They want to be simply Macedonians - 1922
"They want to be simply Macedonians" is the message Baron Rosen wrote in his autobiography, published 1922.
Brief Introduction. Who was Baron Rosen:
On the picture below, sitting on the right.
Baron Roman Romanowitsch Rosen (Russian Роман Романович Розен; * February 12 / February 24, 1847 in Reval; † December 31, 1921 in New York) was a German-Baltic nobleman and Imperial Russian diplomat.
Roman Rosen came from the Estonian family von Rosen, his father was Robert Gottlieb von Rosen. He served as the Russian Ambassador to the United States from 1904 to 1911. Before that, he was the Russian ambassador to Japan and Bavaria. During the negotiations on the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) he was a member of the Russian delegation headed by Sergei J. Witte.
After the October Revolution he fled his home country with his family to Sweden and later to the United States of America.
"Forty Years of Diplomacy"
Forty Years of Diplomacy is the name of his autobiography, which was published in New York in 1923. The editor of the book says in the foreword: Baron Rosen died in a motorcycle accident before these lines were typed, so the Baron's final correction is missing.
Excerpt:
... As regards the ambitious designs, or rather hopes, of territorial expansion, my impression was that popular sentiment was more occupied with the fate of Macedonia than with Bosnia and Herzegovina, let alone Croatia.
Macedonia, with the extraordinary tangle of races — Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek and even Koutzo-Wallachian, tyrannized over by an infinitesimally small layer of the ruling Turkish race — had always been a bone of contention between the various races composing its population, the Serbians and Bulgarians each claiming to be the numerically preponderating nationality, the Greeks basing their claim to preponderance not on numbers, but on traditions of ancient history and on cultural superiority.
Moreover, the question was complicated by the tendency of the rival Great Powers to take a hand in these disputes according to what each considered to be best suited to serve its own interests. As an illustration of this state of affairs I might repeat a story told meby a distinguished Serbian statesman, at the time out of of&ce. In the course of a journey through Macedonia, he had reached Salonika and had been entertained at dinner by the Russian Consul-General, reputed to be the greatest authority on the ethnography of the Balkan Peninsula. When my Serbian friend, after dinner over coffee and cigars, asked him for his frank opinion as to whether the Macedonians were Serbians or Bulgarians, he elicited from his host the following illuminating reply : "If you ask me this question as plain Mr. X., I will say they are Serbians, but if you want to know my opinion as Consul-General of Russia, I am bound to say that they are all Bulgarians." There are also in Macedonia people who decline to be considered either Serbians or Bulgarians, and who want to be simply Macedonians. ...
Full Text HERE via archive.org
