Macedonia

Macedonia names two things that this atlas holds in a single row because the name itself is part of the material.

The first is the ancient kingdom north of Greece proper, whose ruling house claimed Greek descent and Heracles as an ancestor while its neighbours to the south argued about whether Macedonians were Greek at all. Its religion was recognisably Greek in its gods and its sanctuaries, with local emphases: the sanctuary at Dion under Mount Olympus was the kingdom's principal cult centre, and Alexander sacrificed there before crossing into Asia. What Alexander's campaigns then did was carry Greek cult practice, city foundation and language across Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia and beyond, which is the precondition for almost everything the atlas holds under Hellenistic religion, including the setting in which the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek.

The second is the modern region, divided between the republic of North Macedonia and the Greek province of the same name, whose religious history is Slavic and Christian. Its centre is Ohrid, on the lake at the republic's southwestern edge, where the pupils of Cyril and Methodius established a school after being expelled from Moravia and where Slavonic literacy was consolidated for the Balkans.

The atlas keeps one entry and distinguishes the senses in the material, since splitting them would imply a settled answer to a question that is not settled.

Ohrid matters to Slavic Christianity roughly as Iona matters to the Christianity of the British Isles: a small place where a literary and monastic tradition was consolidated and from which it spread.

Clement and Naum, pupils of Cyril and Methodius, arrived in the late ninth century after the Moravian mission collapsed, and the school they established taught in Slavonic, trained clergy and copied books. Old Church Slavonic in the form that became standard for Orthodox worship across the Balkans and later Russia owes a great deal to this work, and the alphabet now called Cyrillic was developed in this milieu rather than by Cyril himself. Ohrid became the seat of an archbishopric, and its lakeside churches carry frescoes and icons among the most studied in Byzantine art.

The status of that see is the long argument. It was autocephalous, then subordinate, then abolished by Constantinople in 1767, and the modern claim to inherit it produced one of the most protracted disputes in Orthodox Christianity. A Macedonian church declared itself independent in 1967 and was recognised by no one; the split ran for fifty five years, cutting a large population off from communion with the rest of Orthodoxy, and was settled only in 2022.

The dispute is a good illustration of how Orthodox jurisdiction works, since nothing in it turned on doctrine. It was entirely about who has authority to grant independence, and to whom.