Serbianisation
Serbianisation or Serbianization, also known as Serbification, and Serbisation or Serbization is the spread of Serbian culture, people, and language, either by social integration or by cultural or forced assimilation.
Medieval period
Populated by Bulgarians and Romanians, the area between the Morava and Timok rivers became part of the Serbian state in 1291/1292 which began the Serbianisation of the region. Albanians that came under the rule of Serb Emperor Stefan Dušan were required by state policy to convert to Orthodoxy and Serbianise their Albanian names. Uglješa Mrnjavčević, a fourteenth-century Serbian despot who ruled much of Macedonia on behalf of Serb Emperor Stefan Uroš V attempted to Serbianise the monastic community of Mount Athos.19th century
Principality of Serbia
The historical sources demonstrate that before the 19th century and the rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire the majority of the ordinary Orthodox Christians on the Balkans had only a vague idea of their ethnic identity. The local South Slavic-speaking peasants were accustomed to defining themselves in terms of their religion, locality, and occupation. After the national states were established, peasantry was indoctrinated through the schools and military conscription, the official Church, and the governmental press. It was through these instruments of the state administration, that a national identity came into real and rapid development.Some Serbian sources from the mid 19th century, correctly, continued to claim, the areas southeast of Niš, including Southern Pomoravlje and Macedonia, were mainly Bulgarian populated. Per Serbian newspaper, Vidovdan, the future Bulgarian-Serbian frontier would extend from the Danube in North, along the Timok and South Morava, and then on the ridge of Shar Mountain towards the Black Drin River to the Lake of Ohrid in the South.
The region of today's Eastern Serbia faced a number of changes in regard to the dominant population group in the area, due to constant wars, conquests, plague Great Migrations of the Serbs, and Migrations of Bulgarians during the 17th and the 18th-19th century. It was only after the Serbian revolution and later independence that the Serbian national idea gained monumentum within the area east of Niš. According to many authors ca. 1850 the delineation between Serbs and Bulgarians ran north of Niš, although Cyprien Robert claimed that Serbs formed half of the town of Niš population. In the sub-district of Prokuplje, the most numerous ethnic group were the Albanians, while in Vranje, Bulgarians and Albanians were equally distributed alongside minority Serbian population. In Pirot and Leskovac sub-districts, the Bulgarians were the main ethnic group. The Turks lived mainly in the bigger towns, and were later expelled with other Muslim minorities in 1862. In Ottoman usage then the Sanjak of Niš was included in an area designated as "Bulgaristan", i.e. Bulgaria.
Serbian elites after the mid of the 19th century, claimed that the Bulgarians located south-east of Niš were Old Serbians, which was an implementation of Garašanin's irredentist plan called Načertanije. In 1870, the Southern Pomoravlje was included in the Bulgarian Exarchate. Milan Savić still claimed that at this time Niš and environs were Bulgarian populated. After the war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the lands in the regions of Niš, Pirot and Vranje became a part of Serbia. Serbia had successfully homogenized and modernized these new territories and in this way it assimilated the local Bulgarians of the Timok and Morava river valleys toward the end of the nineteenth century. Afterwards Serbia turned its attention to the region of Macedonia.
Kingdom of Serbia
In 1878 Serbia became independent and pressure developed in the state for people from different ethnic groups to Serbianise religious denominations and their personal names. Serbianisation of identity along with ideological and cultural Serbianisation followed. Belgrade was reconstructed as a new capital by the Serb elite that removed elements of the Ottoman era. While Serb commonfolk looked for ways to aid the Serb cause and assist other Serbs still residing in areas ruled by the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Austro-Hungarian Serbs who had integrated within Serbia and promoted Serbianisation opened the country up to cultural and economic influences of Austria-Hungary in the 1880s. The demographics of Niš underwent change whereby Serbs who formed half the urban population prior to 1878 became 80 percent in 1884.Principality of Montenegro
According to jurist and sociologist Valtazar Bogišić all Eastern Orthodox citizens of Montenegro were Serbs. He states that they Serbianised a small number of Romani people who mostly worked as blacksmiths.Ottoman Macedonia
Representatives from Serbia, such as the statesmen, diplomat and historian Stojan Novaković encouraged a separate Slavic Macedonian identity to counter the strong Bulgarian influence, to separate the local population from the rest of the Bulgarians, and to instill the "Serbian idea". Serbianising directly the local Slavic population through propaganda and education was difficult due to strong Bulgarian sentiments at the time in the region. The spread and promotion of Serbian Macedonianism was seen by Serbs as the first move toward eventually Serbianing the Macedonians. Serbian nationalist-oriented politicians in the 19th century traveled to the area of Ottoman Macedonia and spread national propaganda with intent to build a Serbian national feeling among the local population. One of these nationalist was Miloš Milojević who claimed that Serbia in ancient times has been far bigger, with expansion to more continents.Vlachs
Pre-Ottoman Serbian Empire and its institutions had no time to serbicize the Balkan Vlachs in medieval Serbia, since it soon fell under the Turkish dominance; that process was not finished until the 19th century. Furthermore, the process of serbization, of "Vlachs" has been accomplished through the Serbian Orthodox Church in Dalmatia and the Military Frontiers, i. e., in the territories of the Croatian Kingdom, together with Bosnia, where Vlachs found their final domicile. The Church had the most decisive role in the serbization process of Vlachs in the initial and middle phases. During the 16–18th centuries the amalgamation of the process of sedentarization of the Orthodox Vlachs and their gradual fusion into the Serbian rural population reached a high level and was recognized by the Ottoman authorities. In the final phase, the most significant role was played by the newspaper Srbobran in the 1880s and 1890s. According to Ivo Banac almost whole civil authority of the former Serbian state Ottomans transfer to the patriarchs of Peć. The millet system that the Serbs transferred to the Habsburg Monarchy was a good instrument for transmitting the Serbian national identity. Patriarchate of Peć and later Metropolitanate of Karlovci Serbianized parts of Balkan Orthodox people such as Bulgars, "Vlachs", Albanians, Romanians and a significant number of Catholic Croats. According to Vjeran Kursar although Catholic and Muslim Vlachs, or other, non-Serbian elements which exist in the western Balkans should not be underestimated still the vast majority of Vlachs in that area were Orthodox Christians and Serbian, often still bilingual. All Slavic or Slavicised Orthodox Christians under the jurisdiction of Patriarchate of Peć ie Serbian patriarchs were eventually identified as Serbs, this process did not finish until modern times.20th century
Interwar Yugoslavia
Following the First World War, the new Kingdom was reliant on patronage from the Serb monarchy that resulted in tendencies of centralisation and Serbianisation that other ethnic communities in the country opposed. In Belgrade a new government was formed after the war that quickly Serbianised the gendarmerie and made non-Serbs in the country view the new Kingdom as an extension of the old Kingdom of Serbia.Vardar Macedonia
The region of present-day North Macedonia until 1912 was part of the Ottoman Empire. According to Encyclopædia Britannica 1911 Edition, at the beginning of the 20th century the Slavs constituted the majority of the population in Macedonia. Per Britannica itself the bulk of the Slavs there were regarded as "Bulgarians". Although the majority of the Slavs did not have a clear sense of national identity, it was purely superficial and imposed by the nationalist propaganda campaigns. National identity was espoused by small number of educated people, often called intelligentsia, consisting of schoolteachers, priests, and government officials. Immediately after annexation of Vardar Macedonia to the Kingdom of Serbia, the Macedonian Slavs were faced with the policy of forced serbianisation.Those who declared as ethnic Bulgarians were, harassed or deported to Bulgaria. The high clergymen of the Bulgarian Exarchate were also deported. Bulgarian schools were closed and teachers expelled. The population of Macedonia was forced to declare as Serbs. Those who refused were beaten and tortured. Prominent people and teachers from Skopje who refused to declare as Serbs were deported to Bulgaria. International Commission concluded that the Serbian state started in Macedonia wide sociological experiment of "assimilation through terror." All Bulgarian books gave way to Serbian. The government Serbianized personal names and surnames for all official uses. Between 1913 and 1915 all people who spoke a Slavic language in Vardar Macedonia were presented by Serbia as Serbs.
During the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the government of the Kingdom pursued a Serbisation policy towards population of the Macedonia, then called "Southern Serbia" or "Vardar Banovina". The dialects spoken in this region were referred to as dialects of Serbo-Croatian. Southern dialects were suppressed with regards to education, military and other national activities, and their usage was punishable. Following the First World War Serbian rule was reinstated over Vardar Macedonia, the local Bulgarian or Macedonian population was not recognised and an attempted Serbianisation occurred. Yugoslavia aimed to incorporate Macedonia through "assimilation" and "nationalisation" through two main goals. Firstly, to legitimate its control, the state based its claims to Macedonia as an inheritance of the medieval monarch Stefan Dušan or as a promised land given by God to the Serb people. Secondly, the state used the modernist idea of the nation and spread it through schools. Both processes merged as myths, people, symbols and dates originating from Serbian history were also used in the endeavour. During 1920 the Orthodox community of Vardar Macedonia was placed under the Serbian Orthodox Church after payment was made to the Constantinople Patriarchate who sold its control for 800,000 francs in 1919. In Vardar Macedonia, Bulgarian signage and literature was removed and societies were shut down along with the expulsion of Bulgarian teachers and clergy who had returned during the war. Names of people were forcefully Serbianised such as Atanasov becoming Atanasović and Stankov as Stanković along with a spate of repression that followed through arrests, internment and detention.
The Kingdom was also interested to change the ethnic composition of the population in Vardar Macedonia. Yugoslavia commenced a policy of forced Serbianisation through such measures as the Agrarian Reform which was a settlement plan. In 1919 there were announced the orders for preparing for colonization of Southern Serbia. The Serbian colonization was maintained through "agricultural" and "administrative" actions. In the Interbellum, the Kingdom has settled 3,670 families. The colonists were given properties. Also, in the same time, almost all clerks in the area were Serbs. This means that in the period between the two World wars the Kingdom succeeded through the agricultural and the administrative colonizations to create significant Serbian ethnic minority in Vardar Macedonia. Total numbers were 4,200 Serb families with 50,000 Serb gendarmes and troops relocated from Serbia to Vardar Macedonia to advance the Serbianisation of the region and population.
Politicians based in Belgrade thought that ideology alongside repression could generate the "correct national" sentiments among local inhabitants. Serb officials, gendarmes and teachers, often poorly trained and little interested in their job according to reports of the time were given the task to "nationalise and assimilate" the region. The initiation of an educational campaign made children to learn that "I am a true Serb like my father and my mother" while their parents were not receptive of the Yugoslav state. A small number of inhabitants did declare themselves as South Serbs and Serbs, often done for reasons of opportunism. Government authorities due to maladministration had difficulties in Serbianising the local population as they were strongly attached to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and Bulgarian nationalism. The same authorities held conflicting views toward the population, whom they told were Serbian, whereas local inhabitants noticed they were treated unequally in relation to their Serb counterparts. Some state officials let locals know that they viewed them as Bulgarians and used the term bugaraši for people that supported Bulgarians or were not recognised as Serbs. The state considered individuals that supported local autonomy, culture or language as a Bulgaroman and sought their suppression. In Vardar Macedonia Bulgarian newspapers were banned in many areas and mail from Bulgaria remained undelivered within the region due to "a technicality".
As a counteraction to Serb efforts the paramilitary IMRO began sending armed bands into Yugoslav Macedonia to assassinate officials and stir up the spirit of the locals. After 1923 the IMRO had de facto full control of Bulgarian Macedonia and acted as a "state within a state". It used Bulgaria as a base for terrorist attacks against Yugoslavia with the unofficial agreement of the right-wing governments. Because of this, contemporary observers described the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border as the most fortified in Europe. Meanwhile, several hundred political assassinations were organized by the Yugoslav security police led by Dobrica Matković. Following regular attacks by pro-Bulgarian IMRO komitadjis on Serbian colonists and gendarmes, the government appealed to Association against Bulgarian Bandits, responsible for the massacre of 53 inhabitants of the village of Garvan in 1923. Regions with pro-Bulgarian sentiments such as Tikveš and Bregalnica were violently Serbianised by Serb četniks that resulted in the population being gathered up for forced labour and local leaders killed.
In the 1930s a more homogeneous generation was growing up in Vardar Macedonia, which resisted Serbianisation and increasingly identified itself as Macedonian, but which also made it clear that the Bulgarian idea was no more the only option for them. A sizable part of the local population nonetheless had undergone a transformation as Serbianised Slavs. The government and its widespread massive Serbianisation campaign was unsuccessful in trying to eliminate the traces of an emerging Macedonian national consciousness among the local population. The failed assimilation of the region was due to Serb policies that were exploitative and colonial and not directed toward integration. Funds were controlled from Belgrade and the economy was geared toward resource extraction whose raw materials were bought by the government at low prices it determined for itself. The state controlled the local tobacco monopoly and acquired a steady and sizable amount of revenue without investing much in return to raise the living standards of the inhabitants. The government in Belgrade or the wider administration showed little concern toward conditions within the region. A high rate of turnover existed among ministers and officials who mainly showed up prior to elections or to advance their own career and often staff in the local administration from other parts of the country were incompetent and corrupt.
Locals were excluded from involvement in the sociopolitical system, suppression of elites occurred and state security forces instilled an environment of fear among inhabitants. New arrivals to the region were favoured over the local population regarding state employment, loans and agricultural reform and both groups continued to be separate from each other. During the interwar period the Croatian question dominated politics, Macedonia was sidelined and the view of the time was that discontent within the region could be contained through use of repressive measures. Local inhabitants were mistrusted by the political elite of Belgrade whom designated them as being pure Serbs or through terms such as the "classical south". During the interwar period Bulgaria resented the Serbianisation policy in Vardar Macedonia. In World War II, the Bulgarian Army occupied southern Yugoslavia and their troops were welcomed as liberators from Serbianisation by the local Macedonian Slavs.