Nationality South Slavic Skopjian Ethnicity | Former Yugoslav Republic of "Macedonia"

[Otto]

This thread is titled Former Republic of "Macedonia" | South Slavic Skopjian Ethnicity,
and will provide solid artifactual evidence and arguments for the ethnicity of the Skopjian peoples.

[Otto]

Introduction

The similarities of Skopjian People to those of the Bulgarian are plenty. This includes their Language, History, Politics, and Culture.

The Skopjian people however are also related to Albanian, Vlach, Serbian, Croatian and other Slavic peoples in many respects.

It is thus confusing what "nationality" the Skopjian people of the former Republic of "Macedonia" are exactly. As "FYROM - or the Former Republic of "Macedonia" was never a nation, nor a "nationality" until very recent times (ie until the last few decades), this points to political rather than ethnic birth of their "ethnic consciousness".



Interestingly, although the Skopjian propagandists have been pointing to the "ethnic diversity of the Greeks", the republic of "Macedonia" was and is today a very ethnically diverse geographical area.

The former Republic of "Macedonia" is an ethnically diverse country.
1 300 000 inhabitants declared themselves to be "Macedonians", which represents only 64% of the total population.
However, a great percentage of these people also declare that they are Bulgarian.
As at May, 2004, some 14,000 "Macedonians" had applied for a Bulgarian citizenship on the grounds of Bulgarian origin and 4,000 of them had already received their Bulgarian passports. Also, according to information of the Bulgarian embassy in Skopje, a total of 2,435 Macedonians received Bulgarian citizenship in 2005 alone.
In June, 2004, the "Macedonian" state television announced with alarm that at least one member of every fourth household in the eastern part of the former Republic of "Macedonia" had already received a Bulgarian passport or had at least applied for one. The last quoted number so far was of 63,000 "Macedonians"(the number has not been confirmed officially) by the "Macedonians" daily Vecher on April 5, 2005.

Approximately 500 000 inhabitants are declared as Albanians, representing 25% of the population.
Turks (78,000 or 3.9%)
Roma (54,000 or 2.7%)
Serbs (36,000 or 1.8%)
Aromanians or Vlachs as they are called in census (9695 or 0,4%)
Slavic Muslims or Bosniaks as they are officially called in census represent 0,8% and these include Torbesh, Gorans and Pomaks.
Many other minorities exist, namely Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes (all constituting a small presence of people from the former Yugoslavia), Egyptians and Circassians who live in a handful of villages.

There are strong Bulgarian (1/4 of households had a Bulgarian passport) and Albanian (1/4 of the population at least) influences in the former Republic of "Macedonia" which cannot be ignored. Many other smaller minorities collectively (over 10% of the population) also cannot be ignored as they constitute more than 60% of the population.

[Otto]

Politics of the Former Republic of "Macedonia"

Bulgarian governments throughout the period continued their policy of non-recognition of Macedonians as a distinct ethnic group, pointing to the fact that the so-called "Macedonians" were actually closely linked to Bulgarians. This is easily shown by the political affiliations of these "Macedonians" to Bulgarian parties.

Interestingly the Bulgarian VMRO (a modern right-wing Bulgarian political party) flag is identical to the flag of the Krushevo, Ilinden and the VMRO uprising in Skopje, former "Macedonia". The colours Black and Red were the colours representing Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia and are now prevelent colours for the Skopjians. See more here



There were repeated complaints of official harassment of Macedonian Slav activists in the 1990's. Attempts of Slav Macedonian separatist organisation UMO Ilinden to commemorate the grave of revolutionary Yane Sandanski throughout the 1990's were usually hampered by the Bulgarian police. Several incidents of mobbing of UMO Ilinden members by Bulgarian IMRO activists were also reported. After the Bulgarian Electoral Committee endorsed in 2001 the registration of a wing of UMO Ilinden, which had dropped separatist demands from its Charter, the mother organisation became largely inactive. No major incidents or harassment has been reported since then.

Similar cases of harassment of pro-Bulgarian organisations and activists have been reported in the Republic of Macedonia. In 2000 several teenagers threw smoke bombs at the conference of pro-Bulgarian organisation 'Radko' in Skopje causing panic and confusion among the delegates. The perpetrators were afterwards acclaimed by the Macedonian press as national heroes. 'Radko' was later banned by the Macedonian Constitutional Court as separatist. The organisation has continued its activity, though mostly in the cultural field.
Front cover of Songs of the Macedonian Bulgarians by Stefan Verkovic, first edition (1860)
Enlarge
Front cover of Songs of the Macedonian Bulgarians by Stefan Verkovic, first edition (1860)

In 2001 'Radko' issued in Skopje the original version of the folk song collection 'Bulgarian Folk Songs' by the Miladinov Brothers (issued under an edited name in the Republic of Macedonia and viewed as a collection of Slav Macedonian lyrics). The book triggered a wave of other publications, among which the memoirs of the Greek bishop of Kastoria, in which he talked about the Greek-Bulgarian church struggle at the beginning of the 20th century, as well the Report of the Carnegie Commission on the causes and conduct of the Balkan Wars from 1913. Neither of these addressed the Slavic population of Macedonia as Macedonian Slav but as Bulgarian. Being the first publications to question the official Macedonian position of the existence of a distinct Macedonian Slav identity going back to the time of Alexander the Great, the books triggered a reaction of shock and disbelief in Macedonian Slav public opinion. The scandal after the publication of 'Bulgarian Folk Songs' resulted in the sacking of the Macedonian Minister of Culture, Dimitar Dimitrov.

[Ptolemy]

I am not sure if it has been posted before but here it is.

MACEDONIA IN 1300 - 1750


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1345 - In a letter to the Venetian Doge Andrea Dandolo the Serbian emperor Stephan Dushan (1331 - 1355) explains that since he possesses Macedonia he is a ruler of a part of the Bulgarian kingdom

"By the grace of God Stephan, King of Serbia, Dioclea, Zachulmia, Zeta*, Albania and the Pomorie** and ruler of not a small part of the kingdom of Bulgaria, and Lord of almost all Romania***."

Monumenta Slavorum meridionalium II, Zagrabiae, 1870, p. 278.

* Zachulmia, Dioclea and Zeta - small Serbian principalities on the Adriatic

** Pomorie - the Aegean coast of Macedonia

*** Romania - the European part of Byzantium

1353 - The scribe Stanislav in the Lesnovo monastery puts the name of the Bulgarian tsar in front of that of the tsar of Serbia, although the monastery is in Macedonia, which is possessed by the Serbs*.
"...This book was written in the time of the pious and Christ-loving Bulgarian tsar Ioan Alexander and the pious and holy tsar of the Serbian and Greek land Stefan and the great despot Ioan Oliver**."

Lesnovo Parenesis, the original is in Old Bulgarian.

* This is evidence that although the monastery was in Serbia, the monks felt Bulgarian and acknowledged the Bulgarian king. Moreover, they continued to write in the Bulgarian version of Old Bulgarian, whereas the Serbs wanted to introduce the Serbian version. This case is very similar to the Bologna Psalter (click here).

** Ioan Oliver was a Serbian voivoda (military leader) who later become a despot (big feudal lord) and was given lands in Zletovo in central Macedonia by the Stefan Dushan.

1381 - 1383 - Documents of the notary Manoli Bresciano in the town of Candia on the island of Crete about the sales of slaves.*
Sept. 12, 1381 - "... a slave ... Maria of Bulgarian stock [de genere Bulgarorum], from the locality of Prilep." (#19)

Nov. 4, 1381 - "... Theodora, of Bulgarian stock, from the locality of Kostour..." (#31)

July 5, 1382 - "... a slave named Alexo, of Bulgarian stock, from the locality of Serres..." (#99)

July 8, 1382 - "... a slave named Irina, of Bulgarian stock, from the locality of Kostour..." (#100)

July 12, 1382 - "... a slave named Irina, of Bulgarian stock, from the locality of Devol**..." (#105)

Sept. 18, 1382 - "... a slave named Dimitar, a Bulgarian from the locality of Vodena..." (#125)

Sept. 21, 1382 - "... of Bulgarian stock, from the locality of Veles..." (#126)

Mar. 7, 1383 - "...Mihail, of Bulgarian stock, from the locality of Skopie..." (#184)

Iv. Sakuzov, Newly found documents from the end of the XIVth c. about the Bulgarians from Macedonia sold as slaves, Makedonsky Pregled, 1932, No. 2-3, pp. 1- 62; the original is in Italian.

* The famous slave market in Candia was on the island of Crete, held by the Venetians. Each selling or liberating of a slave had to be confirmed by a notarial deed. The notary asked the slaves questions and according to the answer wrote down his name, nationality and place of birth. All slaves from Macedonia, with the exception of a few Greeks and Wallachians have been recorded as Bulgarians.
** Devol - a town in East Albania close to Ochrid

From the "Life of St. John of Rila [Sveti Ivan Rilski]" (end of the XIVth century), written in the library of the "St. Clement [Sveti Kliment]" church in Ohrid.
"Pray to the merciful God to save your compatriots - your congenial Bulgarian people."

c. 1500 - The Serbian historian Mihail of Ostrovitsa in his chronicle reports that Dushan's son and successor, Stephan Urosh V, gave the two brothers, the Serbian feudal lords Vukashin and Uglesha, to rule over the Bulgarian lands.*
"He allowed the two brothers to govern the Bulgarian Kingdom... When he was only four miles away from Drenopole, the two brothers, who had occupied the Bulgarian land, rose up against their master."

The original is in Serbian.

* to see the extent of Vukashin and Uglesha's lands click here

1591 - Information by the Venetian ambassador Lorenzo Bernardo about the Bulgarian character of the localities in Macedonia.
"They say that Struga is a town but as a matter of fact it is rather a village; it is the first locality in succession in Bulgaria. A river flows across Struga which runs out of the lake of Ochrida; here, they say, is also the spring of the river of the town of Lesius [Drim river]. Practically the whole plain of Struga is cultivated, tiled and very fertile; a little further away, at the beginning of the plain of Struga, one passes through a bridgewhich is on the border between Bulgaria and Albania. The Bulgarians speak Slav and observe the Greek [Eastern Orthodox] rite."

"On May 23, proceeding further on a good road, they reached Bitola at 7 o'clock. Bitola is a Bulgarian town, densely populated, as they say, 1,500 houses, including 200 Jewish."

"On May 27, descending the hill abounding in water and wells, they followed the foot of the mountain situated opposite the hill and came down in a wide plain which the Turkscall Vardar Ova and the Bulgarians - Slanitsa."

"They passed through a wooden bridge, 300 steps long, leading across the Vasrdar River which further on flows through Skopje...This bridge is the boundary between Bulgaria and Thessaly. Near the bridge there is a house from which a Bulgarian maid came with a loaf baked under hot ashes."

Jordan Ivanov, The Bulgarians in Macedonia, pp. 169-170; the original is in Italian.

http://www.bulgaria.com/VMRO/documen3.htm#dushan

[akritas]

Perseas διάβασε τι λέει ο Καργάκος για τον ισχυρισμό των Βουλγάρων μέσω φυσικά του Ανδριώτη

[akritas]

"Today's members of the Macedonian people, or narod, speak a Slavic language codified only after 1944 with fewer than 2 million native-speakers and a slender body of literature. Macedonians are, for the most part, members of an Orthodox Church whose authority was established by a socialist political rιgime in 1968. Their kin-terms, household structures, marriage practices, and vernacular culture all closely resemble those of neighboring groups. THEY ARE DESCENDED FROM PEOPLE WHO WERE CALLED, AND AT TIMES CALLED THEMSELVES, SERBS OR BULGARIANS."

[Keith Brown, "The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Encertainties of Nation", 2003, Princeton Unicersity Press, p.2]

"Let’s say immediately on the start that the Macedonian identity is a modern product par excellence[...] For Instance, claims that the core of what consists now the Macedonian nation was awaken in the course of the XIX century, assumes that there was a sleeping Macedonian identity which only needed to be properly motivated and put on it’s feet. I think this is not true, for one thing, and for another, this leads to misunderstandings and disappointments when later faced with unexplained and systematically avoided basic historical data. The evidences of existing of ‘Macedonians’ already in the early Middle Ages onward are rather thin, to say the least, and even the toponym ‘Macedonia’ appears and disappears in the course of the centuries.[...]Let us now go back to the second and most problematic segment of the history of the region - the appearance of the preaching nationalism on the ground of Macedonia, or so called propaganda before it’s violent phase. Macedonian historiography covers this period in its geographical totality, which is not the problem, taking into account that the territory was indeed one geographical and economic entity. What is not true is the assumption of its cultural entity, taken as a potential for ‘national unity’."

http://www.hi-story.org.mk/2.htm

"What then was directed to the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia refers, in the greatest part, to present Macedonia as well. The titular nation of the Balkan state, which gained independence in 1991, and its political representatives used the “history” as an argument for retaining the concept of democracy on ethnic lines as a fully closed representation: according to the ethno-centric point of view of the Macedonian majority “well, they did not fight for more than a century” for independence to now divide their own state with the Albanian “immigrants” from the Yugoslav time! [11] This level of reflection is the same as from the first Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia, in whose (in the meantime outdated) Preamble, the country is defined as a “national state of the Macedonian nation”, while granting lower status to the other third of the population, “the Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Romani and other minorities” [12] . Bearing in mind the modern history of the region around Macedonia, this is actually a completely unhistorical definition, because the movement for autonomy in the Osmanli Macedonia near the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, which the Constitutional Preamble refers to, operated in a multiethnic even supranational regional concept in which the notion “Macedonian” existed as a common term for the Bulgarians, Turks, Vlachs, Jews, Serbs, Albanians, Greeks and others [13] . The ethno-national connotation of the signifier “Macedonian”, which was aimed at the Christian Orthodox, south Slavic language nation, and additionally at the Bulgarians and Serbs, and was itself unknown in the central Balkan region of that time, gained significance only after the Second World War."

http://www.newbalkanpolitics.org.mk/OldSite/Issue_6/troebst.historical.eng.asp

« Macedonian or Bulgarian Macedonian ?

[The Slavs] spoke dialects belonging to the same halfway dialectal zone between the Bulgarian type and the Serbo-Croatian type, but much more closer to the first. They used to call themselves “Bulgarians”.

Among the writers today considered as founders of the macedonian litterature, one of them, Kiril Pejcinovic, from Tetovo (1771-1845) tells us that his book “The Mirror”, published in 1816, “has been written in simple Bulgarian language, not bookish, from inferior Moesia”. Another one, Dimitar Miladinov, from Struga (1810-1862), claimed to write in Bulgarian too; a British linguist tells us that he “developped a fanatical Bulgarian national consciousness” [De Bray, 1980, Guide to the South Slavonic languages, Columbus, Ohio, Slavica publishers]. From the middle of the 19th century, subject under the Ottoman regime to the competition of Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian churches and schools, they frequented in majority the firsts and wrote in Bulgarian. For most of them “Macedonians” was a regional name “Bulgarians” a national one. In 1914, the report of the Carnegie commission on the Balkan wars didn’t cast doubt a single time on the Bulgarian national consciousness of the Macedonian Slavs [Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1914), 1993]. How do we pass from this situation to today’s one, where Macedonians generaly consider themselves as a nation distinct from the Bulgarians?

The starting point is the esteblishment in 1878 , by the Congress of Berlin, of a new political border between the newly autonomous Bulgaria, soon independant, and Macedonia, renamed in the Turkish empire[...]. From this time, the name of Macedonians refers to the still enslaved Bulgarians longing to free themselves. This is under that name that ther revolutionary movement developped, and at first the well known IMRO: “Macedonian”, so acting in Macedonia, and “Inner”, so made of the region inhabitants founded without the backing of the new Bulgarian principality [...]. The campions of the anti-Ottoman resistance of the beginning of the century, like Jane Sandanski, Goce Delchev and others, are praised as National heroes by the Bulgarians and the Macedonians – two names both of them couldn’t tell the difference.”

[Paul Garde, “le discours balkanique”, 2004, Fayard, pp.202-204]

[achilles]

To add up a bit of humour to this thread...please take a look at this:
http://www.historyofmacedonia.org/Co...ia/donski.html

This is how some Skopjans choose to define themselves. As direct ancestors of the ancient Macedonians.

I found it hilarious. Self-proclaimed Macedonians. Just like the author of this piece of art is a self-proclaimed historian.

The same website (which is probably the most carefully crafted, yet even full of linguistic mistakes piece of blatant propaganda) contains "scientific" studies on the genetic mapping of modern Skopjans and its resemblance with that of ancient Macedonians. I wonder how far these people are willing to take it. Perhaps they should be reminded of the balance of powers between Greece and their heroin-processing pseudo-state, as well as their economic dependence on us. This might happen if we work towards an independent foreign policy.