From: lb@cs.man.ac.uk (Luben Boyanov)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek,soc.culture.bulgaria
Subject: Re: Trip to Skopje, 9/92
Date: 14 Nov 92 14:36:24 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.greek
Organization: Dept Computer Science, University of Manchester, U.K.

In article <1473100066@igc.apc.org> lgsax@igc.apc.org (Lynn Gazis-Sax) writes:

[deleted - observations from a trip in Macedonia]

>I was surprised to find that even the streets still have their old
>Yugoslavian names.  There, in the center of town, there is still a
>street named for Tito, and his portrait can still be seen some
>places.  Perhaps Macedonia, once a Partisan stronghold, remembers
>Tito more fondly than Croatia (though Tito was also a Croat and
>Croats also served among the Partisans).  One Macedonian woman
>(born in Florina, Greece) said, "Tito was a good man. Now we
>remember only the bad, but we should also remember the good."

As Lou said once - the greatest Macedonian hero ...

>To Greeks, the Macedonian identity is a recent, artificial
>creation, to be viewed with suspicion as a tool to be manipulated
>by the Serbs.  The Macedonians are linguistically and culturally
>closely related to the Bulgarians, and Serbians are said to have
>promoted this nationality to distinguish these people from
>Bulgarians.  (They have some support for this view from historians
>who say that the Macedonian national identity solidified only in
>the twentieth century.  On the other hand, there is a lot of
>disagreement among historians about when and how the idea of a
>Macedonian nationality evolved - judging who is right is way
>beyond my competence and outside the scope of this article.)

The first documented attempts were after 1870 - since that time there were
2 different approaches to 'prove' that the Slavs in Macedonia are not
Bulgarians (a fact, which has been universally recognized until that time
even by the Serbs). The first was that these people are 'South Serbs' and
the second - that they are 'Macedonians'. The second approach got it's
significance only after the Balkan wars and WWI, when it became clear that
the population from Vardar Macedonia won't accept a Serbian identity (no
one denies that there were Serbs in Vardar Macedonia).

>To the Macedonians, it is the nationality they have grown up with.
>"It is in their folk songs," said a friend of ours from Beograd.

The curious thing here is that the first publications (in fact - all -
until 1945) of these folk songs - collected by Miladinovi Brothers and by
Stephan Verkovich (around 1860) were under the title "Bulgarian folk
songs". This fact speaks enough for itself. After 1945, the original titles
of those books has been changed for purely political reasons - i.e. the
word 'Bulgarian' has been deleted ...

>national identity began in the nineteenth century.  Our guidebook,
>_Skopje and Its Surroundings_ (written in 1986, before the breakup
>of Yugoslavia) goes farther, saying, "the end of the first
>millenium brought the first Macedonian state and the Macedonian
>Emperor Samuil (976-1014)."

According to all historians and documents since that time Samuil is one of
the greatest Bulgarian kings, Ohrid was his (i.e. Bulgarian) capital, and
the Byzantine Emperor who defeated Samuil is well known in history as Basil
II, Bulgaroctonus (the killer of the Bulgarians). The subject has been
discussed many times on the net ...

>ones.) The money of the Republic of Macedonia is printed with a
>picture of a monument to the Ilinden uprising of 1903, an uprising
>which our guidebook to Skopje describes as "a message to the whole
>world about the desire for freedom and the great hardship of the
>Macedonian people."

The 1903 uprising is well documented in the diplomatic records of England,
France, Italy, Austria as a purely Bulgarian one, despite that it was for
autonomy and independence of Macedonia and not for unification with
Bulgaria. However, in all documents preveils the theme, that the autonomy
was the first step towards unification with Bulgaria. Fortunately,
everybody interested in the matter can find those documents and verify this
fact for himself. Hundred of pages of consular reports from Macedonia,
written by diplomats from the mentioned countries, leave no doubt in the
Bulgarian character of the 1903 uprising and what was the nationality of
the predominant Slav population in the region. Now it's different.

[deleted]

Thanks for the interesting article

regards

Luben
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek