The mythical tribes invented by the politics of a Byzantine Empire through propaganda and lies.

Authored by Senver Alagic.

All of your history books are flooded by the history of the Slavs, or more precisely, the South Slavs, how they have raided Balkans in the 7th century AD, conquered native populations and took the lead of governing, sprouting and birthing many nations that have formed today as the Balkan countries who’s further story you already know.

But, what if I told you that they don’t actually exist?

The History

The first ever actual mention of the Slavs starts in chronicles of Byzantine’s administrators, former Ostrogoths who got baptised, Cassiodorus, who rewrote the report from Jordanes (his work Getica) and Procopius of Ceasarea in his work De Bello Gothico, mid-sixth century AD.

In their works, Slavs are depicted as the tribes who live between the Danube and Dnieper Rivers or all the inhabitants of the northern borders of the Byzantine Empire aka Europeans.

In reality, the name is invented by the Byzantines to describe all the European nations that were conquered or influenced by them, through which they were spreading their influence through religion, Christianity.

Ask yourself, what is or what are the Slavic languages?

If you have ever heard of Byzantine’s theologians and saints, Cyril and Methodius, one thing that easily slips from everyone’s mind is that, they’ve took the Greek language, modified it and built a Cyrillic letter out of it, which they spread through the aforementioned areas and further, having nations adopting them as their own languages which were later modified to fit specific needs of these nations, creating languages such as Old Bosnian, Russian for example in their ‘attempt’ of spreading literacy throughout the Europe, right before the formation of the first Balkan states or kingdoms.

But, what were the languages before that, the so-called Slavic languages?

Reality tells, Illyrians are the native Balkan people and Slavs have never actually existed nor the story of their raids have ever been true

If you dig through the history, the most notable mentioning of the Illyrians or Illyria was as the province of the Roman Empire, where we learn of the Bato’s Rebellion, a leader of the Illyrian Daesitiates Tribe, that inhabited the area of the modern day city in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the city of Busovacha.

The revolt have bursted because of heavy taxation by the Roman Empire and poor treatment of the Illyrians. The rebellion was successful to a degree after Bato the Daesitiate gathered other tribes from the Danube River (Eastern Illyrians), across the Dinaric Alps to the west — Dalmati and other Illyrian tribes.

Later from 4th century AD, the area has been conquered by the Ostrogoths (led by Theodoric The Great) who’s kingdom fell apart few centuries later after which Balkans became the centre of focus for the Byzantine Empire.

So, where is, Slavic traditional clothing, for example?

As in the images below, we can compare the Illyrian clothing with, for example, Bosnian traditional clothing (as these clothings are similar if not almost identical for majority of the Balkan nations) and see that, times have changed very slowly for the Balkans:

Now, let’s take a look at the modern reiteration of this clothing:

So, where is Slavic traditional clothing?

You can ask yourself that question all day long but you will hopelessly roam for an answer as the true answer is: it doesn’t exists.

Now, what kind of conqueror, defeats the entire peninsula without imposing his own letter, language, culture, clothing, anything?

Why would a conqueror adopt the culture of the defeated natives in entirety?

Isn’t it strange?

Propaganda

The true answer to these questions would be, that the Byzantine Empire have used the religion to spread its influence, conquer new lands and easily assimilate the natives by imposing the special language and the special story of origin for them, through genocides of the older generations, to make the younger generations feel their own sense of affiliation to the Byzantines and doing their bidding of conquest of the rest of the Balkans.

The myth of the Slavs is perpetuated in modern days by the Balkan countries, through the centuries, of a myth of almost all Balkan nations belonging to a single root/s which, in the minds of their rulers, created a notion of a unification (see Kingdom of Yugoslavia as an example) of all Southern Slavs but this notion was just a mask for a ghastly desire: a desire for land conquests which resulted in numerous genocides and ethnic cleansings that haunt Balkan’s nations and their history till this day; just for the most notable reference, see the project of Greater Serbia.

Reference

Author Senver Alagic. https://medium.com/@dr0ne.sa14/why-slavs-dont-actually-exist-66e201bcec80