National awakening of the ethnic Macedonians

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This article refers to the national awakening of the contemporary ethnic Macedonians, a Slavic ethnic group who form a slight majority in the Republic of Macedonia. For details on other Macedonians and Macedonias, please see Macedonia (terminology). This article does not relate to the region in Greece called Macedonia. For the national awakenings of other groups in the region of Macedonia, please see Greeks, Bulgaria, Albania and Serbia; for others see History of the Balkans.

The national awakening of the ethnic Macedonians^[1] can be said to have begun in the nineteenth century;^{[citation needed]} this is the time of the first expressions of ethnic nationalism by limited groups of intellectuals in Belgrade, Sofia, Thessaloniki and St. Petersburg.^[2]

The birth of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans can be considered to have started in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when identification based on religion (for example Orthodox Christianity or Islam), started to move to identification based on linguistic, or ethnic grouping.^[2] The newly independent states of Greece, Serbia and Bulgarians of the Bulgarian Exarchate vied for influence in the region of Macedonia, each side attempting to instill in the population an ethnic and national identity matching their own.^[2] Labels reflecting collective identity, such as "Bulgarian", changed into national labels, from being broad terms, in the case of Bulgarian being almost synonymous with peasant,^[2] and without political significance.^[3]

This confusion is illustrated by Robert Newman, who recounts discovering in a village in Vardar Macedonia^[4] in 1935 two brothers, one who considered himself a Serb, and the other considered himself a Bulgarian. In another village he met a man who had been a Macedonian peasant all his life, but who had varyingly been called a Turk, a Serb and a Bulgarian.^[5]

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[edit] Notes

^ Throughout this article, the term "Macedonian" will refer to ethnic Macedonians. There are many other uses of the term Macedonian, and comprehensive coverage of this topic may be found in the article Macedonia (terminology).
^a ^b ^c ^d Danforth, L. (1995) The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World ISBN 0691043574
^ Wilkinson, H. R. (1951) Maps and Politics (a review of the ethnographic cartography of Macedonia). Liverpool University Press
^ The term "Vardar Macedonia" is a geographic term which refers to the portion of the region of Macedonia currently occupied by the Republic of Macedonia.
^ Newman, R. (1952) Tito's Yugoslavia (London)