Macedonia: Its Races And Their Future

[yannis-3]

Originally Posted by Cadmus

??????

So let me get this right....there are as many people descendent from Bulgarian farmers in Monastir as in Thessalonica vilayets?

I really don't get it?

So northern Macedonia is almost as much as Bulgarian as the Monastir area??

Look, this map made by Skopians
Southern FYROM and southwestern Bulgaria was in the vilayets of Monastir and Thessalonica


This document is in French
Is about the schools and the students in the two Macedonian vilayets

ELEVES ( students) you can see in all the “CAZA” of today Greek territory the Greek students are much more than the Bulgarians .

[Draco]

Brailsford makes three things clear a) that Greeks existed in Macedonia, b) that Greeks understood the term "Macedonia" in a different way to Bulgarians and Serbs in that they didn't consider Skopje part of it since it was unrelated to ancient Macedonia and there weren't many Greeks there, and c) and Skopjians are/were Bulgarians who speak Bulgarian.

Dellux/Boss, this post of your is trolling, since it is selective quoting which can be easily ascertained. It was a poor attempt at deception.

[Truth Bearer]

Brailsford clearly writes that today's "Macedonians" were BULGARIANS....So boss you obviously agree with this perception??

[Truth Bearer]

Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future
H. Brailsford
IV. The Races of Macedonia

10. Are the Macedonians Serbs or Bulgars ?


Are the Macedonians Serbs or Bulgars ? The question is constantly asked and dogmatically answered in Belgrade and Sofia. But the lesson of history obviously is that there is no answer at all. They are not Serbs, for their blood can hardly be purely Slavonic. There must be in it some admixture of Bulgarian and other non-Aryan stock (Kuman Tartars, Pechenegs, &c.). On the other hand, they can hardly be Bulgarians, for quite clearly the Servian immigrations and conquests must have left much Servian blood in their veins, and the admixture of non-Aryan blood can scarcely be so considerable as it is in Bulgaria. They are probably very much what they were before either a Bulgarian or a Servian Empire existed — a Slav people derived from rather various stocks, who invaded the peninsula at different periods. But they had originally no clear consciousness of race, and any strong Slavonic Power was able to impose itself upon them. One may say safely that for historical reasons the people of Kossovo and the North West are definitely Serbs, while the people of Ochrida are clearly Bulgarians. The affinities of the rest of Macedonia are decided on purely political grounds. Language teaches us very little. The differences between literary Servian and Bulgarian are not considerable, but they are very definite. The Macedonian dialect is neither one nor the other, but in certain structural features it agrees rather with Bulgarian than with Servian.This, however, means little; for modern Servian is not the language of Dushan, but the dialect of Belgrade. A southern Macedonian finds no difficulty in making himself understood in Dushan's country (Uskub and Prizrend), though he will feel a foreigner in Belgrade. One must also discount the effects of propaganda. A priest or teacher from Sofia or Belgrade who settles in a village will modify its dialect considerably in the course of a generation. This process may be observed at work round such centres as Uskub, where both Servians and Bulgarians are active. A trained ear can now detect a difference speech
between villages which are only a few miles apart, and even the foreigner notices that while the Bulgarophil peasants answer a question in the affirmative with "Da," the Serbophils say "Yis." The element of accident in these political affinities is very large. It is not uncommon to find fathers who are themselves officially "Greeks" equally proud of bringing into the world "Greek," "Servian," "Bulgarian," and "Roumanian" children. The passion for education is strong, and the various propagandas pander eagerly to it. If a father cannot contrive to place all his sons in a secondary school belonging to the race which he himself affects, the prospect of a bursary will often induce him to plant them out in rival establishments. It is, of course, a point of honour that a boy who is educated at the expense of one or other of these peoples must himself adopt its language and its nationality. The same process is at work among the villages. I remember vividly my amazement when I encountered this quaint phenomenon during my first visit to Macedonia. I was talking to a wealthy peasant who came in from a neighbouring village to Monastir market. He spoke Greek well, but hardly like a native. "Is your village Greek," I asked him, "or Bulgarian ?" "Well," he replied, "it is Bulgarian now, but four years ago it was Greek." The answer seemed to him entirely natural and commonplace. "How," I asked in some bewilderment, "did that miracle come about ?" "Why," said he, "we are all poor men, but we want to have our own school and a priest who will look after us properly. We used to have a Greek teacher. We paid him £5 a year and his bread, while the Greek consul paid him another £5; but we had no priest of our own. We shared a priest with several other villages, but he was very unpunctual and remiss. We went to the Greek Bishop to complain, but he refused to do anything for us. The Bulgarians heard of this and they came and made us an offer. They said they would give us a priest who would live in the village and a teacher to whom we need pay nothing. Well, sir, ours is a poor village, and so of course we became Bulgarians." One can picture this rather quaint
revolution. The little man who had once been to Athens abandons the hopeless task of teaching Greek to children who had learnt only Slav from their mothers. The legend that Alexander the Great was a Greek goes out by one road, and the rival myth that Alexander was a Bulgarian comes in by the other. The Mass, which was droned unpunctually in ancient Greek, is now droned (punctually) in ancient Slav. But beneath the rather comic aspects of this incident the fact remains that the village was now obtaining education in its own tongue, and opening its doors to civilising influences which came to it in a form which it could assimilate and make its own. The bribe of £5 did but hasten an inevitable process. I have heard a witty French consul declare that with a fund of a million francs he would undertake to make all Macedonia French. He would preach that the Macedonians are the descendants of the French crusaders who conquered Salonica in the twelfth century, and the francs would do the rest. But after all, the Greeks dispose of ample funds, and yet the Greeks have lost Macedonia.

[Truth Bearer]

So boss can you please reply what are you???How about this one about the "Macedonians"?

Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future H. Brailsford
V. The Bulgarian movement

1. First Impressions of the Bulgarian Character


A TRAVELLER'S first impressions of the Bulgarians of Macedonia are rarely favourable. It is a race with few external attractions; and it seldom troubles to sue for sympathy, or assist the process of mutual understanding. It is neither hospitable nor articulate. The Slav peasant has no passwords to the foreigner's heart. He cannot point, like the Greek, to a great past; he cannot boast that his forbears have been your tutors in civilisation. He leaves you to form what opinion of him you please, and shows himself only in the drab of his daily costume of commonplace. He will not call on you unbidden at your hotel, or invite you to his schools, or insist that you shall visit his churches. And, perforce, you study him from the outside. You find him dull, reserved, and unfriendly, for experience has taught him to see in every member of an alien race a probable enemy. He lacks the plausibility, the grace, the quick intelligence of the Greek. He has nothing of the dignified courtesy, the defiant independence, the mediaeval chivalry of the Albanian. Nor has he physical graces to recommend him; and even the women are unprepossessing. He has no sense for externals, no instinct for display. If he is wealthy he hoards his wealth. If he is poor he lives in squalor and in dirt. His national costumes are rarely picturesque, his national dances monotonous, his national songs unmusical. You may learn to respect his industry, his vast capacity for uninteresting work; but it is all the toil of the labourer, and the spirit of the artist and the craftsman is not in him. He erects
against you a bulwark of deceit. He treats your every question as a snare into which he refuses to enter. Either he answers with feigned stupidity and an assumption of ignorance, or else he seeks to divine the response you expect, and proceeds forthwith to give it to you with no thought of its relation to the truth. It is not exactly lying as we understand it. Rather the peasant has no conception of a frank relationship with any superior. He has been demoralised by dealing with masters who are childish and capricious as well as tyrannical. His vices are the mean habits of the down-trodden, and if in any capacity you have need of courage or honesty or fidelity, it is the Albanian and not the Bulgarian whom you will employ. You may learn to view these faults in a true historical perspective. You may bring yourself to think of them rather as the shameful evidence of the conqueror's wrongdoing than any proof of original depravity in the conquered. The more you learn the more you will incline to a kindly pity, but at the first you are hardly likely to admire this stolid and unprepossessing race. Time and accident alone bring the clue to a different reading of its character.

It came to me by chance in the silent streets of Macedonian towns — this occult and difficult clue. One hears in them neither music nor laughter. The peasant trudges silently in, his wife some paces behind him, and speaks only to chaffer at the bazaar. The townsman is too busy in dodging spies and stepping over dogs to break the melancholy silence. And yet, as the winter went on, a plaintive melody began to detach itself from the dull background of depression. I hardly heeded it until one evening I heard it at the fireside of a Bulgarian house. I can think of nothing in my experience more homely, more complacent, more comfortable than that family circle with the plain daughters, the shy son, and the fat parents in undress. It was an atmosphere of crude materialism, and nothing seemed more

1. Another reason why the Bulgarians of Macedonia seem so unattractive is that all their best men are exiles in free Bulgaria. There is no educated class left to leaven the rest, or to represent the nation to the traveller.
distant than ideas, more remote than revolution. And then, suddenly, they sang it, the plaintive air of the streets. It brought a fire to their eyes, a resonance to their voices, a blush to their phlegmatic cheeks. It was a song of revolt. It summoned the young men to the hills, chid the old laggards who "sit in cafés" celebrated one by one the chiefs who had fought and died in the autumn, and prophesied a future of freedom. From that evening onward the air was always in my ears. Sometimes it was a schoolboy who whistled it in the streets; sometimes a group of young men who chanted it, with all its daring words, within earshot of a Turkish sentry. It mingled with the tread of armed patrols and the rumble of ammunition carts. It challenged the night-watchman, and insulted the Pasha's carriage. Let the Turks be never so busy with their ostentatious precautions, their endless mobilisation against the coming campaign, this song of defiance was always in the air, mocking their dull wits and their useless preparations. They neither heard nor understood, foreigners that they are in their own country. It played about their ears unheeded, like a song of doom, sung by the land itself. And here at length was the real rhythm of the Bulgarian heart. Henceforward the lies and the silences mattered little. One could overhear this inarticulate people talking to itself. I was amid a race that was organising itself for freedom. It leads a double life, caring little for the ugly, unimportant present in which it suffers, intrigues and compromises, postponing its greater qualities for the future it has resolved to conquer. The insurgent movement is in reality a genuine Macedonian movement, prepared by Macedonians, led by Macedonians, and assisted by the passionate sympathy of the vast majority of the Slav population. There is hardly a village that has not joined the organisation. In the larger towns, like Monastir, there are few individual Bulgarians who are not active and willing members. Ten and twenty years ago the children in Macedonian schools, trained to render the Sultan's hymn for the benefit of official visitors, were taught in secret a pathetic song, "to the honour of him, whosoever he may be, who shall be our liberator."
To-day that song has given place to ballads of achievement which tell how Delcheff or Svetkoff gave their lives in open fight for an unfurled banner.

[Truth Bearer]

Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future
H. Brailsford
V. The Bulgarian movement

2. The Treaty of San Stefano


The Treaty of San Stefano, which closed the Russo-Turkish war, brought a momentary and elusive hope of liberty to Macedonia. If we could but dismiss the habits of thought of twenty years, see the map of the Balkans without the artificial lines which diplomacy has traced upon it, and think away the political suggestions conveyed in such purely geographical terms as "Bulgaria" and "Macedonia," there is no reason in history or in the nature of things, why these two regions should have been subjected to such different fates. In both, the population is predominantly Slavonic, and in both there is a minority of Turks and Greeks. Both took up arms to co-operate with the liberating Russian invader. Both had revolted from the Greek form of Orthodoxy and freely joined the Bulgarian Exarchist Church. When the Berlin Congress, influenced by the dread which England entertained of creating a great Bulgaria that might have been a powerful ally of Russia, ordained that Bulgaria should be freed, while Macedonia should return to Turkish rule, a reckless despair seized the abandoned population which had just seen its liberties won by blood and ratified by treaty. Their first instinct was one of protest. Two districts of the Struma valley rose in arms, seized the passes, and for some days defied the Turkish troops. At Ochrida a more ambitious conspiracy was revealed to the authorities before it had ripened. Repressions followed, but Europe had given its decision; and for more than a decade the Slavs of Macedonia endured their fate with what sullen patience they could command, cherishing the hope that Russia might some day enforce in earnest the generous programme of San Stefano. It was a period of much suffering, in which progress was slow and painful. The Greeks were active and hostile, persecuting any teacher who dared to propagate the Bulgarian language, and opposing the extension of the "schismatic" Bulgarian Church with the familiar weapons of bribery and denunciation.

So boss any question you might need to ask?

[Demetrius Doukas]

They obviously are not able to comprehend that such "archives" just prove blank clear that they are Bulgarians with the difference that they are simply brainwashed Bulgarians.....................

[Truth Bearer]

This is why these peoiple have no idea they use one comment from a source but fail to realize that the source can backfire on them.Brailsford like Arthur Evans believed that most of the people in macedonia were of Bulgar stock due to the language being Slavic.There is not one historian,linguist,anthropologist,journalist or politician at the time early 1900's that believed in an ethnicity called "Macedonian".Yes Macedonian as in the region but of Bulgar,Serbian,Greek stock.