Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Messinia on Romfea.News
In a few days, the Greek Parliament will be asked to vote in favour or against an agreement signed in Prespes Lake. Despite that it is believed that this agreement will resolve a long-standing problem between our country and the neighboring country, within the two countries tension, polarization and intense controversy are created.
Regarding this agreement, which is described by the political leaders as either progressive or conservative, the Church of Greece has been rightfully opposed, not on political grounds, nor to create polarization, but it considers that the Prespes Agreement is offensive to Greek history and to Greek culture.
Far from the nationalist ideology but with national consciousness, he states that no one can use the name of Macedonia since it is an constitutive element of the History, the culture and the identity of the Greek, and their self-consciousness.
The establishment of the state of Skopje, in the wrong way, would solve and defuse nationalistic tension in the Balkans and would achieve a nationalist equilibrium. That created within the aforementioned state a crisis of national, because it failed to find any ground in History or in any culture. A similar crisis was created on an ecclesiastical and linguistic level.
So, there was a state that could not build its identity, trace its roots due to its multinational composition. With those elements the state would create a cultural and historical background and would build a national, linguistic, ecclesiastical and cultural identity.
Therefore, the state of Skopje was created without history, tradition and culture, and more specifically without name, which is of importance and distinctive for the identity of a state.
So, no name was found, a name that would express the idea of a “united democracy”, which would consist of many historical and cultural backgrounds strictly associated with a non-existent history, and a cultural discontinuity, which is still true today. The church structure created in state of Skopje has reached the same dead end while it is isolated.
However, a nation without history, culture, language but ethnically determined can not last. This failure was immediately visible by reaching the dead end in the search for a name, which should not only determine it as an independent state, but also be correlated with a historical and cultural past, which is something the state of Skopje lacks.
Like the state of Skopje has been formed by merging borrowed territories, it has also been trying, for a number of years, to create pillars of history and culture by borrowing from other countries their language, dialects and cultural elements, albeit thereby distorting the history of its neighbours.
No state achieves the delimitation of their entity by referring to elements of the national identity of another culture and another historical reality, and especially when grasping or claiming them.
Thus, the historical name of Macedonia, whether defined geographically or in terms of time, complex or not, contains a history and manifests itself in a culture that is imprinted on the Greek history over time and is linguistically and culturally confirmed within the Greek territory, and therefore cannot be used or claimed by another state with which it cannot be identified.
The Church struggled too in order to preserve and enshrine these identity elements, without any nationalist or ethnocentric tendencies or diversions, and therefore it can today take a stand against all forms of distortion, challenging and claim by foreign nations.
The Church respects everyone but also requires from everyone to respect all the elements of our national, historical, cultural and linguistic identity.
The use of a complex or non-complex name by the state of Skopje that includes the term Macedonia, with a geographical or period definition, the adaptation of an -in name only- Macedonian language, the legal and bureaucratic application of a Macedonian nationality and the establishment of a Macedonian ecclesiastical arrangement does not resolve the underlying problems, neither in the interior of the particular state nor in relation to our own country.
On the contrary, they encourage and raise hatred, nationalist tendencies and rivalries, events that are known and dangerous for the Balkans.