I wonder what is funny about the word 'separatist'? Were they not getting armed and fighting Ottomans to separate from them? Or the problem is "Macedonians are not a seperate ethnical people, so they don't have the right to be separatist"?
If a symbol has existed widely on armors, buildings, etc. and especially thousands of coins from a definite area as Teodor's picture shows, it doesn't have to wait to be found on a royal stuff underground, for the permission to be claimed by any people/ organization. It is very interesting that how Macedonia and its neighbors all have too different points of views on the subject,each opposite of all others,as far as I know. With a short web search you can find sites with amazingly different points of views like
http://www.makedonija.info/info.html