Historiography in North Macedonia

Historiography in North Macedonia is the methodology of historical studies developed and employed by Macedonian historians. It traces its origins to 1945, when SR Macedonia became part of Yugoslavia. According to German historian Stefan Troebst, it has preserved nearly the same agenda as Marxist historiography from the times of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The generation of Macedonian historians closely associated with the Yugoslav period, who were instrumental in establishing national historical narratives, still exerts an influence on modern-day institutions. In the field of historiography, communism and Macedonian nationalism are closely related. After the Fall of communism, Macedonian historiography did not significantly revise its communist past, because of the key role played by communist policies in establishing a distinct Macedonian nation.

According to Austrian historian Ulf Brunnbauer, modern Macedonian historiography is highly politicized, because the Macedonian nation-building process is still ongoing. Diverging approaches are discouraged, and people who express alternative views risk economic limitations, academic career obstacles and stigmatization as "national traitors". Troebst wrote in 1983 that historical research in SR Macedonia was primarily about direct political action. He would go on to characterize this reciprocal dependence of historiography and politics as being more pronounced than what had been observed in Eastern and Southeast Europe. Because of the complexity of the case, Macedonian historiography could be described as a state "ideology". Moreover, in North Macedonia, archaeology has often been placed at the service of the state, and used to legitimize nationalist claims to history, culture, and territory.

Although references to ethnic Macedonians do not appear in primary sources before 1870, the first generation of Macedonian historians after WWII traced Macedonian ethnogenesis to the beginning of the 19th century. However, after the Tito-Stalin split, an important break occurred and the nation's origins were traced further back in time, to the medieval empire of Samuel of Bulgaria, which was appropriated as Macedonian rather than Bulgarian. After the Republic of Macedonia's independence from Yugoslavia and after the beginning of the Macedonia name dispute with Greece, Macedonian historiography carried the nation's origins back even earlier, to antiquity and to the ancient kingdom of Macedon with a particular emphasis on Alexander the Great. Croatian historian Tvrtko Jakovina cites the appropriation of Alexander the Great by Macedonian historiography as an example of an "obvious lie".

Some domestic and foreign scholars have criticized this agenda of negationist historiography, whose apparent goal is to affirm the continuous existence of a separate Macedonian nation throughout history. This controversial view is ahistorical, as it projects modern ethnic distinctions onto the past. Such a reading of history contributes to the distortion of Macedonian national identity, and does harm to the academic integrity of history as a discipline. Via the medium of education, unsubstantiated historical claims have been transmitted to generations of students in the country, to conceal that many prominent Macedonians had viewed themselves as Bulgarians. The Skopje 2014 project, for example, promoted the idea of continuity of the Macedonian nation from antiquity until modern times. The debates in North Macedonia concerning its relationships with Bulgaria and Greece have had significant impact on historiographic narrative in the country, introducing a new revisionist interpretation of the past.