Macedonians (ethnic group)
Macedonians are a nation and a South Slavic ethnic group native to the region of Macedonia in Southeast Europe. They speak Macedonian, a South Slavic language. The large majority of Macedonians identify as Eastern Orthodox Christians, who share a cultural and historical "Orthodox Byzantine–Slavic heritage" with their neighbours. About two-thirds of all ethnic Macedonians live in North Macedonia; there are also communities in a number of other countries.
The concept of a Macedonian ethnicity, distinct from their Orthodox Balkan neighbours, is seen to be a comparatively newly emergent one. The earliest manifestations of an incipient Macedonian identity emerged during the second half of the 19th century among limited circles of Slavic-speaking intellectuals, predominantly outside the region of Macedonia. They arose after the First World War and especially during the 1930s, and thus were consolidated by Communist Yugoslavia's governmental policy after the Second World War.
The formation of the ethnic Macedonians as a separate community has been shaped by population displacement as well as by language shift, both the result of the political developments in the region of Macedonia during the 20th century. Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the decisive point in the ethnogenesis of the South Slavic ethnic group was the creation of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia after World War II, a state in the framework of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This was followed by the development of a separate Macedonian language and national literature, and the foundation of a distinct Macedonian Orthodox Church and national historiography.
History
Ancient and Roman period
In antiquity, much of central-northern Macedonia was inhabited by Paionians who expanded from the lower Strymon basin. The Pelagonian plain was inhabited by the Pelagones and the Lyncestae, ancient Greek tribes of Upper Macedonia; whilst the western region was said to have been inhabited by Illyrian tribes, such as the Enchelae. During the late Classical Period, having already developed several sophisticated polis-type settlements and a thriving economy based on mining, Paeonia became subject to Philip II of Macedon, while its southern part was later incorporated into the kingdom of Macedon. In 310 BC, the Celts attacked deep into the south, subduing various local tribes, such as the Dardanians, the Paeonians and the Triballi. Roman conquest brought with it a significant Romanization of the region. During the Dominate period, 'barbarian' foederati were settled on Macedonian soil at times; such as the Sarmatians settled by Constantine the Great or the settlement of Alaric I's Goths. In contrast to 'frontier provinces', Macedonia continued to be a flourishing Christian, Roman province in Late Antiquity and into the Early Middle Ages.Medieval period
Linguistically, the South Slavic languages from which Macedonian developed are thought to have expanded in the region during the post-Roman period, although the exact mechanisms of this linguistic expansion remains a matter of scholarly discussion. Traditional historiography has equated these changes with the commencement of raids and 'invasions' of Sclaveni and Antes from Wallachia and western Ukraine during the 6th and 7th centuries. However, recent anthropological and archaeological perspectives have viewed the appearance of Slavs in Macedonia, and throughout the Balkans in general, as part of a broad and complex process of transformation of the cultural, political and ethnolinguistic Balkan landscape before the collapse of Roman authority. The exact details and chronology of population shifts remain to be determined. What is beyond dispute is that, in contrast to "barbarian" Bulgaria, northern Macedonia remained Roman in its cultural outlook into the 7th century. Yet at the same time, sources attest numerous Slavic tribes in the environs of Thessaloniki and further afield, including the Berziti in Pelagonia. Apart from Slavs and late Byzantines, Kuver's "Sermesianoi" – a mix of c. 70,000 Byzantine Greeks predominantly, also Bulgars and Pannonian Avars – settled the "Keramissian plain" around Bitola in the late 7th century. Later pockets of settlers included "Danubian" Bulgarians in the 9th century; Magyars and Armenians in the 10th–12th centuries, Cumans and Pechenegs in the 11th–13th centuries, and Saxon miners in the 14th and 15th centuries. Vlachs and Arbanasi also inhabited this area in the Middle ages and mingeled with the local Slavic-speakers.Having previously been Byzantine clients, the Sklaviniae of Macedonia switched their allegiance to the Bulgarians with their incorporation into the Bulgarian Empire in the mid-800s. In the 860s, Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius created the Glagolitic alphabet and Slavonic liturgy based on the Slavic dialect around Thessaloniki for a mission to Great Moravia. After the demise of the Great Moravian mission in 886, exiled students of the two apostles brought the Glagolitic alphabet to the Bulgarian Empire, where Khan Boris I of Bulgaria welcomed them. As part of his efforts to limit Byzantine influence and assert Bulgarian independence, he adopted Slavic as official ecclesiastical and state language and established the Preslav Literary School and Ohrid Literary School, which taught Slavonic liturgy and the Glagolitic and subsequently the Cyrillic alphabet. The success of Boris I's efforts was a major factor in making the Slavs in Macedonia—and the other Slavs within the First Bulgarian State—adopt the common demonym Bulgarians and transforming the Bulgar state into a Bulgarian state. Subsequently, the literary and ecclesiastical centre in Ohrid became a second cultural capital of medieval Bulgaria.
Ottoman period
After the final Ottoman conquest of the Balkans by the Ottomans in the 14th/15th century, all Eastern Orthodox Christians were included in a specific ethno-religious community under Graeco-Byzantine jurisdiction called Rum Millet. Belonging to this religious commonwealth was so important that most of the common people began to identify themselves as Christians. However, ethnonyms never disappeared and some form of primary ethnic identity was available. This is confirmed from a Sultan's Firman from 1680 which describes the ethnic groups in the Balkan territories of the Empire as follows: Greeks, Albanians, Serbs, Vlachs and Bulgarians.Throughout the Middle Ages and Ottoman rule up until the early 20th century the Slavic-speaking population majority in the region of Macedonia were more commonly referred to as Bulgarians. However, in pre-nationalist times, terms such as "Bulgarian" did not possess a strict ethno-nationalistic meaning, rather, they were loose, often interchangeable terms which could simultaneously denote regional habitation, allegiance to a particular empire, religious orientation, membership in certain social groups. Similarly, a "Byzantine" was a Roman subject of Constantinople, and the term bore no strict ethnic connotations, Greek or otherwise. Overall, in the Middle Ages, "a person's origin was distinctly regional", and in the Ottoman era, before the 19th-century rise of nationalism, it was based on the corresponding confessional community.
The rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century brought opposition to this continued situation. At that time, the classical Rum Millet began to degrade. The coordinated actions, carried out by Bulgarian national leaders and supported by the majority of the Slavic-speaking population in today's Republic of North Macedonia to have a separate "Bulgarian Millet", finally bore fruit in 1870 when a firman for the creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate was issued. In June 1870, the Macedonian side expressed openly and clearly its views on how the Exarchist Church should be governed in order for the Macedonians to join it, because "...the high mercy was not promised exclusively to the Bulgarians, but the same was promised also to the Macedonians...". The realization of this possibility, according to the article published in the Bulgarian newspaper Makedoniya, was conditioned by the promotion of democratic principles in the religious relations between the Macedonian and Bulgarian communities. Otherwise, the determination for centralism—referred to in the article as "despotism"—would open to the public the issue of the "Macedonian Question". The anonymous author argued: "We broke away from the Greeks; shall we fall under others?" In September 1872, the Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimus VI declared the Exarchate schismatic and excommunicated its adherents, accusing them of having "surrendered Orthodoxy to ethnic nationalism", i.e., "ethnophyletism". At the time of its creation, the only Vardar Macedonian bishopric included in the Exarchate was Veles.
However, in 1874, the Christian population of the bishoprics of Skopje and Ohrid were given the chance to participate in a plebiscite, where they voted overwhelmingly in favour of joining the Exarchate Referring to the results of the plebiscites, and on the basis of statistical and ethnological indications, the 1876 Conference of Constantinople included all of present-day North Macedonia and parts of present-day Greek Macedonia. The borders of new Bulgarian state, drawn by the 1878 Treaty of San Stefano, also included Macedonia, but the treaty was never put into effect and the Treaty of Berlin "returned" Macedonia to the Ottoman Empire.
For Christian Slav peasants, however, the choice between the Patriarchate and the Exarchate was not tainted with national meaning, but was a choice of Church or millet, and unsurprisingly the majority preferred the Slavic Church over the non-Slavic Greek one. Furthermore, adherence to the Bulgarian national cause was attractive as a means of opposing oppressive Christian chiflik owners and urban merchants, who usually identified with the Greek nation, as a way to escape arbitrary taxation by Patriarchate bishops, via shifting allegiance to the Exarchate and on account of the free provision of education in Bulgarian schools. Alignment of the Slavs of Macedonia with the Bulgarian, the Greek or sometimes the Serbian national camp did not imply adherence to different national ideologies: these camps were not stable, culturally distinct groups, but parties with national affiliations, described by contemporary observers as "sides", "wings", "parties" or "political clubs". Furthermore, any expression of national identity among the majority of Macedonian Slavs was purely superficial and imposed by the nationalist educational and religious propaganda or by terrorism from guerrilla bands. Also, more astute foreign observers who visited Macedonia at the time concluded that Macedonian Slavs linguistically were neither Bulgarians nor Serbs. Considering all of the previous circumstances, it is possible to argue that the Macedonian Slavs formed a separate nationality.