Antiquitize

I have an hypothesis of my own concerning those poems which I think I could make out to be at least highly probable: viz. that they were originally all written in modern English and antiquitized after. Had I his modernisms now published, I would take one of them and antiquitize it in two manners, à la Chaucer, and à la Chatterton, and I am persuaded that these two specimens would prove the matter clearer than all the critical arguments that either have or will be produced; and yet I think that T. Warton has done enough in that way to convince even the president of the Antiq. society (if such president were ever capable of conviction) that he was of all forgerers the most palpable; all this however no more detracts from his poetical abilities than Rousseau’s insanity does from his oratorical.

These projects were built mainly under principles of neo-classicism, but, like the use of the Gothic, they symbolized an attempt by the Ascendancy, to antiquitize the homescape, to make it more venerable than it was, to root it in a history it did not have.

In late midrashic texts from the medieval period the authors of these texts revert to the Biblical term ye’or in order to antiquitize their texts.

Since the last elections of 2008 and 2009, VMRO has gained the absolute power in the country and the city of Skopje. Its political agenda is dominated by a nationalist discourse, which is excluding and marginalizing the minorities in the country (25% Albanians, 4% Turks, 3% Roma, 2% Serbians, 1% Bosnians, 1% Aromunians) and includes the attempt to “antiquitize” the Macedonian nation, the glorification of Macedonia and the Macedonians, the glorification of VMRO and the neglecting of the Ottoman and Yugoslavian heritage.