Category: 01A ETHNOGNESIS

Who are the Macedonians? Yugoslavia claims they are Serbs; Greeks claim they are Greeks who speak Bulgarian and call them ‘Vulgarophones’; Bulgarians hold they are Bulgarians, and most of the Macedonians assert that they are Macedonians.

In the central stretches of the Balkans, Macedonia, the people spoke practically the same Slavic dialect, but did not line up sharply with either of the rival nationalities.   A struggle to control Macedonia set in, which was one of the saddest pages in church history. Serb, Greek, Bulgar, prelates, school teachers, bandits, set out to make Macedonians join their…

Macedonians! Today, as before, you have no political or cultural freedom. While the Serbian officials did not allow you to call yourselves Macedonians and persecuted those who disobeyed, now the Bulgarian fascists and chauvinists force you to call yourselves Macedonian Bulgarians, also persecuting those who say they are Macedonians. They represent your leaders and fighters from the past, such as…

• Pgs. 18-19 • The layman was an ardent Macedonian nationalist, rather distrustful of Bulgaria, and profoundly hostile to Russia. The description was good and accurate.   • Pg. 80 • Macedonia which revolts, which claims to be a unity and asks for autonomy—there are neither Greeks nor Turks.   • Pg. 96 • Under the third Tsar, Samuel, the…

• Pg. 6 • Poor Georgie! He spoke a Slav dialect, and was possibly a mixture of all the races that have ever ruled the peninsula, and all he had gained was a Mauser ball through his right hand in the name of Alexander the Great… A song was sung during the late Macedonian insurrection in which an eagle, who…

Who thinks about Macedonia? We Bulgarians do not talk about Macedonia, but others speak and think about it – they are the Macedonians themselves … Do not forget that Macedonians really are like the ‘Slavic Irish’ – in them the national consciousness is strongly developed and so that is how their fighters are born.

These Slavs may properly be considered as a special Macedonian group, but since they were closely related to both Bulgars and Serbs and had, moreover, in the past been usually incorporated in either the Bulgar or Serb state, they inevitably became the object of both Bulgar and Serb aspirations and an apple of bitter discord between these rival nationalities. As…

Because Macedonia is the reason for many troubles between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, why wouldn’t we create an independent Macedonia? After all, the Macedonians do not recognize any nationality except Macedonian.

The salvation of the Balkan peoples is in the autonomy of Macedonia. Macedonians want this autonomy because they see it as a solid guarantee for the peace, tranquility and fraternal life of the inhabitants of the Balkans. A shared Macedonia would be the source of countless misfortunes, an autonomous Macedonia would be a hotbed of civilization, the rendezvous of the…

‘What language do you speak?’ I asked the peasant… ‘I am a Macedonian,’ he replies, ‘you know, the Serbs maintain that our language is a Serbian dialect, the Bulgarians say that we speak Bulgarian. What can you do about it?’

We wonder how many Macedonians — real Macedonians — attended the so-called Macedonian meeting recently held in opposition to the cause of Macedonian emancipation in Athens. Possibly one, probably none…But all the distinguished phil- Hellenists in the world, backed by all the pseudo-Macedonians in Greece, cannot get over the fact that Macedonia is in a frightful state of disorder and…

The concept of ‘Macedonian Slavic’ is confusing only for those who want it to be. Macedonian Slavic is to such an extent a reality that there existed in the nineteenth century a Macedonian literary language, the language of a quite limited scholarly literature but of a voluminous popular literature; and one is not dealing here with documents of folklore such…

My place by the sea hospital was now filled up by a physician, a Macedonian, who had studied at Padua: He told me that in the year 1739, the last year of the Turkish War, his countrymen, the Macedonian Christians, had assembled a body of between thirty and forty thousand men, with a design to free themselves from Turkish slavery.

Don’t expect from me that I feel myself to be a Serb. The Bulgarians have put it into my head for an eternity that I am a Bulgarian. The only thing that I can now say is that I am a Macedonian. Take my children, educate them as Serbs, and they will become Serbs. I have nothing against it. But…

They are fiery eyed men… who live for nothing else than Macedonia, and who, if they thought all hope of freeing it were lost, would scarcely hesitate, like passionate and despairing lovers, to destroy themselves, life having lost for them its sole purpose.