The Macedonian Question and the Macedonians

A History

Alexis Heraclides

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000289442
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: European History

This book is a comprehensive and dispassionate analysis of the intriguing Macedonian Question from 1878 until 1949 and of the Macedonians (and of their neighbours) from the 1890s until today, with the two themes intertwining.

The Macedonian Question was an offshoot of the wider Eastern Question – i.e., the fate of the European remnants of the Ottoman Empire once it dissolved. The initial protagonists of the Macedonian Question were Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, and a Slav-speaking population inhabiting geographical Macedonia in search of its destiny, the largest segment of which ended up creating a new nation, comprising the Macedonians, something unacceptable to its three neighbours.

Alexis Heraclides analyses the shifting sands of the Macedonian Question and of the gradual rise of Macedonian nationhood, with special emphasis on the Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian claims to Macedonia (1870s–1919); the birth and vicissitudes of the most famous Macedonian revolutionary organization, the VM(O)RO, and of other organizations (1893–1940); the appearance and gradual establishment of the Macedonian nation from the 1890s until 1945; Titos's crucial role in Macedonian nationhood-cum-federal status; the Greek-Macedonian name dispute (1991–2018), including the 'skeletons in the cupboard' – the deep-seated reasons rendering the clash intractable for decades; the final Greek-Macedonian settlement (the 2018 Prespa Agreement); the Bulgarian-Macedonian dispute (1950–today) and its ephemeral settlement in 2017; the issue of the Macedonian language; and the Macedonian national historical narrative. The author also addresses questions around who the ancient Macedonians were and the fascination with Alexander the Great. This monograph will be an essential resource for scholars working on Macedonian history, Balkan politics and conflict resolution.

1 Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian claims to Macedonia

Macedonia: geography, history, ethnography

The geographical region of the Balkans known as Macedonia was not fixed but changed shapes and sizes from its first appearance in Antiquity in the seventh century BC. In the second century AD, the great geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy included a map of Macedonia in his famous book Geography, which is roughly half the size of geographical Macedonia as understood today, to which he chose to add Thessaly. In the Roman Empire it was larger, split into two parts and under the Byzantines (eastern Roman Empire) it depicted various regions, all of them smaller, between the great cities of Constantinople and Thes-saloniki. By the ninth century, Macedonia was a region of Thrace from where the Byzantine Macedonian dynasty hailed, while geographical Macedonia as we know it today corresponded to the ‘themes’ (Byzantine administrative regions) of Thessaloniki and Strymon.1 In the Renaissance, Ptolemy’s map was reproduced and the Europeans perceived Macedonia on that basis, but the Ottomans who seized the region in the mid-fourteenth century did not call it Macedonia.²

Macedonia as the name of a political entity had appeared only once prior to 1944, in Antiquity, as the Kingdom of Macedonia or Macedon. The ancient Macedonians gave the Balkans its first large state and ‘Europe its first intercontinental empire’.³ The Macedonian name ‘disappeared from the historical stage and consciousness’,⁴ with the battle of Pydna (168 BC) when the Romans under Aemilius Paullus (to be known as Macedonicus) defeated the Macedonians under King Perseus.⁵

Thereafter, Macedonia was ‘merely a geographical expression describing a disputed territory of indeterminate boundaries’ under medieval states and ‘a little known land, virtual terra incognita, until the nineteenth century’.⁶ In lieu of example, as late as 1870 it was believed in the West that there existed an ‘impassable’ chain of mountains splitting Macedonia into two parts, the ‘savage and inhospitable’ north and the ‘agreeable and polished’ south (this misconception was largely due to Ptolemy’s map).⁷

Geographical Macedonia (as it is known internationally from the mid-nineteenth century onwards) was from 395 AD until the ninth century under Byzantine rule, and then under Bulgarian rule (First Bulgarian Empire) until 1014, to revert to the Byzantines from 1014 (with Tsar Samuil’s defeat at the Battle of Kleidion) to 1230, to then again become Bulgarian (Second Bulgarian Empire) until 1250, followed until 1371 by a division of the region among the Serbs (Stefan Dušan’s Empire), the Epirote Byzantines and the Byzantines of Nicea, concluding with the Ottoman conquest of the entire region in 1389 (Battle of Kosovo) with the Ottoman rule lasting until 1912.⁸ This central region of the Balkans also witnessed many a Völkerwanderung (migration), but the most decisive one, which led to permanent settlement, was that of the Slavs in the course of the sixth and seventh centuries.⁹

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards Macedonia is defined as the area with the Shar Mountain to the north, Mountain Olympus to the south, the Rhodope Mountains to the east and Lake Ohrid to the west. Contemporary Macedonian authors tend to regard the territory of their present state as part of ancient Macedon, while Greek authors regard the ancient kingdom roughly corresponding to the region acquired by Greece in 1913, with the ‘Republic of Macedonia’ part of the ancient state of Paionia or Paeonia.¹⁰ In fact, ancient Macedon comprised present-day Greek Macedonia in addition to the southernmost parts of today’s Republic of North Macedonia, while most of the latter’s territory was part of the ancient states of Paeonia and Dardania.¹¹

Geographical Macedonia was one of the first regions of the Balkans to form part of the Ottoman Empire and one of the last to be ‘liberated’ from the Ottoman rule in 1912–1913.¹² In the Ottoman Empire, Macedonia did not comprise an administrative unit, but in Europe it was understood as comprising three provinces (vilâyet), those of Thessaloniki (Selânik), Bitola (Monastir or Manastir), and Kosovo centred in Skopje (Üsküb),¹³ amounting to 68,000 square kilometres, about 15 percent of the Balkan Peninsula.¹⁴ In fact, during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, the Ottoman bureaucracy ‘was not allowed to use the word Macedonia (along with many others considered harmful and seditious) in its official correspondence’ for its ‘mere designation’ was considered a ‘concession to all the parties, especially the insurgents fighting in the region, that anticipated the Ottomans’ imminent and complete departure from Europe’.¹⁵

The population of Macedonia (three districts) was strikingly heterogeneous linguistically, ethnically and religiously. By and large, the cities and towns were dominated by Muslims and Greeks (the latter mostly in southern Macedonia) and the countryside by Slavs.¹⁶ The various communities were well over a hundred. The largest groups were the Muslims (divided into Turkishspeakers, Albanianspeakers, Greekspeakers, Bulgarianspeakers, Romanian-Vlachspeakers, Romaspeakers and other smaller groups), the Slavs (Bulgarians, Slavspeakers and Serbs), Greeks, Christian Romanian-Vlachs, Christian Albanians, Roma and the Jews of Thessaloniki. The Muslims as a whole and the Slavs were the two largest groups, and among the Slavs, the Bulgarians or Slavspeakers (mainly speakers of western Bulgarian dialects) were the most numerous. In fact, the largest single group was the Muslims, despite the tendency of several ethnographic maps to limit their numbers for obvious reasons, to ‘throw the Turks’ out of Europe.¹⁷

From the 1840s until the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), there were an astounding number of ethnographic maps depicting ‘Turkey in Europe’ or Macedonia (see Chapter 2). If the map-maker happened to be from the Balkans (Greek, Serb, Bulgarian or Romanian), the aim was to highlight the dominant presence of one’s own group, at the expense of the ‘Turks’ and other groups regarded as rivals in the region.

Most present-day scholars are of the view that the great majority of ethnographic maps should be discarded as unreliable.¹⁸ Yet most maps had something to offer one way or another. If a map was considered authoritative, it had impact, influencing international diplomacy, as seen during the 1875–1878 Balkan Crisis. As for maps by the Balkan contenders they were useful as primary sources and gave rise to rebuttals. Several introduced a new parameter, for instance greater emphasis on religion instead of language, the discovery of a new ethnic group or that the ‘Turks’ (Muslims) were more numerous after all.

What all the ethnographic maps had in common was the astonishing ethnic variety, hence the humorous Orientalist label, ‘la salade macedoine’, for Macedonia, a mixed salad or fruit salad comprising an array of ingredients with each one retaining its distinct flavour.¹⁹ John Reed, the famous American journalist, had described Macedonia as ‘the most frightening mix of races ever imagined’.²⁰ In fact, Macedonia was hardly unique in this respect; heterogeneity was the rule, not the exception, in many imperial settings not only of the Ottoman Empire but also of other land empires, such as Austria-Hungary or Russia.²¹

From the 1870s onwards and until the division following the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), the main contenders for Macedonia were Greece and Bulgaria almost simultaneously, followed by Serbia, with Romania as a lesser contender, in view of the Vlachs (Romanian-speakers) residing mainly in the Pindos Mountain range.

Greece and Macedonia

For Greece, the first independent state to emerge in the Balkans in 1830–1832, the territorial claims were limited to securing Thessaly, with Mount Olympus and the River Aliakmon as the northern limits. These were regarded ‘the northern limits of the Greek language and learning’.²² According to Greece’s first head of state, Ioannis Capodistrias, a revered figure in European diplomacy since the days he was the co-foreign minister of the Russian Empire, this was a ‘defensible frontier’ for the new state; and it had ‘separated Greece from the northern neighbouring countries in ancient times. . .. Thessaly was always kept Greek, while Macedonia was conquered by the Slavs and other races’.²³

Yet the Greeks ‘pushed their northern national frontier deep into Slav-speaking Macedonia and made themselves part of the Macedonian Question – with considerable delay but with a vengeance’.²⁴ What had caused it? Two things: the appearance and predominance of the irredentist Megali Idea (Great Idea) and the concomitant striving for a ‘Greek Empire’, and the Bulgarian claim to the very same region.²⁵

Ironically, given today’s clash between Athens and Skopje regarding the identity of the ancient Macedonians and Alexander the Great, the original Greek national narrative that dominated the scene until the early 1850s did not regard the Macedonians as Greeks. According to scholar Adamantios Korais, the doyen of what came to be known as the Greek or Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment,²⁶ and his disciples who held high positions in the new state, the Macedonians were a ‘barbarian people’ who had conquered the Greeks in the battlefield (at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC) and through bribery (Macedon was known for its gold).²⁷ In those days, this was also the dominant view of intellect...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian claims to Macedonia
• 2 The war of ethnographic maps
• 3 The VM(O)RO and other Macedonian organizations (1893-1940)
• 4 Tracing the birth of a new Balkan nation
• 5 Tito and the Macedonians: the crucial 1940s
• 6 The 'New Macedonian Question': the Greek-Macedonian naming dispute
• 7 Bulgaria's stance towards Macedonia
• 8 The Macedonian language
• 9 The Macedonian national historical narrative
• 10 The charm of Alexander the Great: who were the ancient Macedonians?
• 11 The crux of the Greek-Macedonian dispute: the skeletons in the cupboard
• 12 The settlement of the Greek-Macedonian dispute: the Prespa Agreement
• 13 The ephemeral Macedonian-Bulgarian rapprochement
• Select bibliography
• Index