Communities and the issue of nationality
Henry R.Wilkinson's study of the ethnographic cartography of Macedonia opens with an admission to be found in any nationalist account of the area. "Macedonia," he writes, "defies definition for a number of reasons. ... History no more sets its seal upon the boundaries of Macedonia than does physical geography. ... This region is distinctive not on account of any physical unity or common political experiences but rather on account of the complexity of the ethnic structure of its population" (1951: 2-3).
Indeed the diversity of the population of Macedonia in the nineteenth century was so well known that it inspired the French expression "Macedoine," meaning a salad of mixed fruits and vegetables.
Although most accounts of the "ethnic structure" of the population of Macedonia in this period agree that the main groups of people living there were Slavic-speaking Christians, Greek-speaking Christians, Turkish-speaking Moslems, Albanian-speaking Moslems, Vlachs, Jews, and Gypsies, they differ greatly with regard to the size of the various groups, the criteria used to define them, and the terms used to designate them. For these reasons, ethnographical maps and statistical data that attempt to assign precise locations and sizes to these different groups are a welter of confusion, hopelessly marred by inconsistencies and contradictions. As a result, while such material reveals a great deal about the ethnic and national categories employed by the people who compiled it, reveals very little about the population of Macedonia itself.
Some of the inconsistencies and contradictions in this material can be attributed to the fact that most of the early ethnographers of Macedonia were in the service of one nationalist camp or another. However, many of these inconsistencies and contradictions arose because these ethnographers imposed their national categories on people whose world was still organized in terms of linguistic, ethnic, and religious categories -people, in other words, for whom national categories held very little meaning.
Consider, for example, the following list of groups classified as "Greek" by observers with a Greek nationalist perspective: Greek Moslems, Greek Orthodox Turks and Albanians, Hellenized Vlachs, Bulgarian patriarchists, Bulgarian-speaking Greeks, and Greek Jews (Wilkinson 1951: 316-17). Clearly proponents of other nationalist perspectives could place virtually all these people into different national categories with equal justification.
The population of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Macedonia from the fourteenth century until 1913, was organized into communities or administrative units, knows as millets, based on religion rather than on language or ethnicity. Being a Christian, a member of the Orthodox or rum millet, as opposed to being a Moslem, was the most important aspect of the identity of most of the inhabitants of Macedonia. Other important aspects of their identity were their status as members of a certain family, residents of a certain village or town, and members of certain socioeconomic class.
Nationalist ideologies associated with the Enlightenment is western Europe began to penetrate the Balkans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the beginning of the age of nationalism in the Balkans, the period that marked the fateful transition from "the ecumenical community of Balkan Orthodoxy... to a still inchoate, inarticulate and uncertain world of modern linguistic nations" (Kitromilides 1989: 151). An "imagine" community based on a shared Orthodox faith gradually broke up into several "imagined" communities based on a shared sense of national identity. Intellectuals throughout the Balkans began to articulate separate national identities based on a common language and a shared history. These nationalist ideologies spread and eventually reached even the most rural segment of the population of Macedonia.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century Greece, Serbia, and Romania emerged as independent states as a result of national revolts against Ottoman rule. These newly formed states then continued the process of nation building by cultivating a shared national identity with all means at their disposal -the military, the civil service, and the educational system.
In the Balkans one of the most important steps in the nation-building process has been the establishment of autocephalous national churches. In 1833, for example, the Church of Greece unilaterally and uncanonically proclaimed its independence from the Patriarch of Constantinople. In this way, as Kitromilides (1989:180) points out, the Church of Greece set an example for other churches in the Balkans to follow.
The establishment of an autocephalous Bulgarian church headed by an exarch in 1870 marked an intensification of the Macedonian Struggle, a three-way contest between Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece over which country would gain control of the territory of Macedonia. Now Orthodox communities in Macedonia had the choice of affiliating with either the Greek patriarch, the Bulgarian exarch, or the Serbian Orthodox Church.
By the first decade of the twentieth century all three of these nation-states had fielded irregular bands of guerrilla fighters who attacked the Turks, fought each other, and terrorized the local population.
In addition, through the construction of churches and schools and the assignment of priests and teachers these three countries conducted intense propaganda campaigns whose goal was to instill the "proper" sense of national identity in the Christian peasants of Macedonian in order to justify their claims to the territory these people inhabited.
In the attempt to incorporate the people of Macedonia into "imagined" national communities represented by the Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek states, terms of collective identity, which were in common use and which had no connotation of national identity whatsoever, experienced a form of semantic slippage and took on new national meanings.
Thus "rum," meaning "Orthodox Christian," a term that could refer to someone who spoke Albanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, or Greek, was reinterpreted by Greek nationalists to mean "Greek" in a national sense.
The term "Bulgarian," which had earlier been used to refer to all the Slavs of the Ottoman Empire (Friedman 1975:84), or as a virtual synonym for "peasant" without any political significance at all (Wilkinson 1951:149), came to mean "Bulgarian" in a national sense.
Similarly, the term "Greek," which was used in the early nineteenth century to refer to members of the Orthodox Christian merchant class regardless of their "ethnic origin" or the language they spoke, came to mean "Greek" in a national sense (Stoianovich 1960:311).
During the Ottoman period, therefore, terms like "Bulgarian" and "Greek" were not used to designate different ethnic or national groups; they were used to designate different sociocultural categories in what Hechter (1978) has called a system of "cultural division of labour." In this system of ethnic stratification the process of upward social mobility by which a Slavic-speaking peasant or a Vlach-speaking shepherd entered the merchant class was indistinguishable from the process of Hellenization." When a farmer or a shepherd became a merchant, he was no longer a "Bulgarian" or a "Vlach"; he became a "Greek". During this time ethnicity was "the modality in which class [was] lived" (Hall et al. 1978:394).
At the turn of the century, then, most of the inhabitants of Macedonia were illiterate peasants with no clearly developed sense of national identity at all.
National identity was something that was imposed on them from the outside as a result of the three competing nationalist campaigns of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece.
As Wilkinson points out (1951:178), any expression of national identity that was encountered among the Macedonian peasantry "was purely superficial, and owed its existence to religious or educational propaganda, or even to terrorism.
Factors that became increasingly important in the construction of collective categories of identity were whether a family or village was affiliated with the Greek Patriarchate or the Bulgarian Exarchate and whether they were Greek-speaking or Slavic-speaking. These factors of religious affiliation and language use were given a national interpretation by proponents of both Bulgarian and Greek nationalist ideologies.
While Slavic-speaking Exarchists and Greek-speaking Patriarchists were easily claimed as "Bulgarians" and "Greeks" by their respective nationalist camps, the issue was much more complicated in the case of Slavic-speaking Patriarchists. They were claimed by both sides, by the Bulgarian on the basis of their language and by the Greek on the basis of their religious affiliation.
Many disinterested observers at the time concluded that the Slavic-speaking inhabitants of Macedonia were "Bulgarians" (R.King 1973:187) and that the term "Macedonian" was not used to identify people as belonging to a distinct "Macedonian" ethnic or national group.
Rather "Macedonian" was either used in a general regional sense to designate all the inhabitants of Macedonia regardless of their ethnicity, or it was used more specifically to refer to the Slavic-speaking Christians living in the geographic area of Macedonia. If pressed to assert some other form of collective identity, these people may well have said they were "Bulgarians" (Perry 1988:19; Lunt 1959:20).
There was also widespread agreement that the "Greek" population of Macedonia was concentrated in major urban centers throughout Macedonia as well as in rural areas in the southern portion of what is now Greek Macedonia.
In the central and northern portion of what is now Yugoslav and Bulgarian Macedonia, the Slavic-speaking population predominated, with "Serbs" more numerous in the northwest and "Bulgarians" more numerous in the east.
The part of Macedonia that lay on either side of the present northern border of Greek Macedonia and which was bitterly contested by Greece and Bulgaria was inhabited primarily by Slavic speakers.
Sir Arthur Evans, a distinguished British archaeologist and ethnologist who traveled extensively in Macedonia at the turn of the century, described the population of Macedonia as follows: "There are no Macedonians. There are Bulgars." He went on to add that the Greek claim to Macedonia "is a dream" since "except for a narrow fringe to the south and some sporadic centres of no real magnitude in the interior of the province, the Greek element had no real hold on Macedonia" (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences 1978:540-41).
The British journalist H.N.Brailsford, a perceptive observer of conditions in Macedonia shortly after the Ilinden Uprising of 1903, offers many revealing insights into just how superficial a hold national categories had on the rural population of Macedonia. His observations also show very clearly the incredible facility with which villagers in Macedonia manipulated these categories in a constant process of negotiating identities in a manner designed to serve their interests most favorably. For example , Brailsford mentions a man who sent each of his three sons to a different school, one to be educated as a "Serb," one as a "Bulgarian," and one as a "Greek." He describes a village whose population was "Slav in blood and speech," but which belonged "to the Greek [i.e. Patriarchist] party and took no share in the Bulgarian movement" (1971:160). He describes another village that had been "Greek" four years earlier, but which recently became "Bulgarian" because the Bulgarians had sent the village a teacher and a priest, while the Greeks had only sent a teacher. In this way, Brailsford observes wryly, "the legend that Alexander the Great was Greek goes out one road, and the rival myth that Alexander was Bulgarian comes in the other." Brailsford adds that he heard "a witty French consul declare that with a fund of a million francs he would undertake to make all Macedonia French" (103).
Commenting on the role of the Orthodox clergy, in these nationalist struggles, Brailsford reports that one Bulgarian bishop advised certain villages to transfer their allegiance to the Greek church in order to "distract the suspicions of the authorities." He also points out that the Greek bishop of Florina had to address his flock in Turkish since they were all "Bulgarians" even though Florina was considered a Greek town because it was loyal to the Patriarch (1971:167,197). Finally, commenting on the Greek policy of trying to prove that Macedonia is Greek by exterminating all the Bulgarians, Brailsford writes that "the worst of this practical ethnography is that it leaves so many corpses to testify to the contrary thesis" (218).