not an isolated case, on the contrary. Only to stay in Europe is Luxembourg the name of a Grand Duchy but also of the immediately adjacent Belgian region. The same goes for Moldova, where the Republic of Moldova with the capital of Chisinau is joined by the Moldavia region within Romania. Going country, name problem that you find.
But not everyone reacts in the same way or rather not all geopolitical scenarios are so tense as to create embarrassment for a simple definition.
That the Greeks were a matter of principle was to be expected. It is more difficult to think that the diatribe was still open after 25 years and that Skopje was admitted to the UN only two years after the declaration of independence and with the acronym FYROM, English acronym to indicate Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
Relations between Skopje and Athens have been very bad over time and despite the thaw they have never returned to the margins of good neighborliness. Not even the Orthodox brotherhood could do much, although it is usually a very strong bond in the East, especially as a defense against the interference of other religious ethnic groups. The common anti-Islamic cause was of no use and at the time of the Yugoslav wars it mobilized many Greek volunteers alongside the Serbs and moved (and moved) the Skopje army to Slavic and Orthodox control in the 2001 civil war against the Albanian pro-independence Macedonian UCK. It is an incontrovertible fact: the most remote and poor of the ex-Yugoslav republics, with Greece it cannot bind.
The road from Thessaloniki to the Republic of Macedonia and rises towards Skopje has thus become the artery of a thorny region. Parallel to the Vardar river, it reaches Tsoliades, the border between the two republics. Customs is not a formality and the checks themselves are often a source of problems and delays. Of course, the fact that Greece is part of the Union is not insignificant, while the path of Macedonia, to which the application for membership is precisely opposed by Athens for the aforementioned reasons, is still long. The figure is not marginal, above all because Greece is included in the Euro area (although in the relegation zone) which implies the overlapping of a financial wall to political, historical and frontier ones.
If we consider that Greece is the southeastern gateway to the European Union, particularly exposed to migratory flows from the Middle East and northern Africa, we realize how the news that reaches tensions along the Greek-Macedonian border is not random.
Both through Turkey (happy to create inconvenience to the millennial enemy), and from the confines of its eastern archipelagos, Greece is the last paradise of mass irregular immigration: that due to ongoing conflicts (Iraqi crisis area - Syrian) and that put to profit by the usual unknown.
News of military reinforcements to stem the phenomenon (island of Kos) are mostly pasture for newspapers. The same goes for the tissue on the clashes between the Macedonian army and uncontrolled masses of illegal immigrants. The partial mobilization of the Macedonian armed forces covers the worsening of the crisis in the northern area of Kumanovo, where pockets of Islamic ethnicity continue to destabilize the republic. Rather than the little credible test of muscle against illegal immigration, it is easier to think that Greeks and Macedonians try to hurry up from these days with as little fanfare as possible.
Having discovered the new transit axis, the International of immigration meanwhile continues to prosper by relying on the Balkan mafias. The countries involved, in themselves not able to stem the phenomenon, limit themselves to speeding up the passage and not committing false steps on the humanitarian level, counting on a return of the emergency as quickly and painlessly. The line between Athens and Skopje thus arrives in Belgrade and continues to Budapest before getting lost in the dark mechanisms of the refugee holding.
The strange destiny of Greece destined to be surrounded by not-so-friendly neighbors (apart from Bulgaria), at least once seems to be blunted by a common interest.
What history has failed to do between Macedonia and Greece, they managed to do it a pragmatic spirit and a good supply of unprepared, fueled by difficult economic contingencies.
The irony of fate wants that the A1, the highway that starts from the border with Greece and cuts Macedonia in half, is named after Alexander the Great, father of the Macedonian homeland exhumed after the Titino obscurantism but known by most as a leader Greek…
Regardless, we'll see who will pay the final bill.
