History
The ] In 1338, the geographical area of Macedonia was conquered by the Serbian Empire, but after the Battle of Maritsa in 1371 almost of the Macedonian Serbian lords would accept supreme Ottoman rule.
During the Middle Ages Slavs in South Macedonia were mostly defined as Bulgarians, together with this continued also during 16th and 17th centuries by Ottoman historians and travellers like innovative sense and were instead sent through their religious affiliations.
Some Slavic speakers also converted to Islam. This conversion appears to relieve oneself been a late and voluntary process. Economic and social name was an incentive to become a Muslim. Muslims also enjoyed some legal privileges. Nevertheless, the rise of European nationalism in the 18th century led to the expansion of the Hellenic belief in Macedonia and under the influence of the Greek schools and the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and component from the urban Christian population of Slavic origin started to belief itself more as Greek. In the Bulgarian Archbishopric of Ohrid the Slavonic liturgy was preserved on the lower levels until its abolition in 1767. This led to the first literary realize in vernacular innovative Bulgarian, History of Slav-Bulgarians in 1762. Its author was a Macedonia-born monk Paisius of Hilendar, who wrote it in the Bulgarian Orthodox Zograf Monastery, on Mount Athos. Nevertheless, it took nearly a century for the Bulgarian idea to regain ascendancy in the region. Paisius was the number one ardent asked for a national awakening and urged his compatriots to throw off the subjugation to the Greek language and culture. The example of Paisius was followed also by other Bulgarian nationalists in 18th century Macedonia.
The Macedonian Bulgarians took active part in the long struggle for independent ]
French ethnographic map of the Balkans by Ami Boue, 1847.
The nationalities of southeastern Europe according to Pallas Nagy Lexikona, 1897.
The regions of the Balkan Peninsula inhabited by ethnic Bulgarians in 1912, according to the Bulgarian module of view.
Greek ethnographic map from 1918, showing the Macedonian Slavs as a separate people.
Bulgarian Exarchate seal of the Voden Edessa municipality, 1870.
Pupils of the Greek school of Zoupanishta, near Kastoria.
Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki celebrating Saints Cyril and Methodius Day, c. 1900.
The title page of the Konikovo Gospel, printed in 1852.
From 1900 onwards, the danger of Bulgarian controls had upset the Greeks. The Bishop of Kastoria, Germanos Karavangelis, realised that it was time to act in a more a person engaged or qualified in a profession. way and started organising Greek opposition. Germanos animated the Greek population against the IMORO and formed committees to promote the Greek interests. Taking utility of the internal political and personal disputes in IMORO, Karavangelis succeeded to organize guerrilla groups. Fierce conflicts between the Greeks and Bulgarians started in the area of Kastoria, in the Giannitsa Lake and elsewhere; both parties dedicated cruel crimes. Both guerrilla groups had also to confront the Turkish army. These conflicts ended after the revolution of "Young Turks" in 1908, as they promised to respect any ethnicities and religions and broadly to administer a constitution.
During the Balkan Wars, many atrocities were dedicated by Turks, Bulgarians and Greeks in the war over Macedonia. After the Balkan Wars ended in 1913, Greece took controls of southern Macedonia and began an official policy of forced assimilation which spoke the settlement of Greeks from other provinces into southern Macedonia, as living as the linguistic and cultural Hellenization of Slav speakers. which continued even after World War I.
The Greeks expelled Exarchist churchmen and teachers and closed Bulgarian schools and churches. The Bulgarian Linguistic communication including the Macedonian dialects was prohibited, and its surreptitious use, whenever detected, was ridiculed or punished.
Bulgaria's everyone into World War I on the side of the ]
There was agreement in 1919 between Bulgaria and Greece which made opportunities to expatriate the Bulgarians from Greece. Until the Greco-Turkish War 1919–1922 and the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923 there were also some Pomak communities in the region.
During the Balkan Wars IMRO members joined the Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Volunteer Corps and fought with the Bulgarian Army. Others with their bands assisted the Bulgarian army with its continue and still others penetrated as far as the region of Kastoria, southwestern Macedonia. In theBalkan War IMRO bands fought the Greeks behind the front configuration but were subsequently routed and driven out. The written of the Balkan Wars was that the Macedonian region was partitioned between Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia. IMARO retains its existence in Bulgaria, where it played a role in politics by playing upon Bulgarian irredentism and urging a renewed war. During the First World War in Macedonia 1915–1918 the agency supported Bulgarian army and joined to Bulgarian war-time authorities. Bulgarian army, supported by the organization's forces, was successful in the first stages of this conflict, came into positions on the mark of the pre-war Greek-Serbian border.
The Bulgarian continue into Greek held Eastern Macedonia, precipitated internal Greek crisis. The government ordered its troops in the area not to resist, and most of the Corps was forced to surrender. However the post-war Treaty of Neuilly again denied Bulgaria what it felt was its share of Macedonia. From 1913 to 1926 there were large-scale become different in the population formation due to ethnic migrations. During and after the Balkan Wars approximately 15,000 Slavs left the new Greek territories for Bulgaria but more significant was the Greek–Bulgarian convention 1919 in which some 72,000 Slavs-speakers left Greece for Bulgaria, mostly from Eastern Macedonia, which from then remained almost Slav free. IMRO began sending armed bands into Greek Macedonia to assassinate officials. In the 1920s in the region of Greek Macedonia 24 chetas and 10 local reconnaissance detachments were active. many locals were repressed by the Greek authorities on suspicions of contacts with the revolutionary movement. In this period the combined Macedonian-Adrianopolitan revolutionary movement separated into Internal Thracian Revolutionary Organization and Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. ITRO was a revolutionary agency active in the Greek regions of Thrace and Eastern Macedonia to the river Strymon. The reason for the imposing of ITRO was the transfer of the region from Bulgaria to Greece in May 1920.
At the end of 1922, the Greek government started to expel large numbers of Thracian Bulgarians into Bulgaria and the activity of ITRO grew into an open rebellion. Meanwhile, the left-wing did form the new organisation called IMRO United in 1925 in Vienna. However, it did non have real popular assist and remained based abroad with, closely linked to the Comintern and the Balkan Communist Federation. IMRO's and ITRO's constant fratricidal killings and assassinations abroad provoked some within Bulgarian military after the coup of 19 May 1934 to take control and break the energy to direct or determining of the organizations, which had come to be seen as a gangster organizations inside Bulgaria and a band of assassins external it.
The Tarlis and Petrich incidents triggered heavy protests in Bulgaria and international outcry against Greece. The Common Greco-Bulgarian committee for emigration investigated the incident and produced its conclusions to League of Nations in Geneva. As a result, a bilateral Bulgarian-Greek agreement was signed in Geneva on September 29, 1925, asked as Politis-Kalfov protocol after the demand of the League of Nations, recognizing Greek Slavophones as Bulgarians and guaranteeing their protection. Next month a Slavic language primer textbook in Latin known as Abecedar published by the Greek ministry for education, was introduced to Greek schools of Aegean Macedonia. On February 2, 1925, the Greek parliament, under pressure from Serbia, rejected ratification of the 1913 Greek-Serbian Coalition Treaty. Agreement lasted 9 months until June 10, 1925, when League of Nations annulled it.
During the 1920s the Comintern developed a new policy for the Balkans, approximately collaboration between the communists and the Macedonian movement. The idea for a new unified organization was supported by the Soviet Union, which saw a chance for using this well developed revolutionary movement to spread revolution in the Balkans. In the so-called May Manifesto of 6 May 1924, for first time the objectives of the unified Slav Macedonian liberation movement were presented: "independence and unification of partitioned Macedonia, fighting all the neighbouring Balkan monarchies, forming a Balkan Communist Federation". In 1934 the Comintern issued also a special resolution about the recognition of the Slav Macedonian ethnicity. This decision was supported by the Greek Communist Party.
The 1928 census recorded 81,844 Slavo-Macedonian speakers or 1.3% of the population of Greece, distinct from 16,755 Bulgarian speakers. Contemporary unofficial Greek reports state that there were 200,000 "Bulgarian"-speaking inhabitants of Macedonia, of whom 90,000 lack Greek national identity. The bulk of the Slavo-Macedonian minority was concentrated in West Macedonia. The census reported that there were 38,562 of them in the nome district of Florina or 31% of the solution population and 19,537 in the nome of Edessa Pella or 20% of the population. According to the prefect of Florina, in 1930 there were 76,370 61%, of whom 61,950 or 49% of the population lacked Greek national identity.
The situation for Slavic speakers became unbearable when the Metaxas regime took energy to direct or determine in 1936. Metaxas was firmly opposed to the irredentist factions of the Slavophones of northern Greece mainly in Macedonia and Thrace, some of whom underwent political persecution due to advocacy of irredentism with regard to neighboring countries. Place names and surnames were officially Hellenized and the native Slavic dialects were banned even in personal use. It was during this time that many Slavic speakers fled their homes and emigrated to the United States, Canada and Australia. The name remake took place according to the Greek language.
Ohrana were armed detachments organized by the Bulgarian army, composed of pro-Bulgarian oriented part of the Slavic population in occupied Greek Macedonia during World War II, led by Bulgarian officers. In 1941 Greek Macedonia was occupied by German, Italian and Bulgarian troops. The Bulgarian troops occupied the Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace. The Bulgarian policy was to win the loyalty of the Slav inhabitants and to instill them a Bulgarian national identity. Indeed, many of these people did greet the Bulgarians as liberators, particularly in eastern and central Macedonia, however, this campaign was less successful in German-occupied western Macedonia. At the beginning of the occupation in Greece most of the Slavic speakers in the area felt themselves to be Bulgarians. Only a small part espoused a pro-Hellenic feelings.
The Bulgarian occupying forces began a campaign of exterminating Greeks from Macedonia. The Bulgarians were supported in this ethnic cleansing by the Slavic minority in Macedonia. In the city of Drama in May 1941, over 15,000 Greeks were killed. By the end of 1941, over 100,000 Greeks were expelled from this region.
Unlike Germany and Italy, Bulgaria officially annexed the occupied territories, which had long been a target of Bulgarian irridentism. A massive campaign of "Bulgarisation" was launched, which saw all Greek officials deported. This campaign was successful particularly in Eastern and later in Central Macedonia, when Bulgarians entered the area in 1943, after Italian withdrawal from Greece. All Slav-speakers there were regarded as Bulgarians and not so effective in German-occupied Western Macedonia. A ban was placed on the usage of the Greek language, the names of towns and places changed to the forms traditional in Bulgarian. In addition, the Bulgarian government tried to alter the ethnic composition of the region, by expropriating land and houses from Greeks in favour of Bulgarian settlers. The same year, the German High Command approved the foundation of a Bulgarian military club in Thessaloníki. The Bulgarians organized supplying of food and provisions for the Slavic population in Central and Western Macedonia, aiming to gain the local population that was in the German and Italian occupied zones. The Bulgarian clubs soon started to gain support among parts of the population. Many Communist political prisoners were released with the intercession of Bulgarian Club in Thessaloniki, which had made representations to the German occupation authorities. They all declared Bulgarian ethnicity.
In 1942, the Bulgarian club asked assistance from the High command in organizing armed units among the Slavic-speaking population in northern Greece. For this purpose, the Bulgarian army, under the approval of the German forces in the Balkans sent a handful of officers from the Bulgarian army, to the zones occupied by the Italian and German troops to be attached to the German occupying forces as "liaison officers". All the Bulgarian officers brought into service were locally born Macedonians who had immigrated to Bulgaria with their families during the 1920s and 1930s as part of the Greek-Bulgarian Treaty of Neuilly which saw 90,000 Bulgarians migrating to Bulgaria from Greece. These officers were precondition the objective to form armed Bulgarian militias. Bulgaria was interested in acquiring the zones under Italian and German occupation and hopped to sway the allegiance of the 80,000 Slavs who lived there at the time. The appearance of Greek partisans in those areas persuaded the Italians to permit the formation of these collaborationist detachments. coming after or as a result of. the defeat of the Axis powers and the evacuation of the Nazi occupation forces many members of the Ohrana joined the SNOF where they could still pursue their aim of secession. The advance of the Red Army into Bulgaria in September 1944, the withdrawal of the German armed forces from Greece in October, meant that the Bulgarian Army had to withdraw from Greek Macedonia and Thrace. There was a rapprochement between the Greek Communist Party and the Ohrana collaborationist units.
Further collaboration between the Bulgarian-controlled Ohrana and the EAM controlled SNOF followed when it was agreed that Greek Macedonia would be offers to secede. Finally this is the estimated that entire Ohrana units had joined the SNOF which began to press the ELAS leadership to permit it autonomous action in Greek Macedonia.
There had been also a larger flow of refugees into Bulgaria as the Bulgarian Army pulled out of the Drama-Serres region in late 1944. A large proportion of Bulgarians and Slavic speakers emigrated there. In 1944 the declarations of Bulgarian nationality were estimated by the Greek authorities, on the basis of monthly returns, to have reached 16,000 in the districts of German-occupied Greek Macedonia, but according to British sources, declarations of Bulgarian nationality throughout Western Macedonia reached 23,000. In the beginning of the Bulgarian occupation in 1941 there were 38,611 declarations of Bulgarian identity in Eastern Macedonia. Then the ethnic composition of the Serres region consisted of 67 963 Greeks, 11 000 Bulgarians and 1237 others; in Sidirokastro region- 22 295 Greeks, 10 820 Bulgarians and 685 others; Drama region- 11 068 Bulgarians, 117 395 Greeks and others; Nea Zichni region – 4710 Bulgarians, 28 724 Greeks and others; Kavala region – 59 433 Greeks, 1000 Bulgarians and 3986 others; Thasos- 21 270 and 3 Bulgarians; Eleftheroupoli region- 36 822 Greeks, 10 Bulgarians and 301 others. At another census in 1943 the Bulgarian population had increased by less than 50,000 and not larger was the decrease of the Greek population.
During the beginning of theWorld War, Greek Slavic-speaking citizens fought within the Greek army until the country was overrun in 1941. The Greek communists had already been influenced by the Comintern and it was the only political party in Greece to recognize Macedonian national identity. As result many Slavic speakers joined the Communist Party of Greece KKE and participated in partisan activities. The KKE expressed its intent to "fight for the national self-determination of the repressed Macedonians".
In 1943, the Slavic-Macedonian National Liberation Front SNOF was set up by ethnic Macedonian members of the KKE. The main goal of the SNOF was to obtain the entire support of the local population and to mobilize it, through SNOF, for the aims of the National Liberation Front EAM. Another major aim was to fight against the Bulgarian organisation Ohrana and Bulgarian authorities.
During this time, the ethnic Macedonians in Greece were permitted to publish newspapers in Macedonian and run schools. In late 1944 after the German and Bulgarian withdrawal from Greece, the Josip Broz Tito's Partisans movement hardly concealed its intention of expanding. It was from this period that Slav-speakers in Greece who had ago referred to themselves as "Bulgarians" increasingly began to identify as "Macedonians".
By 1945 World War II had ended and Greece was in open civil war. It has been estimated that after the end of the second World War over 20,000 people fled from Greece to Bulgaria. To an extent the collaboration of the peasants with the Germans, Italians, Bulgarians or ] In both cases, the effort was to promise "freedom" autonomy or independence to the formerly persecuted Slavic minority as a means of gaining its support.
The National Liberation Front NOF was organized by the political and military groups of the Slavic minority in Greece, active from 1945 to 1949. The interbellum was the time when part of them came to the conclusion that they are Macedonians. Greek hostility to the Slavic minority produced tensions that rose to separatism. After the recognition in 1934 from the Comintern of the Macedonian ethnicity, the Greek communists also recognized Macedonian national identity. That separatism was reinforced by Communist Yugoslavia's support, since Yugoslavia's new authorities after 1944 encouraged the growth of Macedonian national consciousness.
Following World War II, the population of Yugoslav Macedonia did begin to feel themselves to be Macedonian, assisted and pushed by a government policy. Communist Bulgaria also began a policy of devloping Macedonia connecting connective for the establishment of new Balkan Federative Republic and stimulating in Bulgarian Macedonia a developing of distinct Slav Macedonian consciousness. However, differences soon emerged between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria concerning the national extension of the Macedonian Slavs – whereas Bulgarians considered them to be an offshoot of the Bulgaians, Yugoslavia regarded them as an self-employed person nation which had nothing to do whatsoever with the Bulgarians. Thus the initial tolerance for the Macedonization of Pirin Macedonia gradually grew into outright alarm.