With the Treaty of San Stefano on 3 March 1878 and announced establishment of Greater Bulgaria, more appeals were sent to Prince Milan for the unification of Macedonia with Serbia, against the threat of Bulgaria claiming Macedonia. On 10 May, an assembly was gathered, in which the representatives of the nahiya of Skopje, Tetovo, Debar, Kičevo, Prilep, Kratovo, Kočani, Štip, Veles, and Kriva Reka, among others, including the rebel leaders, kmets, and clergy, signed a petition addressed to Prince Milan, the Berlin Congress, and Russia, for the annexation of those territories to Serbia. They asked Prince Milan "on their knees" to unite "our land and the Holy Mother Serbia, and to not replace the hard and grim Turkish (Ottoman) enslavement with the worser and darker Bulgarian one". They also wrote that the inhabitants of the nahiye were "pure Serbs", and that "our land, Old Serbia, is real and pure, which is evident from the only and pure Serb monuments, which there are plenty of in our lands", and enumerated several such churches and monasteries in those nahiye. There were 170 signatures with another 44 official Ottoman municipal seals.