Sofia demonstrates ancient conceptions and makes unsustainable and naive claims against Macedonia.

This is the position of 30 Bulgarian historians, scholars, university professors who stood against the memorandum that Bulgaria sent to EU member states over Macedonia’s EU integration.

In the letter titled “Europe does not understand us” published on “Mediapool.bg“, they write:

We do not believe that the process of formation of the Macedonian nation, with all its specifics, is fundamentally different from the way of formation of other nations, nor do we believe that it can be reduced to the formula in the memorandum of “ethnic and linguistic engineering”. We also oppose the presentation of the Macedonian nation as the fruit of “Yugoslav propaganda”, reads the letter.

Scholars also comment that “all standardized languages are “artificial” in a certain sense and write that Europe could not understand the theses of some influential Bulgarian scholars.

Although we accept the concept of “common history”, we oppose its elementary interpretations, as well as its use to impose a single narrative – in this case, the official story of Bulgaria’s past. We consider that the claim for a common history up to 1944, unilaterally interpreted as Bulgarian, is unconvincing, write the professors.