War has once again consumed the Balkans, following an argument in a bar in Skopje as to whether legendary conqueror Alexander The Great was Greek or Macedonian.
A man identified only as "Stavros" loudly claimed Hellenic origins for Alexander, who in the years 336-328 BC conquered much of the known world by his 28th birthday. "Stavros" was shouted down by several others in the bar, and was then set upon by angry Macedonians. Within hours, several Balkan capitals were in flames.
Bearded Serbian "Chetniks" invaded and laid waste to Zagreb, while a Croatian group calling itself the "Newstashe" burned Mostar, the capital of Hercegovina, and were advancing toward Sarajevo, where the famous bridge on which Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 had just been blown up by a militant group calling itself "Two Extremely Angry Bosnians Named Haso and Moji."
Greek reaction was swift and merciless. Prices were raised at several diners in New York's Queens County, class attendance at NYU fell off drastically, and exports of top-quality feta cheese, tzatziki, moussaka, retsina and galactobureko to other Balkan states were swiftly curtailed..
The EU could not be reached directly. A phone message at the EU's main number in Brussels advised callers that "we at the EU are not in right now, and will be occupied in promulgating playground safety standards until the war in the Balkans, about which we know nothing, is over."
The UN General Assembly, in the meantime, responded by issuing yet another condemnation of the state of Israel, attributing the Balkan hostilities to the fact that the Greek city of Thessalonika "had once had a sizable Zionist-irredentist-racist population."
