Why did the Macedonian name appear as late as the 19th century?
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(a) Why did the Macedonian name appear as late as the 19th century?
The present-day Macedonian name originates not only from the geographical term Macedonia, but also from the name of an ancient people, Macedonians, because in the acceptance of this name by both foreigners and the Macedonian Slavs, the latter were considered not only successors to the territory of the Macedonian state of Philip II and Alexander the Great, but also descendants of the ancient Macedonians, who were proclaimed the oldest Slavs in the Balkans. Yet all this was a development of the ensuing centuries, largely following the 16h century. This view first appeared and developed mostly outside Macedonia, and was only later accepted by the Macedonian Slavs themselves. Of course, during the settlement of the Slavs they already had their Slavic name and hence it was not by chance that when they established semi-state communities of their own they were called Slavinias. No one ever thought, nor it was possible to think, of a full correspondence between the borders of the Slavic settlers and the former borders of the state of the ancient Macedonians. On the contrary, the Slavs spread all over the area, coming as far as Peloponnesus. In the course of time, the broad but not very well delineated ethnic boundaries gradually narrowed, mainly in favour of the Greeks and later of Albanians. The course of history thus formed an ethnic community which gradually developed into an individual Slavic people and later into the individual Slavic Macedonian nation.
As early as 1903, on the basis of original studies and logical conclusions, Misirkov established that “our first popular name was the name Slav”.[1] Our ancestors used this name at least up to the 11th century, even though foreigners used the Bulgarian name for them as early as the 10th century. We should certainly not overlook the fact, and it was not by chance, that St Clement of Ohrid never signed his works as ‘Bulgarian bishop’ (even though he could have done so, as he worked within the frontiers of the then vast Bulgarian state and should have been subordinated to the Archbishop of Bulgaria), but he mostoften signed them as ‘Slavic bishop’. Later, however, the Slavic name utterly disappeared as an exclusive popular name for the Macedonian Slavs, acquiring a broader, all-Slavonic meaning. This is the reason why we cannot find it as a designation for the people even during the process of the birth and development of the Macedonian nation, especially in view of the fact that it had already been used by the Slovaks and Slovenes.
Misirkov is right when he concludes that “the Greeks also gave us, the Macedonians, the name Bulgars. But this renaming,” continues Misirkov, “was not the only one. The Serbs, too, renamed us as Serbs.”[2]
As we have already explained in detail how the Bulgarian borders expanded to include Macedonia and how the Bulgarian name was introduced and became established in a certain period, let us now examine the use of the Serbian name. Once again we can quote Misirkov to illustrate our point:
The Serbs were the principal military power opposing the Byzantines. Our ancestors were their allies. The Byzantines called all their opponents Serbs, i.e. both the Serbs and us. Little by little they renamed us from Bulgars into Serbs. The same was also the result of the recognition of Dušan’s sovereignty over Macedonia and of the role of our leading men in his state. We became Serbs to the external world; then we appeared as Serbian subjects and later the name Serb came to designate a Macedonian, not a Greek, Vlach or Arnaut.
So, before the arrival of the Turks in our land we were renamed three times: 1. Slavs, 2. Bulgars, 3. Serbs. [3] Under Ottoman rule, as “the Turks did not recognize ethnicities in their state, they called us an ‘infidel’ [kaurin] people and ‘raya’, terms based on our low status before the Turks, on the religious differences between us and themselves and on our social position”.[4]
But Misirkov notes that “apart from the Turks, after losing our freedom, the Greeks became our ‘educators’ and masters”,[5]who, in addition to identifying us with themselves as ‘Christians’, thanks to the state-constitutional and church traditions with ‘Bulgarian’ designations, restored the Bulgarian name for us and formally identified us with the Bulgarians. At that time the inhabitants of Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina were no longer designated as Bulgarians, because in these states the names of other states had already become established, and — which is particularly important - they had long since ceased to come under the jurisdiction of the Archbishopric of Ohrid, and mainly gravitated around the church of the mediaeval Serbian state, as a result of which Belgrade no longer bore Bulgarian characteristics. In this way we were once again nominally identified with the Bulgarians, although the Macedonians themselves had almost no links with, and not even an idea of, the Bulgarian people or Bulgarian culture. As a result, in the 19th century there was resistance against Bulgarian penetration into Macedonia, when our people called themselves “pure Bulgarians” and used the name Šopi for the Bulgarians, as the Macedonians knew no other peoples living much further than the land of the Šopi. Yet because the Bulgarians succeeded in proclaiming their historical and national programme earlier, because their revival started earlier and was also completed earlier, our people, refusing to accept the proclaimed ‘unity’ of Macedonia, Thrace, Bulgaria and parts of Serbia, and making a strong distinction between themselves and the Bulgarians, rejected the Bulgarian and accepted the already well-developed Macedonian name.
