Za lazhite na makedonizma i mitovete mitovete na balgarshtinata v Makedonia
About the "Macedonism" Lies and the Myths about the "Bulgarian-ship" in Macedonia

Summary/Abstract: The basic theoretical purpose of the article is to study the national historiography in Macedonia and Bulgaria as a creator of national identity as long as it is the interpretative but also the ideological resource of modern historiography that endows the past with an identitary importance. This presupposes an analysis of the strategic way in which both national narratives are constructed. Thus the article attempts to take a critical distance to the substantialist ethnic premises of Bulgarian and of Macedonian national historiographies in order to give account of their ideological functions producing certain historical myths of both nations. This critical review involves a denouncing of the validity claims of each kind of interpretation of the history founded upon the assumption of an ethnic continuity between the pre-modern past and the processes of nation-building that started in the 19th century ≠ the so called Revival period. With this respect, the article tries to disclose the basic mythological assumptions and the most important interpretative strategies that the Macedonian and the Bulgarian historians use in their polemics concerning the interpretation of the historical sources or the national belonging of one or another political phenomenon or a personality of the past. In this way, the article is dedicated to the intrinsic mechanisms peculiar to both historiographies in their effort to produce the truths and the symbolic image of the national identity. Thus the present study is interested in essential to Macedonian and Bulgarian historiographic narratives debates like those concerning the so called ethnogenetic problems as well as in topics like the Revival period and the Macedonian revolutionary movement in order to question the ethnic premises that generate a great deal of myths and of paradoxes in modern historical reconstructions.

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