The North Greek Frontiers until Balkan Wars

[akritas]

he main problem concerning the delimitation of the Greek from the non-Greek world in the Balkans during the pre-Balkan wars or the last period of the Ottoman period is in the very nature of the frontiers we wish to deal with. The answers do not come easily, mostly because of the complex nature of human activity. Naturally, this implies the existence of various types of frontiers which a Hungarian scholar attempted to classify summarily. First there are the political frontiers which are subdivided into state, provincial and administrative. Then come the economic, including frontiers of transport, communications, production, customs and money. In the third place, we have frontiers of jurisdiction and law, of culture including religion, style and others. And, last but not least, there is the question of natural frontiers with their three major subdivisions: geological, geographical and ethnographical. All can be cut down further into such subdivisions as quality of the soil, types of climate and vegetation, precipitation and temperature belts, and as many types of frontiers.

A geographer may choose to interest himself in such frontiers as climate, vegetation, and settlement. In each case he is bound to discover that the frontier is in fact a "transitional area rather than a sharp divide. Of course, human geography presents greater problems than physical geography.

As we have seen, the idea of the frontier is almost synonymous to instability. We have already suggested how difficult it was to delimit East from West over the Greek world. One of the best-known champions of modern Greek nationalism, Rhigas, has put the entire Balkan Peninsula upor a "map of Greece" which he prepared in 1797. His concept of Greece was in conformity to the Byzantine ecumenical tradition and he did not draw any sharp lines of delimitation between Greek and non-Greek Christians in the Balkans: they were all brothers. But after the Serbian and the Greek revolutions, nationalism came over the Balkans to stay and, therefore, ethnic, linguistic and cultural boundaries had to be taken more and more into consideration. Having this in mind and writing almost half a century after Rhigas, Sir J. E. Tennent assigned to Hellenism all of Epirus as wcll as the major parts of Macedonia and Thrace.

At this point of our discussion reference must be made to the "Jirekk line". Constantine Jirecek was an eminent Czech historian of the 19th century who, thanks to the valuable services he rendered to the Bulgarian nationality through his writings, was invited in Sofia to become minister of national education. On the basis of epigraphic evidence, he established a line separating the Greek from the non-Greek world in the Balkan Peninsula. Even though his delimitation was applicable mostly to the early years of the Byzantine Empire, namely to the period before the arrival of the Slavs and the Bulgarians, it has been applied to later periods including the one which is of interest to us. Despite some minor corrections by later scholars, this line has been generally accepted as representing more or less faithfully historical realities covering quite a few centuries. On the north, the sphere of Greek influence has been delimited by a boundary cutting across the Peninsula from Alessio on the Adriatic to the Black Sea. After going through the Dibra region, this line crosses northern Macedonia somewhere between Stobi (Istip) and Scouboi (Skoplje). Then it turns north towards Nyssa (Nish) and Pirot where it comes nearest to the Danubian river system. From that point it goes towards Serdica (Sofia) and then, following the Southern slopes of the Balkan range of mountains, it reaches the sea. We leave out the coastal region of the Black Sea, where the Greek world made its presence felt in a more continuous manner and much more to the north of the Jirecek line. Taking into consideration all that has been said above, our map on the approximate zone of delimitation of the Greek culture area in the Balkan Peninsula during the Turkokratia is, nevertheless, based upon an ethnological map drawn by H. Kiepert in 1878.

Much of what has been written about the nature of the vital Greek space in the Balkans from antiquity to the present, both historically and geographically, has been ably summed up by Stilpon P. Kyriakides, at a time he was promoting the idea for the need for more expanded studies of Balkan history cutting across present national frontiers. More recently, professor D. Obolenski arrived at the same conclusions so far as the position of the Greek world in the Balkans during the Byzantine millenium is concerned. As professor A. Vacalopoulos has demonstrated, the Ottoman conquest of the entire Peninsula put into motion a series of movements of Greek populations all over the Empire. Those metanastic movements were not limited in the traditional areas of the Greek world itself, but overflowed into the non-Greek world of the Balkans as well.

Jovan Cvijic, . who wrote at the beginning of the 20th cent, when the Slavic aspect of the Macedonian question was just about settled in favor of his country, relied upon the information gathered by Ami Boue in the 19th century to put the frontier of Hellenism well south of the delimitations of the two aforementined Greek authors and this especially for Macedonia. According to him, the frontier zone between Hellenism and Slavdom has been less stable for the region between the plain of Thessalonike and the Adriatic coastline in Albania than has been for the region between that city and the upper Evros (Maritza) valley. This has been the main result of the extraordinary power of cultural attraction which was exerted upon a great number of Albanian Tosks and Kutzovlachs by Hellenic culture.

It appears that, when the Ottomans first invaded the then war-torn Balkan Peninsula, they named the countries they occupied by the nationality of their inhabitants. Thus, the country of the Bulgarians (Bulgar-ili) was geographically situated somewhere between the lower Danube in the North and the Haemus mountain chain (Balkan) in the South. The lands of the Roum (Roum-ili), as the Greeks were still calling themselves Romans (Romaioi) their popular spoken language being the Romaic, were stretching South. Therefore, the names of Rumelia, or Rumeli, simply meant the "land of the Greeks”. This is why, even today, the heart of old, or continental, Greece, which is to be found South of the Arta-Volos line, is known as Rumeli.


What has been said of the name of Rumelia can also be said of the nameof Romania, by which some European travellers of the 17th and 18th centuries designate the Greek world in the Balkans, including Eastern Rumelia. It indicates lands inhabited by Greeks. A West European mapmaker might have designated as Romania any territory from the Peloponnesus, which was the oldest known, to the upper Evros valley, which was the least known to them. During the Byzantine, as well as the post-Byzantine, period of Greek history any Balkan Christian speaking the Greek language as a mother tongue was considered a "Roman". He spoke "romeika", that is to say Greek, and belonged to the "Romiosyne", that is to say to Hellenism." The words "Hellene" and "Hellenism" came to use much later, and even then they were at first used mostly by scholars. There are still many Greeks who know themselves only as "Romioi", even though the name Hellene has prevailed among intellectuals from the beginning of the 19th century!'




Sources:
1-Constantinos Vakalopoulos,History of the Greater Macedonia,2004
2-Constantinos Vakalopoulos,History of the Greater Thrace,2003
3-Basil Spyridonakis,Historical Geography at the Tiurkokratia, 1977
4-Jovan. Cvijic, The Zones of the Civilizations at the Balkan Peninsula,1918

Thanks to the L for her help as about the translation.

[Flipper]

Very nice Akritas...

[admin]

Excellent Article Akritas!

[PhiliptheUniterchaeronea]

Cheers.

[MILA]

Hello,

Exuse me in case I did not understand and please do correct me.

Are you claiming that the Bulgarian territory called 'Rumelia' was inhabited by a Greek population?????????? (That is to say at least half of today's Bulgaria)

If 'Yes',what do you think happened to all these Greeks!!!?

All the best,

Mila

[akritas]

Originally Posted by MILA

Hello,

Exuse me in case I did not understand and please do correct me.

Are you claiming that the Bulgarian territory called 'Rumelia' was inhabited by a Greek population?????????? (That is to say at least half of today's Bulgaria)

If 'Yes',what do you think happened to all these Greeks!!!?

All the best,

Mila

Read more carefully what I said and dont think with the today boundaries. Rumelia boundaries were the North Greece, Thessaly, South Albania, FYROM, South Bulgaria and European Turkey.Greek people immigrated in Greek Macedonia and Thrace.

[MILA]

Hello Akritas!

What I ment was-when Bulgaria divided in two.....the eastern part which remained under ottoman rule was called 'Eastern Rumalia'.So,assuming the same logic...was this territory inhabited by a Greek population?

'Rumelia boundaries were the North Greece, Thessaly, South Albania, FYROM, South Bulgaria and European Turkey.Greek people immigrated in Greek Macedonia and Thrace.'

So in today's FYROM ,(right after the liberation of the ottoman rule and so on...) there were mainly greek people living there?

Forgive me if misunderstanding everything....

(Could you possibly provide a map including the% of all the other nations? I tryied to find one but I was proposed to buy some books about that and so on....Actually.. is there any special site for that...like maps,populations in different periods?Any idea?That would be cool!)

Thank you in advance.

All the best,

Mila

[olvios]

Does this help?

[akritas]

Mila the title of the thread is

The North Greek Frontiers until Balkan Wars or better before 1912.Greek immigrated after the Balkan Wars ans WWI from the mentioned regions.And two from the known cities when the Greek population was the majority were the Philipoupolis(Plodviv) and Monastirion (Bitola). Of course there were and other ethicities except the Greek, but theirs influence (poltical, social, cultural) was insignificant in the specifiv time.

[Istor]

If 'Yes',what do you think happened to all these Greeks!!!?

Hey, there is no need for both peoples (Bulgarians and Greeks) to talk about those times. Let history making its job.