Macedonians (Slavic ethnicity)

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The Slavic Macedonians ( Macedonian Македонци , transl. Makedonci ) are a South Slavic ethnic group. They form the majority population and the titular nation of North Macedonia . The Slavic Macedonians are not to be confused with the ancient Macedonians . Sometimes they claimed a relationship with them; However, this is neither scientifically proven nor comprehensible from an ethnological point of view.

In what is now North Macedonia, which has been independent since 1991, Macedonians form the largest population group with around 1.3 million members (1,297,981 according to the 2002 census). Minorities live in Greece , Albania , Serbia and Bulgaria (1,654 according to the 2011 census), as well as in Canada , Australia and the USA . However, they are only recognized as a minority in Albania.

History up to the 20th century

In the 6./7. In the 19th century , Slavs settled in the area of ancient Macedonia . As a result, they were mostly considered Bulgarians , and large parts of them saw themselves as such until the 19th century. For this reason it is controversial whether one can speak of the existence of a Macedonian language, nation or ethnic group before 1943.

Until the middle of the 20th century, the ethno-national determination of the Christian- Orthodox majority of the Macedonian population was low.

Through the struggle to displace the Ottoman Empire , combined with the strengthening of the nationalism of the Balkan peoples, territorial claims arose with regard to Macedonia, which also included the local population. For Bulgaria, that part of the Slavic population of Macedonia who professed Bulgarian Orthodox Christianity (→  Bulgarian Exarchate ) was Bulgarian. For Serbia it was Serbs, for the Greeks it was "Konational", who spoke a Slavic language because of a "historical error".

The Bulgarians claimed that the peasant inhabitants were Bulgarians because they spoke a dialect very similar to Bulgarian. The Serbs invoked similar folk customs, the Greeks pointed to the spread of the Greek Orthodox Church and that the Greeks had lived in the area since Alexander the Great . After 1890, parts of the educated upper class began to proclaim that there was a separate Macedonian Slavic nation. Most Macedonians, however, only felt local ties to family, religion and the village.

Recent history and today's situation

North Macedonia

The Macedonian nation-building process is closely connected with the establishment of the second, socialist and federal Yugoslavia after the Second World War. Even in advance, the AVNOJ in Jajce decided on November 29, 1943 to establish a “Republic of Macedonia” in a future federal Yugoslavia. However, representatives of the Macedonian communists were absent from this decision. The decisions of Jajce showed the political will of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to create a Macedonian language and nation, which was consistently implemented over the next few years.

In 1944 the Macedonians were declared one of the national peoples of socialist Yugoslavia and were given their own socialist republic. This was intended to integrate a population that had been hostile or hostile to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between the two world wars, into the Titoist Yugoslavia. The Slavic-Christian population of Macedonia was no longer referred to as southern Serbs as by the government in Belgrade, or as a regional group of the Bulgarian nation as viewed by the Bulgarian government and the Macedonian national revolutionary movement in the Ottoman Empire.

During this time, was Macedonian language by a decision of the Anti-Fascist Council of People's Liberation of Macedonia for official language proclaimed Nordmazedoniens and subsequently to a fully functioning, Serbian-oriented standard language developed . The aim was to develop an independent national identity that was different from the Bulgarian one . For this purpose, as is usual with nation building , a continuous Macedonian history was drawn up. This policy includes, for example, the appropriation of the apostles Cyril and Method as Macedonians because of their place of birth Thessaloniki and the appropriation of the medieval empire of Tsar Samuil as Macedonian.

There were problems with Greece, which always refused to recognize Macedonia under its constitutional name Republic of Macedonia (Republika Makedonija) because it feared territorial and cultural property claims. Instead, Greece recognized Macedonia under the provisional name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia , under which the country was accepted into the United Nations under Greek pressure , and internally mostly used the name Republic of Skopje or the English abbreviation FYROM (→ main article dispute about the name Macedonia ).

The majority of Macedonians today belong to the Macedonian Orthodox Church , which, however, is not recognized as autocephalous by any other Orthodox Church . The small groups of Torbeschen and Gorans are Muslim Macedonians.

Many Slavic Macedonians in the time of accession of Bulgaria , the Bulgarian citizenship adopted.

Greece

In the Greek part of Macedonia , numerous Greeks displaced from Asia Minor were also settled in the 1920s , so that the proportion of the Slavic population there fell sharply. To this day, the Slavs are not recognized as an ethnic minority here . This is related to the fact that the Slavic Macedonians in Greece could neither develop their idiom into a standard language nor join the standardization in the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; they speak the so-called Aegean Macedonian .

Bulgaria

When the Bulgarian Communist Party became the strongest force within the government of the Fatherland Front in the post-war period , it relied on a Balkan federation to overcome the interstate disputes with socialist Yugoslavia, which should initially include Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and later possibly Romania and that not -Communist Greece.

At the center of this federation plan was the creation of a Macedonian nation that would serve as a link between communist Bulgaria and communist Yugoslavia. In this context, the newly created Macedonian standard language was propagated as the official language in the Bulgarian parts of the geographical region of Macedonia. In parallel to the ongoing processes in Tito Yugoslavia to establish the Macedonian nation, the Bulgarian communist government initiated processes to develop a Macedonian national minority with limited cultural autonomy, with its own schools and newspapers within Bulgaria.

However, the federation plan failed after Stalin's intervention in 1948, but the efforts made by Bulgaria resulted in an extensive normalization of post-war relations with Yugoslavia. Since the 1960s at the latest, however, the Bulgarian policy towards the recognized Macedonian minority and its own language has changed, so that their existence has been increasingly denied. This also met with approval in Bulgarian society because a quarter to a third of the Bulgarian population are descendants of Bulgarian refugees from Macedonia and Thrace . However, the problem with the Macedonian minority recognized by the communist regime and the Macedonian nation as a whole has persisted to this day.

After the independence of the Republic of North Macedonia in 1991, Bulgaria was the first state to recognize it, but until 1999 this recognition only related to the state, while the existence of a Macedonian nation and a Macedonian national minority on Bulgarian territory was negated.

In 2011, however, only 1654 Bulgarians (less than 1% of the total population) identified themselves as Macedonians in the census. Nevertheless, in Skopje there are 200,000 members of a "minority" living in the area around Blagoevgrad , up to 750,000 throughout the country.

Albania

Albanian-Macedonian street sign in the village of Pustec

In 2011, in the last census in Albania, 5512 people declared themselves “Slavic Macedonians”. In contrast, 4443 stated Macedonian as their mother tongue. Most of them live in Pustec, one of the 61 municipalities in Albania . The minority area is officially bilingual and was therefore not integrated into a larger municipality during the last territorial reform in 2015, although the place has around 3,000 inhabitants. In 2013 the Parliament of Albania officially changed the place name from the Albanian version Liqenas to the Macedonian version Pustec . There is a Macedonian-speaking high school and elementary schools with Macedonian lessons. Information and street signs are also listed in two languages. Smaller Macedonian population groups are said to exist or have existed in the border areas with North Macedonia and in the larger cities of Albania.

See also

References and footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c Heinz Willemsen: The political system of Macedonia , in: The political systems of Eastern Europe , Ed. Wolfgang Ismayr , Opladen 2006, p. 770.
  2. ↑ The Prespa Agreement gave up such claims, at least from a legal point of view.
  3. ^ Gustav Weigand: Ethnography of Macedonia . 1924, p. 10 .
  4. ↑ Census 2011 (bulg.) (PDF; 1.6 MB), National Statistical Office of Bulgaria, final results of the 2011 census, p. 23.
  5. ↑ Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, 21st edition , Volume 17, Leipzig etc. 2006, ISBN 3-7653-4117-7 , p. 488.
  6. ^ A b Daniel Blum: Language and Politics. Language policy and language nationalism in the Republic of India and socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991) , Ergon Verlag, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-89913-253-X , p. 154 f.
  7. ↑ Stefan Troebst: The Macedonian Century. From the beginnings of the national revolutionary movement to the Ohrid Agreement 1893–2001. Selected essays. Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 1996, ISBN 978-3-486-58050-1 , p. 28.
  8. ↑ a b c d Ulrich Büchsenschütz: Nationalism and Democracy in Bulgaria since 1989 in Egbert Jahn (Ed.): Nationalism in late and post-communist Europe. Volume 2: Nationalism in the Nation-States. Verlag Nomos, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8329-3921-2 , pp. 572-573.
  9. ↑ Claudia Weber : In search of the nation. Culture of remembrance in Bulgaria from 1878–1944 (=  studies on the history, culture and society of Southeast Europe 2). Lit-Verlag, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-8258-7736-1 , p. 165 f.
  10. ↑ Steven W. Sowards: Modern History of the Balkans. The Balkans in the age of nationalism . BoD, Seuzach 2004, ISBN 3-8334-0977-0 , p. 244.
  11. ↑ a b Heinz Willemsen / Stefan Troebst: Schüttere continuities, multiple breaks; The Republic of Macedonia 1987–1995 in Egbert Jahn (Ed.): Nationalism in late and post-communist Europe. Volume 2: Nationalism in the Nation-States. Verlag Nomos, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8329-3921-2 , p. 517.
  12. ↑ Wolf Oschlies : Textbook of the Macedonian Language: in 50 lessons. Verlag Sagner, Munich 2007, p. 9, ISBN 978-3-87690-983-7 : "[...] the resolution of the ASNOM (Antifascist Council of the People's Liberation of Macedonia), which was issued on August 2, 1944 in the southern Serbian (or northern Macedonian) Monastery of Sv. Prohor Pćinjski the Republic of Macedonia (within the Yugoslav Federation) and in this the "Macedonian vernacular as the official language" proclaimed. [...] "
  13. ^ The Making of the Macedonian Alphabet
  14. ↑ a b Ljubčo Georgievski : With the face to the truth. Selected essays, essays and lectures (Bulgarian С лице към истината. Избрани статии, есета, речи), Balkani Publishing House, Sofia 2007, ISBN 978-954-9446-46-3 .
  15. ↑ Jutta de Jonng: The Macedonian Nation Development - Independent Integration or Artificial Synthesis? In: Yugoslavia. Integration problems in the past and present , Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1984, p. 171, ISBN 3-525-27315-0 .
  16. ↑ Before the First World War, for a short time after the Second Balkan War, there was a state “Macedonia” formed from remnants of the Ottoman Empire, located south of Serbia and west of Bulgaria. This state included both clearly Greek areas, e.g. B. Thessaloniki and the Chalkidike peninsula, as well as clearly South Slavic areas, z. B. the city of Skopje and the surrounding area.
  17. ↑ Focus Southeast Europe , dw.de, editor: Fabian Schmidt, author: Sveto Toevski / Mirjana Dikic, August 11, 2010.
  18. ↑ See the report by Human Rights Watch : Denying Ethnic Identity - The Macedonians of Greece (English; PDF; 260 kB).
  19. ↑ See Filip Dimitrov : Bulgaria's Recognitions ( Memento of December 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) in the journal Foreign Policy ; The political systems of Eastern Europe , Ed. Wolfgang Ismayr , Opladen 2006, ISBN 3-8100-4053-3 ; Ljubomir Ivanov et al .: Bulgarian Policies on the Republic of Macedonia: Recommendations on the development of good neighborly relations following Bulgaria's accession to the EU and in the context of NATO and EU enlargement in the Western Balkans ( Memento of the original dated June 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. [trilingual: Bulgarian, Macedonian and English,] Sofia: Manfred Wörner Foundation 2007/2008, ISBN 978-954-92032-2-6 . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / members.lycos.co.uk
  20. ↑ For a brief historical overview, cf. Herbert Küpper, Minority Protection in Eastern Europe: Bulgaria ( Memento from January 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 853 kB), [Cologne 2003], p. 25 f .; for the current situation cf. the section “The Macedonian minority” in the “Bulgaria” chapter , in: Amnesty International , Annual Report 2007 .
  21. ↑ Census 2011 (bulg.) (PDF; 1.6 MB), National Statistics Office, final results of the 2011 census, p. 23.
  22. ↑ Wolfgang Libal / Christine von Kohl: The Balkans. Stability or Chaos in Europe , Europa-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-203-79535-3 , pp. 104-105.
  23. ↑ Според процените што се правени во македонското МНР ... во Бугарија има 750,000 Македонци ( Memento of 30 July 2013, Internet Archive ), online version (from the Macedonian According to estimates of the Macedonian Foreign Ministry 750,000 Macedonians living in Bulgaria) of the newspaper Dnevnik from 15th August 2011, accessed September 1, 2011.