Why was it the Macedonian name that was accepted?
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(b) Why was it the Macedonian name that was accepted? When the Slavs settled in Macedonia, the Macedonian name was considered rather vague, although many traditions and legends were still alive among the local population. It is also important to mention that there is a written records dating from as early as 802 in which West Thrace is designated as the theme of Macedonia. The Macedonian name became more and more established with Plovdiv as its centre. In addition, starting from 867 and during the following two centuries, the Byzantine Empire was ruled by the Macedonian dynasty whose founder was Emperor Basil I the Macedonian (867-887), born in the vicinity of Adrianople. The naming of Thrace as the theme Macedonia was also not incidental, as the ancient Macedonian state was originally organized along the lower course of the River Marica, and only later, during the time of Philip II, did it incorporate the territory of present-day Macedonia with its seat at Pella. Bulgarian control and the long-standing Byzantine administrative organization of Macedonia as the theme ‘Bulgaria’ developed side by side with the existence of the theme ‘Macedonia’ in Thrace.
Serbian and Turkish conquests and the fall of the Byzantine Empire created a new situation. The development of humanism and the Renaissance in Western Europe and the cult of the ancient world and classical culture exalted the glory of the ancient state of Philip II and Alexander the Great (of Macedon).
At the same time, particularly with the development of navigation, cartography began to grow rapidly. On the basis of the maps and ‘geography’ of the Alexandrian geographer and astronomer Ptolemy (2nd century) and on the basis of the ‘travel- ling maps’ which were engraved in the squares of Roman towns in the 3rd and 4th centuries, where the borders of Macedonia were fairly accurately delineated, from the 12th century onwards, copies started to be made, and after the 15th century (when Gutenberg invented the printing press), there began the printing of various maps which spread and disseminated knowledge about the world and history. In 1490 Ptolemy’s maps were redrawn and printed, and, towards the mid-16th century, the founder of modern scientific cartography, Gerhardus Mercator (1512- 1594), made the first more accurate map of Macedonia, printed in Duisburg in 1589 and reprinted separately in Amsterdam in 1628, showing the towns of Salonika, Prilep, Stobi, Skopje, etc. With the progress of scholarship and technology, these maps spread even farther and became a part of the body of material studied in Europe. The name and borders of Macedonia became more and more established in the mind of the civilized world. By the 19th century a large number of such maps had been printed, which had undoubtedly reached Macedonian merchants and literate people maintaining contacts with Western Europe. The contribution of merchants from Dubrovnik, who were among the most numerous in Macedonia, was certainly the greatest.
At the same time various copies and reprinted editions of the mediaeval romance of Alexander the Great spread more and more widely. The ancient glory of the Macedonian state and culture stirred the imagination not only of the Europeans but also of the inhabitants of Macedonia. More and more songs about Alexander the Great began to be sung and more and more legends describing his campaigns were retold. This led to the emergence in this region of what is known as Damaskin literature. Our ‘literate’ people accepted all this. The former geographical borders, now defined with the development of cartography, gradually acquired ethnographic characteristics and a consciousness of the Macedonian origin of the Slavs in Macedonia began to be formed.
We can use the development of Slavic heraldry as a good illustration for and a proof of this extremely significant process. No doubt under the direct influence of the Italian Renaissance and European heraldic literature among the Balkan Catholic Slavs, the idea of the unity of all Balkan Slavs and of resistance against the subjugators — Turkey and Austria — began increasingly to develop. As a result, the first coats of arms of the individual Slavic lands and peoples on the Balkan Peninsula were created.
All this evolved under the wing of what was known as the Illyrian Movement, which was strongest in Dubrovnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, when the term Illyrian was identified with Balkano-Slavic. Of about 70 Macedonian coats of arms discovered so far by Dr Aleksandar Matkovski, the oldest dates from 1595. Up to that time Europe knew only the boundaries of Macedonia, mostoften considering it as a ‘Greek land’. Yet with the appearance of the coats of arms of South-Slavic peoples, including those of the Macedonian people, the Slavic character of this part of European Turkey was represented for the first time. This completed the picture of the boundaries of Macedonia and the character of its population. Hence Leopold I in 1690 addressed “the Macedonian people”, and the documents of the Russian Imperial Office from the 18th century mention the following: “The Orthodox peoples, the Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians and Wallachians, want to serve Her Imperial Majesty with blood and armsIn peaceful times that corpus of Serbs, Macedonians and Bulgarians, Orthodox peoples of the same stock as ours, etc.[1]
It is also important to mention that, as Dr Matkovski points out, “the Macedonian coat of arms appeared at the same time, at the same place and was produced by the same people as the Serbian and Bulgarian coats of arms and those of the other South Slavs”.[2]
The inclusion of the Macedonian coat of arms in the common coat of arms of the South Slav peoples confirmed the separate character, individuality and equality of the Macedonian people with regard to the restof the South Slav peoples.
All this spread in Macedonia itself, although with difficulty and slowly. Perhaps the statements of Athanasius, the Archbishop of Ohrid, are of particular signifi- cance in this respect. The trend gained in strength especially after 1601, when Mavro Orbini from Dubrovnik published his important work Il Regno degli Slavi (The Empire of the Slavs), where the Macedonian coat of arms was printed for the first time; a text on the Macedonian people was printed below. Yet this South Slav ideology experienced its greatest expansion after the publication of the Stemmatographia by Hristofor Žefarovič from Dojran in 1741; it was prepared on the basis of Orbini’s work, but was printed in the Slavonic language and Cyrillic script. The Macedonian coat of arms is given here side by side with the Serbian, Bulgarian and other South Slavic coats of arms, and below it is said that Macedonia lost “her honour” under the Turks, yet nevertheless she holds it dearly. The Stemmatographia spread throughout Macedonia and had an immeasurable influence on the strengthening of the Macedonian ethnic, historical and national consciousness. It was not by chance that the Macedonians who took part in the First Serbian Uprising put a lion on their banner with the inscription ‘Macedonia’. Nor is it a coincidence that we find the same symbol on the banner of the 1876 Razlovci Uprising and even on the flags of some detachments in the 1903 Ilinden Uprising. It is even less coincidental that the portal of the Rila Monastery (1834-1860) includes the Macedonian coat of arms, in addition to the Serbian, Bulgarian and Bosnian ones, as representing four mediaeval states and four independent Ortho- dox Slavic churches, i.e. four individual and neighbouring Slavic peoples. The significance of this fact is even greater if we bear in mind that the masters who painted the icons and did the woodcarving belonged to the then famous three schools — those of Samokov, Bansko and Debar.
But here too, as in some other cases, there are certain complications. Even though the lion represents a number of lands as a symbol in heraldry (Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Austria, Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and even the Serbian reigning family of Branković), there was a mixing of the characteristic signs between the Bulgarian and Macedonian coats of arms which was a consequence of the old confusion resulting from the use of the Bulgarian name.
Macedonian symbols were increasingly suppressed with the emergence and development of the Bulgarian revival, when Bulgarian champions announced their intention of establishing a greater Bulgarian state within the borders of Simeon’s Empire. Although these developments had more impact within Macedonia than outside its borders, the awakened representatives of our revival emphasized the Macedonian ethnic individuality and the Macedonian name, starting a long and extremely difficult struggle for Macedonian national affirmation.
Accordingly, from the historical facts concerning the development of the Balkan Slavs, given here in the most general manner, we can conclude that the Macedonian people started to be formed as early as the period between the 7th and 10th centuries, but that owing to the concurrence of historical events, this process was not fully completed until the 19th century, when the struggle of the Macedonians for the affirmation of the new social and historical category — the nation — began. The apparent evanescence of the Macedonian people after the 11th century was mainly of a formal character; it was the result of a nominal confusion with the surrounding peoples, which was resolved only after the emergence of the nation. In spite of all historical conquests and border changes, inhabiting this territory, sharing the same historical destiny, living a common geopolitical, economic and cultural life, with distinct characteristics in its language and literacy, the Macedonian people — as a distinct ethnic entity and culture — has built its individuality with proven vitality and self-preservation. This is shown by the ultimate strengthening of the Macedonian national name. There is also the fact that the Macedonians looked for and found a way of expressing their historical evolution which was not too different from the evolution of the other ‘non-historical’ nations in the Slavic world such as the Slovenes, Slovaks, Ukraini- ans, Belorussians and Lusatians. This does not mean that we should overlook the considerable ethnic and historical closeness between the Macedonian and sur- rounding Slavic peoples, but this is, however, no greater than the closeness between the Czechs and Slovaks, between the Ukrainians, Belorussians and Russians, or between the Slovenes and Croats.
- ↑ For more details concerning these questions see: Aleksandar Matkovski, Makedonskiot polk vo Ukraina, Misla, Skopje, 1985. Starting from 1751, the Macedonians were registered as a distinct people vis-a-vis the Orthodox Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians and Greeks, and were entered in the registration form as “iz makedonsko nacie” (“of the Macedonian nation”, pp. 177, 184-187, 259).
- ↑ D-r Al eksandar Mat kovski , “Stariot makedonski grb“, Nova Makedonija, Skopje, 10.III.1968, 9. The same author later published a separate book entitled Grbovite na Makedonija (Prilog kon makedonskata heraldika), Skopje, 1970, where he made a detailed analysis of all the Macedonian coats of arms with reproductions in colour, shedding a different light on the entire problem.
