THE row over the name Macedonia that has been rumbling on for 27 years has always been absurd. The former Yugoslav province of Macedonia which became independent in 1991 called itself the Republic of Macedonia. But for a number of reasons Greece refused to accept the name and as a member of the European Union tried to use the suasion of Brussels to force the Macedonians to call themselves something else.

This week it seemed that the Macedonians had finally agreed to do this when their Prime Minister Zoran Zaev accepted that his country should be renamed “The Republic of North Macedonia”. But within hours, the nationalist president Gjorge Ivanov announced he would use his powers to block the agreement, saying that under the constitution, his country’s name could not be changed.

For good measure, in Greece there has also been a nationalist pushback against the deal inked by premier Alexis Tsipras. Hard-liners do no want the sovereign state to the north to use the word Macedonia at all.

The main cause of Greek objections is that their country has a large northern province which is also called Macedonia. They fear that in time the state of Macedonia could lay claim to the eponymous territory just across its border. But the concerns of Greek xenophobes go deeper than that. They protest that the government in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, is seeking to claim the noble heritage of the historic Philip of Macedon and his remarkable son Alexander, who two thousand three hundred years ago, in a just 13 years, crushed the-then mighty Persian empire and extended his conquests east to India and south to Egypt.

For Greeks, Alexander is a popular hero who epitomizes their prowess in war, just as Athens is held up as a cradle of democracy and civilization. But there is a problem here, in that modern Greeks have only a tenuous blood connection with the historic Macedonians. By the tenth century various Slav tribes had invaded and taken over that part of modern Greece which was then ruled by the Byzantine empire based in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. The conquerors slaughtered most of the male Greeks and enslaved their women. In time, the Slavs in Greece voluntarily put themselves under the rule of the Byzantine emperors so they could share in the wealth of the empire. But ethnographers agree that modern Greeks are more Slav than they are Hellenistic.

Unfortunately the ludicrous long memories and vicious short-sightedness that afflict virtually all countries within the Balkans mean that even a name can ignite anger and irrationality. Neither the Macedonians not the Greeks seem capable of settling their differences over a single word, even though the benefits of mutual trust, stability, trade and with it prosperity for everyone, are patently clear. On balance the Republic of Macedonia has a legitimate claim to the name by which it was known during the existence of Tito’s Yugoslavia. No one in Athens, including the brutish junta that ruled from 1969 to 1974, ever sought to make a serious issue out of the name of the Yugoslav province across the frontier.

Shakespeare wrote that a rose by any other name smells just as sweet. Greek intransigence by any other name is just as stupid. This is an entirely unnecessary dispute which serves only to inflame ugly passions best left dormant.