If we give up on our past we become rootless and we leave it to Bulgaria to claim that we are merely a Bulgarian minority that seceded from Yugoslavia, said linguist and academic Katica Kulafkova about the growing national identity dispute between Macedonia and Bulgaria. “It is mindless to demand from us to give up on our right to statehood, to our origin and identity”, she added.

Bulgaria now wants Macedonia to declare that the Macedonian nation and language derived from the Bulgarian – as a condition to allow the opening of EU accession talks.

In essence, we were not the same people, we were been two neighboring peoples who lived together, as many other nations, within large empires. If they were here at the time at all, because it is determined that the Macedonian Slavs, or Slavic Macedonians are native to these lands, while there are other theories about the Bulgarians, which I won’t get into, Kulafkova said.

Kulafkova also criticized the 2018 Prespa treaty with Greece, which imposed on Macedonia a ban on evoking the ancient past of the country. “We have the right to explore it, because we are part of that territory, and likely, of that population. We have the right to evoke it and to protect that heritage”, Kulafkova said.