The mountain-climbing vice-president of FYROM’s Parliament, Antonio Milososki, again provoked Greece on Monday by showing a photo of himself at the Naselba Caska site with the flag of the Vergina Sun.
The Vergina Sun came to prominence following archaeological excavations around the Vergina site, in northern Greece, during the late 1970s. It is an ancient Greek Macedonian symbol that the neighboring country has often tried to use in an effort to make claims on ancient Greek history, and especially the legacy of the kingdom of Macedon, Philip II, Alexander the Great, even as far down the line as Cleopatra, the Rosetta Stone and assorted Hellenistic kingdoms of the Near East.
Milososki, the one-time foreign minister of the small landlocked country, had prompted controversy again last year when he decided to publish a photograph of himself flying the flag atop Mt. Olympus.
An avid hiker, Milososki has claimed that he always carries the Vergina Sun with him and photographs himself with it on all his treks. Some Slavophone residents of the ex-Yugo republic even call the symbol the “Kutlesh sun”, possibly the Slavic corruption of the placename.
Milososki is one of the more recent protagonists of a secretly taped conversation with that country’s premier, where the latter discusses a “name issue” compromise.
