Front Matter

Come take a Ride in Tito’s Time Machine

A Collection of Essays

By Risto Stefov

Come take a Ride in Tito’s Time Machine A Collection of Essays

Many thanks to TrueMacedonian for providing the source material for these essays.

Preface

Before major libraries started digging up old newspapers, scanning and digitizing them and making them available online and accessible from the internet, the Greeks had us convinced that Macedonians did not exist; they had all died off a long time ago. But when we pointed out that there are people today who call themselves Macedonians and showed them examples, they brushed that off and said those people were not “real” Macedonians but “Slavs.” But when we asked for an explanation as to how they become Macedonians, the Greeks explained that “Tito created them when he created the People’s Republic of Macedonia.” And what purpose would Tito have to create these Macedonians, we asked? Most Greeks believed that “Tito created these Macedonians in order to lay claim to Greek-Macedonia!” You know, the one that the Greeks “liberated” in 1913. The Greeks had convinced the entire world that “Macedonians did not exist” and that “the Modern Macedonians were created by Tito.” To this day I get e-mails from Greeks attesting to this “fact!” But when old newspapers, especially major dailies from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s were made available on the internet, we began to see that Macedonians did exist even before Tito’s time. This was indeed a puzzling problem, especially if we were to believe both the Greeks who tell no lies and all the major daily English language newspapers which reported on the Macedonians even before Tito was born. Faced with this dilemma a number of us got together and after many hours of brainstorming, thanks to TrueMacedonian, we found our answer. The only thing that explained how Tito could have created the Modern Macedonians as per Greek testimonies and how Macedonians existed before his time, as documented by all those newspapers, was that “Tito must have had a time machine and went back in time to create the Macedonians.” Like today’s major dailies that report on world events on a daily basis so did the dailies of a century or so ago. The newspapers were reporting on all sorts of activities in the Balkans and in Macedonia, including on the Macedonians preparing and executing the 1903 Macedonian National Ilinden Uprising against the Ottoman Empire.

Enjoy the essays.