Optimistic announcements from historian Dragi Gjorgiev, who leads the Macedonian delegation in the joint committee with Bulgaria, raised eyebrows, since Gjorgiev was the one who was recently warning the public about the heavy-handed Bulgarian demands. The committee is meeting today and tomorrow, and expectations were already raised by Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, who said that they are on the verge of making crucial agreements. Bulgaria wants Macedonia to accept its historic narrative, that would present the Macedonian nation as derived from the Bulgarian.

On our part, we proposed that the medieval state of Tsar Samoil is presented with two alternative views, that it was the continuation of the Bulgarian medieval kingdom, and that it was an independent kingdom. On the Bulgarian part, they insisted that it is presented as the heir to the tradition of the First Bulgarian Kingdom. And that is where we got stuck, said Gjorgiev in December 2020.

More recently, less than a year ago, Gjorgiev warned that the Bulgarian demands on this and other issues are unacceptable. “We are being asked to propose joint honoring of historic figures such as Goce Delcev, but the country that we are honoring him with does not recognize the Macedonian language and claims that we have only been formed as a nation in 1944 by Tito. How can we make such recommendations to our Government? That we accept that we don’t exist as a nation? How will this be seen in our public?, Gjorgiev said in an interview for a Bulgarian TV channel.

But now, after he was elevated to a post in the Macedonian Academy, and after his team was significantly altered, he seems ready to accept the Bulgarian demands.