The name of the Macedonian people

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Since we know that we took the Macedonian name as the name of our nation as late as the middle of the 19th century, two questions are of paramount importance: what was the Macedonian people called up to that period, and how come that they took the Macedonian name? Both questions are of crucial significance for the formation of the Macedonian people and the emergence and development of the Macedonian nation.

From the existing historical sources it can be seen that the names of the native peoples in this part of the Balkans were lost after the arrival of the Slavs. The inhabitants of the Bulgarian state accepted the Bulgarian name, and in the written sources we can find them only under that designation, whereas the inhabitants of Macedonia are mentioned under the names Slavini (Sclavini) or Slavs. By the 9th century specific tribal Slavic names were in use in Macedonia, but later, after its division into regional (and not tribal) administrative units, these names disap- peared almost completely. It is interesting to note one fact which is often not mentioned, namely that up to the 10th century we find the Slavic name as designating almost exclusively the Macedonian Slavs; the claims that there was some kind of ‘mixing’ of the Slavic and Bulgarian names as both referring to the ‘Bulgarian people’ are absolutely incorrect. Dimit’r Angelov acknowledges that in Bulgaria after 681, “in the course of time, even before their conversion to Christianity, there had been a certain intermingling between the religions of the Slavs and Proto-Bulgarians, an intermingling which could also be seen in the field of material culture”. The author considers that “certain customs, beliefs, cults”, even before the conversion of Bulgaria to Christianity, were “spread not only among the Proto-Bulgarians, but also among the Slavs, and they represented, as it were, one common spiritual possession of these two ethnic elements”.^[1]

The same also referred to the language. As Greek was used in Bulgaria as the language of the state, and Slavonic prevailed as the language of the people, there are two possibilities: either the Proto-Bulgarians received the language of the Antians as early as the period when they were living as neighbours, before they came to the Balkans, or this took place during the process of intermingling in the Balkan region, where the much more numerous Slavic tribes imposed their own language. The aforementioned Bulgarian scholar confirms this, writing: “When Slavonic literacy was created and our first literary works appeared, the influence of the Proto-Bulgarian (Turan) language was quite negligible, and there remained almost no traces of it to influence the language of our writers towards the end of the 9th and beginning of the 10th century.”^[2]

And because the language of the Thracians and their name in Bulgaria totally disappeared, with the exception of certain toponyms, some conclude that the process of the creation of the Bulgarian people within the borders of the Bulgarian state (perhaps even before its conversion to Christianity) was completed. Motivated solely by their desire to amalgamate the Macedonian and Bulgarian peoples, Bulgarian scholars claim that, for instance, the Byzantine historian Theophanes (8th c.-818) still mentioned “‘Bulgars’ and ‘Slavs’ separately as two components of the Slavo-Bulgarian state in this period”.^[3] The document Theophanes has left us explicitly states: “This year [i.e. 688, Blaže Ristovski] Justinian started a campaign against Slavinia and Bulgaria [i.e. two distinct and different regions, B.R.]. He repelled the Bulgars who intercepted him at that time [moving from Constantinople towards Bulgaria and Macedonia, B.R.], and attacking them as far as Salonika, he captured a great multitude of Slavs”^[4] (from Macedonia!). Thus Theophanes clearly differentiates between the Bulgars (subjects of the Bulgarian state, recognized by Byzantium, who had already been accepted as the Bulgarian people) and the Slavini (Sclavini) who lived in Mace- donia, called Slavinia (Sclavinia) at the time. The same source quotes that “the lord of Bulgaria sent a twelve-thousand-strong army and noblemen to enslave Berzitia [part of Macedonia, B.R.] and make it a part of Bulgaria”, but that the Byzantine emperor found out about this plan and destroyed the Bulgarian troops. Accordingly, Theophanes is consistent in differentiating between the Bulgars and the Macedonian Slavs.

Bulgarian scholars also claim that the Byzantine sources from the 7th and 8th centuries “often speak of individual Slavic tribes”, quoting the Greek word ethnoi (the plural form) and mentioning the names of the tribes [Brzaci (Brsjaks, Brzaks, Berziti), Rinhini (Rinhins), etc.], but that in the second half of the 9th century, i.e. when Macedonia, too, was incorporated into Bulgaria, “the word ethnos in the singular form appeared more and more often in use, meaning ‘people’ and designating the entire population of Bulgaria”.^[5]

These conclusions, however, are incorrect.

Firstly, individual Slavic tribes are mentioned only when referring to Slavic tribes in Macedonia, as confirmed by the quotation of the names of Brsjaks and Rinhins. Secondly, at that time these tribes were still not part of the Bulgarian state. Thirdly, and most importantly, the designations ethnoi and ethnos in the Greek sources are used side by side even before the settlement of the Slavs in the Balkans, and continued to be used indiscriminately in the following period: “the Slavic people” (John of Ephesus, 584); “the people of the Slavs” (Theophylact Simokata, early 7th c.), and the designation “Slav people” for the Macedonian Slavs can be found as early as the 7th century in many sources, while, for instance, the Miracles of St Demetrius of Salonika, where the allied attackers of Salonika in 622 are even specifically mentioned (“countless army of all the Slavs, Bulgars and other countless peoples”) speak simultaneously of the whole “Slav people” and of “the tribes of the aforementioned Slavs, namely Strymons and Rinhins, as well as Sagudats”, of “the princes of the Dragovit tribe”, etc. All this unequivocally shows that it is difficult to draw conclusions with full reliability upon mediaeval sources as regards the categories ‘tribe’ and ‘people’, and that the assumptions of Bulgarian scholars suggesting a unity in terms of ethnicity and name of the people in Bulgaria and Macedonia cannot be taken seriously.

From what has been said above we can see that the first name of the Macedonian people was Slavini (Sclavini) or Slavs, this form being retained up to the 11th century,^[6] independently of the imposition of other, foreign names through administrative means. It is interesting that the Slavic name referring to the Macedonians has been preserved in the neighbouring Albanian language up to the present day. Although the Macedonian people later received different names, there is no doubt that the Bulgarian name has left the most permanent and significant mark. For this reason, we shall elaborate this question in greater detail.

As we have already pointed out, the first contacts of the Macedonian Slavs with the Bulgaro-Slavs were made as late as the second half of the 9th century, after the departure of Cyril and Methodius to Moravia, when the multiethnic Bulgarian state incorporated Macedonia. On the other hand, the Braničevo and Srem regions, together with present-day Belgrade, came within Bulgaria’s frontiers half a century earlier than Macedonia. So why was the Bulgarian name retained the longest in Macedonia, and not in Belgrade (which is now the centre of the distinct Serbian nation)?

Even though all the ethnic entities which were formerly part of the Bulgarian state later changed numerous masters, they nevertheless, in the course of time, established states under their own names, which in turn founded church organiza- tions under their own names, being the basis for their designations when they subsequently developed as nations. Hence the Bulgarian name was retained among these peoples as long as the frontiers of that Bulgarian state and church lasted.

Macedonian history is different in this respect from the history of the other Balkan Orthodox Slavs. It is true that the Macedonian Slavs succeeded in establishing a strong state towards the late 10th and early 11th century, but its founder was crowned with the Bulgarian imperial crown and received the Bulgarian name for his state, as even earlier the Macedonians had been Bulgarian subjects for some time; he elevated the Bishopric of Ohrid to the rank of patriarchate, so that during their existence, both the church and the state bore Bulgarian appellations. This phenomenon was quite usual in the mediaeval period and in all feudal states: for instance, the most powerful European emperors — those of the Byzantines and Franks — proclaimed themselves successors to the Roman crown and proudly called themselves Romans!

Of crucial importance for the strengthening of the Bulgarian name in Macedonia, however, was another factor which we have already mentioned: following the downfall of Samuel’s state, the Byzantine emperor Basil II, in accordance with the usual practice in the empire, divided the newly-conquered territories into themes, and thus Macedonia, as the centre of the destroyed ‘Bulgarian’ state, became a theme bearing the name ‘Bulgaria’. At the same time he gave the name ‘Paristrion’ (the Danube region) to the territory of Bulgaria; the Thracian coast became known as the ‘Strymon’ theme, and the region between Adrianople and Constantinople as the ‘Thrace’ theme. It is of particular signifi- cance to mention that as early as 802 the continental part of present-day Thrace, with its centre at modern Plovdiv, can be found as a theme bearing the name ‘Macedonia’.

In addition, Basil II immediately demoted the Patriarchate of Ohrid to the rank of archbishopric, but left it as an autocephalous church which, nevertheless, until its abolition in the 18th century, retained the Bulgarian appellation in its title. Highly illustrative in this respect is the report concerning the patriarchal thrones and their subordinate dioceses made by Archimandrite Nilus Doxopater by order of the Sicilian King Roger II in 1143. This is what it says with regard to the autocephalous Archbishopric of Ohrid: “The Bulgarian Church is like the Cypriot Church: independent and subordinate to none of the supreme thrones, but autonomously governed and consecrated by its own bishops. In the beginning it was not called Bulgarian, but later, as it came under the control of the Bulgars, it received the Bulgarian name. It also remained independent when it freed itself from the Bulgarian hand and did not join the Constantinopolitan Church.”^[7]

Somewhat later the Archbishopric of Ohrid was made subordinate only and directly to the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, its former eparchies were curtailed and its jurisdiction was reduced mainly to the territory of Macedonia.

The long Byzantine domination in Macedonia (over two centuries, 11th-13th c.), together with the administrative division and conservatism of church traditions described above, was accompanied by a highly developed economic and, in particular, cultural life of the Macedonian Slavs. It is a period from which a large number of cultural and historical written records — in the Slavonic and Greek languages — have been preserved. In all these documents Macedonia is invariably referred to as the theme Bulgaria, and the former Slavini (Sclavini) are now described under the administrative appellation Bulgars, while the Macedonian language is called Bulgarian. The same applies to the various hagiographies and orations connected with Clement and Naum, and even those with Cyril and Methodius, where the nomenclature is in full accord with the administrative division. This is understandable as the majority of historical texts were written by Greeks.^[8]

Using these appellations as ‘arguments’, Bulgarian scholars stress the “Bulgarian character” of Macedonia and use the designations which were the result of a situation in the 12th and 13th centuries to draw conclusions relating to issues from earlier periods. At the same time they forget that during the same period, when we can find Macedonia referred to under the Bulgarian name, the Bulgarian name is absent in the written records relating to Bulgaria and the Bulgars! It is curious (which has long been and still is the cause of dispute between Bulgarian and Romanian historians) that even the founders of the ‘Second Bul- garian Empire’, the brothers Ivan and Peter Asen (1185-1197), did not use the Bulgarian name. Instead, the sources mention ‘Wallachians’, ‘Moesi’, Scythians, etc.^[9]

As late as the early 13th century, Ivan and Peter Asen’s heir, Kaloyan (1197-1207), proclaiming himself “the Emperor of the whole of Bulgaria and Wallachia” and demanding recognition from the Roman Pope, in his letters writes, among other things, that he found in old books that in the past the Bulgars used to have glorious empires and emperors, whose “legitimate” heir he is.^[10]

Yet he succeeded in conquering and controlling a part of Macedonia and Serbia for only two or three years, and this (like the subsequent short-lived incursion of Asen II) could not leave very great imprint on the overall development of Macedonia. The not so brief rule of Serbian feudal lords in Macedonia could not erase the Bulgarian name as the Archbishopric of Ohrid constantly used it not only in the eparchies of Macedonia, but also in those outside its present-day borders. Hence it is not surprising that, for instance, Evliya Çelebi found Bulgars in the 17th century in Belgrade and other places which were under the jurisdiction of the Ohrid Church. Only after the establishment of the independent Serbian Church were conditions created for the formation of the Serbian people, because the state and the church symbolized the boundaries of an individual people in feudalism, which was later used in the delineation of national borders. Up to the present day we still do not have an objective scholarly work examining the character and mutual relations between the three independent Orthodox Slavic churches in the Balkans, but they undoubtedly developed into churches of the three Slavic Orthodox peoples: the Archbishopric of Ohrid (as the oldest church, with the longest continuity of development) for the Macedonian people, the Patriarchate of Peć for the Serbian people, and the Patriarchate of Trnovo for the Bulgarian people. Regardless of the degree of overlapping in their titles and organizational territories, they nevertheless led to the development of three closely related and yet individual cultures.

The complications in these relations arose only after the national delineation of the 19th century, when a people’s designation was considered of prime importance.

The arrival of the Turks led to the suppression of popular names, as the subjugated peoples were classified in accordance with their religion and social position (Christians and raya), but the Bulgarian name was still retained and propagated in the churches and monasteries under the jurisdiction of the Archbishopric of Ohrid. With the strengthening of Russia (particularly in the 18th and early 19th century) and with the arousal of interest in the Slavic world and in the Old Slavonic language and its original homeland, the Bulgarian name once again started to be used through inertia for Macedonia as well, because the researchers found it in old documents written in the Slavonic and other languages. Therefore it was not surprising that in the Dictionary of Four Lan- guages (1802) of the Moskopole teacher Daniil the Macedonian language ap- peared under the Bulgarian name and that Hristofor Žefarovič from Dojran on occasion declared himself to be a Bulgarian, amongstother things. It is in this light that we must understand the statements of some Macedonians before Vuk Karadžić, in the early 19th century, that they were Bulgarians, as well as the writings of the first literary figures of our more recent history that their language was “Slavo-Bulgarian”. The title of Kiril PejčinoviÎ’s Ogledalo (Mirror), where he says that the book is written “in the ordinary and non-literary Bulgarian language of lower Moesia” is a good example of this.

Such or similar statements are to be found among all our writers and cultural workers from the first half of the 19th century, and even later. This, however, should not be explained as the result of Bulgarian propaganda, as we can speak of such propaganda only after the late 1850s, in the 1860s and especially in the 1870s, when the process of Bulgarian national revival was more or less completed and when the rise of national romanticism demanded the restoration of the former borders of Simeon’s Bulgaria. Up to this period it can be assumed that the same name was used for two peoples who were no closer than the Czechs and Slovaks, or the Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians, and who during their history had much less in common than the peoples mentioned above. Just as the Slovaks, Slovenes, Belorussians and Ukrainians took their present-day national names only after the process of becoming nationally aware in the 19th century — without any links to the mediaeval period — so too the Macedonian people, in this same 19th century, raised their historical and geographical name to the degree of national name, formally attesting its independent existence.

Thus the Bulgarian name was used continually in Macedonia, but without awareness on the part of the people of any ethnic or cultural unity with the Bulgarians, from whom they were separated both geographically and historically as well as economically and commercially. This does not imply that other names were not used for this purpose during that long period; numerous examples can be given of the use of the Slavonic, Serbian, Greek and, certainly, the Macedonian name for the designation of the people. But it was not until the historical conditions were fully mature that the Macedonian name developed as a national name as well, this time regionally, culturally and historically defined and sufficiently clearly distinguishable from the national names of the neighbouring peoples and territories which had become established earlier.

1. ↑ Dimitъr Angelov, “Bъlgarskata narodnost i deloto na Kliment Ohridski“, in: Kliment Ohridski 916-1966. Sbornikot statii po sluchajat 1050 godini ot smъrtta mu, BAN, Sofija, 1966, 10-11.
2. ↑ Ibid., 11-12.
3. ↑ Ibid., 15.
4. ↑ Grъcki izvori za bъlgarskata istorija, III, 1960, 265.
5. ↑ Dimitъr Angelov, op. cit., 14.
6. ↑ This is mentioned by Prof. A. Burmov in the quoted work, Hristomatija po istorija na Bъlgarija, I, 425. Here we must underline that mostof the tribal names of the Slavs in Macedonia which can be found chiefly in Byzantine sources were most probably received from the Byzantines, generally according to the place of settlement: the Strymons were given their name according to the River Strymon, the Rinhins according to the River Rinhos, etc. We still do not have reliable information whether they themselves used these names. It is interesting that, of all these, only the names of the Mijaks and Brsjaks have been retained to this day, the etymological origins of which appear not to have such roots.
7. ↑ Pogledi, 3, Skopje, 1967, 110.
8. ↑ With the exception of Haralampie Polenakovič’s chapter entitled “Kliment Ohridski – život i dejnost “ (in: Kniga za Kliment Ohridski, Skopje, 1966, 5-68) and Branko Panov’s article “Kliment Ohridski “ (Istorija, III, 1, Skopje, 1967, 32-53), we have yet no detailed account of these hagiographies that are full of contradictory and very interesting data. Written considerably later, mostly by Greeks within and outside Macedonia, they present sufficient reasons calling for a critical survey which will provide important information — both for us and for others.
9. ↑ Borislav Primov, “Sъzdavaneto na Vtorata bъlgarska dъržava i učastieto na vlasite“, in: Bъlgarsko-rumъnski vrъzki i otnošenija prez vekovite, Izsledvanija, I, BAN, Sofija, 1965, 9-53.
10. ↑ Godišnikъ na Sofiskija Universitetъ, Istoriko-filologičeski fakultet, Sofija, 1942, 21-66.