3. “THE MACEDONIAN STRUGGLE”

3. “THE MACEDONIAN STRUGGLE”

After the creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, clashes began to take place between the Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia. The main objective of the Greeks was to prevent Bulgarian attempts to control the Slavo-phone population living in the area between the line-Kostur-Ptolemaida-Enidzhe-Seres, and between Ohrid- Prilep-Strumitsa-Melnik-Nevrokop.

After the war of 1870, a defeat for Greece, the Bulgarians managed to force much of the Slavo-phone population in the region to join the Bulgarian ideals. This led to the Ilinden Uprising in 1903, the day of St. Elias, which the Turkish army brutally suppressed.

The rebellion caused the destruction of numerous Greek villages and towns, including the town Krushevo. Vandalism and persecution of the Greek population led to a general Greek mobilization and in 1904 it began the armed “Macedonian Struggle” which lasted until 1908. In the course of all those years, volunteers recruited from the free Greek state, Crete, Epirus, Thessaly and from other regions of Greece that were not yet freed, fought alongside the Macedonians who were able to overcome the spread of Bulgarian proselytism and preserved the Greek character of Central and South Macedonia. The Greek troops were largely composed of Slavo-phone and Vlacho-phone supporters who fought for the Greek cause. Because of their attachment to the Greek nation, the Bulgarians called them “grkomani”, i.e. fanatical Greeks. Descendants of those fighters still live in the area around Bitola.

In July 1908 the Young Turk revolution put an end to the armed struggle: The Young Turks dismantled the feudal regime of the Sultan and announced a general amnesty, at the same time promising equal political rights for all ethnic groups.

The Macedonian Struggle was started under very unfavourable conditions lasting for four years but ended with a very happy ending for Greece. This success can only be attributed to the fact that in this struggle the Greeks from free Greece, from Crete and from the other provinces which were still enslaved, came to fight alongside the Macedonians. But this was also because the Greeks fought in a region in which the people lived under friendly terms and supported the same ideals and the same allegiance to the Ecumenical

Patriarchate, the Greek national cause, even if they had not always spoken Greek.

4. FABRICATING A NATIONALITY

The Turkish defeat in the First Balkan War brought the end for the Ottoman Empire in Macedonia. Macedonia was again divided, with 51% going to Greece, 39% to Serbia and 10% to Bulgaria. A mass exodus of the population, which found itself on foreign soil, began and went together with exchanges of populations which fundamentally changed the ethnic composition of the whole of Macedonia, especially in the Greek part.

Bulgaria’s permanent defeat in the Second Balkan War and in the First World War contributed to the Bulgarian part of Macedonia developing very fierce Bulgarian-Macedonian nationalism; nationalism whose irredentist tendencies try to use Comintern slogans such as a “united and independent Macedonia” within a “Balkan Communist Federation”.

In the Yugoslav part of Macedonia, the Serbian politics applied by Belgrade yielded mediocre results. To avoid abuse, one part of the population did not express its pro-Bulgarian feelings and even gave up its Bulgarian name, preferring the politically neutral name Macedonian.

Other parts of the population openly chose to integrate themselves into the Serbian national community.

In Greek Macedonia, on account of the exchanges of population, there were 100 to 150 thousand Slavo-phone speakers divided into two groups: one, the larger group, under a Turkish name, accepted the Greek nationality, and the smaller group joined the Bulgarian nationality and remained undetermined. During World War II when the Bulgarian army entered Slavic Macedonia, it was welcomed by part of the population as a first step towards being freed and integrated with the Bulgarian state. A similar phenomenon, though on a small scale, occurred in Greek Macedonia.

Under Tito, the Yugoslav partisans immediately realized that they needed to break the bonds between the populations of Yugoslav Macedonia at any cost. In other words they took advantage of the growing discontent in the population against the Bulgarian occupation forces: Bulgaria’s reaction was swift and massively repressive.

Tito’s supporters were saying that the Macedonians - i.e. the Slavs in Yugoslav Macedonia - in post-war Yugoslavia should enjoy the same rights as other nationalities and even be equal to the Serbs. They, however, insisted on the fact that the Slavs in Macedonia had nothing to do with the Serbians and Bulgarians, but were a separate “Macedonian nation”. This idea of a “Macedonian nation” was very well received by much of the population in Yugoslav Macedonia. The political and social context was ripe to accept this new thesis: in fact Bulgaria was already defeated when Tito received consent from Stalin to put the new Macedonian politics in circulation and the population was tired of attempts made for over half a century by the Serbians and Bulgarians to impose their own identity on it.

After winning the Otechest Front in Bulgaria (managed by the Bulgarian Communist Party), in September 1944, negotiations on the future of Macedonia and the Balkan Peninsula began.

On August 2, 1944, the “Socialist Republic of Macedonia” was proclaimed in the monastery “Prohor Pchinski” within the new Yugoslav federation. In September 1944, a Yugoslav delegation headed by General Tempo and Lazar Kolishevski, general secretary of the Communist Party of Macedonia, visited Sofia and received a promise from the New Bulgarian government to provide autonomy to the inhabitants of Pirin (Bulgarian Macedonia), which represented the first step towards unification with “the Federal Republic of Macedonia” in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

In April 1945, Tito imposed his federal system on Yugoslavia by establishing a government of the federal states of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Skopje, with the latter being established on April 30, 1945.

Meanwhile in view of the civil war that broke out in Greece, there was uncertainty. The Yugoslavs at the time exerted unbearable pressure on their Bulgarian friends to give up the Bulgarian part of Macedonia to Yugoslavia. Since late 1946, the Bulgarians made a number of concessions to the Yugoslavs regarding Macedonia. In August 1946, during the 10th Plenum of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, it was decided to “work towards a cultural convergence between the inhabitants of Pirin Macedonia and those of the Republic of Macedonia”. The decision was followed by an extensive program of cultural exchanges, which the inhabitants in Pirin Macedonia regarded as an opportunity to choose between the Bulgarian and “Macedonian” nationality.

Lured by individual incentives, most of them opted for a “Macedonian” nationality. After long consultations, Tito and Dimitrov, heads of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, met at Bled, Yugoslavia. On August 2, 1947 they signed the Bled agreement, by which, for a small compensation, Bulgaria was to recognize the residents of Bulgarian Macedonia (Pirin) as “Macedonians” and pave the way for the integration of the Pirin province with the “Socialist Republic of Macedonia”. In exchange, Bulgaria asked that its “Western parts” occupied by Serbia at the end of the First World War be returned. However, Tito’s grandiose plan, with ambitions to create a “Federation of South Slavs” under his domination, was soon ended by Stalin. It came to a halt during the summer of 1948 and with it ended Tito’s hegemonic calculations for the Balkans, imbedded in which was the “Macedonian Question” his main springboard. Bulgaria later used it to restore concessions make to Yugoslavia including the rejection of the thesis of a “Macedonian nation”. Bulgaria also drove out the Skopje commissars sent to its territory. After that Bulgaria capitalized on the difficulties facing Yugoslavia with aims at re-enacting the pre-war slogan “united and independent Macedonia”.