The Origins of the Skopian Nation and why it calls itself 'Macedonia'

Day 2,564, 08:07 • Published in Greece Greece • by Yiannis and Vasilis balambani
The Origins of the Skopian Nation and why it calls itself 'Macedonia'


Modern Day Skopian pseudo-identity expressed in primordialist statues

In the past I was heavily into this my game because of my nationalist sympathies to Greece and saw the Skopians as a natural enemy of Greece who attacked the very core value of what it meant to be Greek: its identity.

I had always assumed the answer was a straight forward one that they were Bulgarians who had been indoctrinated by Marshal Tito to assume a false consciousness. This however is not the entire story nor is it totally true. Before I start I would like to differentiate between two terms: nation and state.

Nation refers to any collective group of people who are in union by a series of binding cultural attributes.

State refers to the political organization of a defined territory, i.e a government.

Most modern day states are organized around nations, which erepublik capitalizes on to keep popularity in this game.

Ethnographic map of Modern Region of 'Macedonia' in 1892


Dark pink = Turkish Muslims, diagonal green and white stripes = Christian Turks, light green = Christian Bulgarians, light brown = Bulgarian Muslims, diagonal blue and white stripes = Christian Serbs, horizontal black and brown stripes = Serbian Muslims, navy blue = Albanian Muslims with Serbian origin, dark green = Yörüks, light pink = Albanian Muslims, horizontal pink and white stripes = Christian Albanians, blue = Christian Aromanians, orange = Aromanian Muslims, horizontal blue and yellow stripes = Christian Greeks, yellow = Greek Muslims, diagonal blue, white and green stripes = Bulgarians and Serbs mixed, dark brown = ?, red = Spanish Jews[/i]


The answer dates back to the late 1800s, where there was a slavic population in the highly mixed region of what is now FYROM. It spoke a unique slavic dialect considered by many academics at the time as Western Bulgarian, the differences being largely minor. However, the existence of different dialects is nothing unqiue, and in the past dialects were treated the same as different languages. If we examine Andersons book, Imagined communities, modern nations formed as a result of industrialization, with the necessity for labour communication creating the necessity for a standardized language. Standardised languages only begun becoming established in the 1800s and very late 1700s, as before that people spoke and wrote in different dialects.

In the Balkans, such development was late due to the Ottoman Empire and the agricultural economies of the Balkan countries, though Greece was among the first to establish a standardised language. Bulgaria, however, only gained its independence in 1878, and thus focused on creating standarised language using the Eastern Bulgarian dialects, marginalizing the Western Bulgarian dialect which had been under Ottoman control.

However, this explanation is also too narrow in the sense that Greece had only gained certain Greek speaking territories after the second world war (Corfu, the Dodecanese Islands), and that's because it is. It is only one factor to many.

While this populace that spoke a Western Bulgarian dialect had been incorporated into the Bulgarian Millet (Nation) within the Ottoman Empire in 1870, after the dissolution of the Rum Millet ("Roman nation" which incorporated all Orthodox Christians), or the fact that the vast majority of the populace had agreed to become part of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in the 1870s, there was a movement among a minority of Skopian scholars from the region to form a separate nation and ethnicity altogether from Bulgaria.


Logo of IMRO

This was NOT the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization which like the Internal Thracian Revolutionary Organization, were used as Bulgarian state tools to get the Bulgar populaces to rebel and support Bulgarian irredentism in the same way Kosovo supports Albanian irredentism. First through secession, then through unity. This was done in order not to anger the great powers (Britain and France), who feared too much Russian influence in the Balkans.

Such Skopian intellectuals included people like Georgi Pulevski, Petko Slaveykov, Krste Petkov Misirkov, Dimitrija Čupovski, and Stojan Novaković, who while a minority, advocated not only a separate "Macedonian" language, but also a separate "Macedonian" ethnicity.

Pulevski for instance stated in his cross language dictionary (which claimed the existence of a different "Macedonian" language) that:

What do we call a nation? – People who are of the same origin and who speak the same words and who live and make friends of each other, who have the same customs and songs and entertainment are what we call a nation, and the place where that people lives is called the people's country. Thus the Macedonians also are a nation and the place which is theirs is called Macedonia.


Basically, a group of Slavic intellectuals who lived in the geographic region of Macedonia (or as Modern day Skopians like to think of it "Greater Macedonia"), who wanted to be distinct from Bulgaria took it upon themselves to be called "Macedonians". These people did not claim to be related to the Ancient Macedonians, but rather were concerned with being distinct, as they were universally recognised as Bulgarians but felt different to Bulgaria.


This doesn't end. After the failure of the 1903 Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising launched by the Bulgarian Internal Macedonian-Adrianople revolutionary organization, the group was divided in two. Those who believed they were Bulgarians and wanted to continue trying to aid the creation of a Greater Bulgaria, and those who were left-wing and believed they were separate identity called 'Macedonians'.

By 1913 the territory was invaded by Serbia first who then attempted to homogenise the populace by forcing everyone to learn the Serb language, illegalising Bulgarian education. The region in which they lived was named Vardarska or Vardar Banovina after the Vardar river (it was part of Rumeila under the Ottoman Empire).

[img]http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_hdgmnPXrcbM/S1kNsKDAptI/AAAAAAAAADY/vnEsS8F9zTI/s1600-h/Vardarska+Banovina.JPG[/img]
Name of Skopia between 1913 - 1941

By 1925, this little insurrection inside the Bulgarian organization turned to a full blown movement with the formation of the new Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (United).These were communists and advocated the formation of a Balkan federation (like Yugoslavia plus Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Romania) in which "Macedonia" would be an autonomous state with an ethnic populace (Greater "Macedonia"). There were supported by the Greek communists (KKE) and managed to remove their perceived stigma as Bulgarians by 1936, when the original organization was disbanded.


Symbol of the Comintern

In 1934, the Comintern (International community of Communists) passed a resolution which recognised Skopians as an existing separate entity from Bulgarians ethnically and linguistically. The purpose for this was because it helped undermine the "imperial" ambitions of the 'bourgeois' states within Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (pre WW2), while at the same time recognise nationality as a 'false consciousness' and thus, like lenin, use nationalism for the benefit of Communist ideology.

Despite these developments, in 1941, the majority of the population of Skopia still expressed pro-Bulgarian sentiment welcoming the Bulgarian army in Skopje, which was aligned with the Axis at the time. Tito realised that because of this, his Partisan resistance was very weak in the region and so promoted the new Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Additionally he feared the populace fighting against him alongside the Axis powers.

By 1944 during the ASNOM conference, he recognised a separate "Macedonian" nation within Yugoslavia, additionally recognising their language and ethnicity as their own. This was one of the main reasons why the Bulgarians were opposed in 1948 in becoming a constituent state in Yugoslavia.

The idea that they were ancient Macedonians was not propagated by Tito, but emerged because they called themesleves Macedonians. Basically, people begun mythologising their own identity in order to feel special as their nationhood was very recent in contrast to everyone else's. This was capitalised by the emergent Government in 1991, which after the loss of Communist and Yugoslav identity, politicians and parties appealed to ethnicity and they did this by creating enemies and mythologies which empowered the ethnic identity of the Skopians.

Many post-communist Eastern European had experienced a huge surge in ethnic nationalism due to the lack of civil society to fall on, and politicians exploited that because it was the easiest way to win elections in post-communist East Europe.

However, while many Historians overwhelmingly support Greece over the naming dispute, Social Scientists do not care as they view all concepts of nation-hood and identity to be socially constructed, and thus a waste of time.

Regards.