Macedonia History

 It was sung about in countless Macedonian folk songs - The Mannlicher Rifle, popularly called among Macedonians "Manliherka". And indeed, the Macedonian fighters could consider themselves lucky back then if they owned such a modern weapon for the time. Basically, the Macedonian insurgents carried and used all the weapons that could be found on the black market at that time or that were taken from the killed opponents. But everyone wanted to call the Mannlicher Model 1895 their own.  In a Macedonian folk song (Izlezi, stara majko) the rifle is even sung as "the most reliable wife of the Insurgents". The Mannlicher Model 1895 rifle is a bolt action rifle with a straight pull bolt and was manufactured in Austria by the Steyr Mannlicher company and in Hungary by the Budapest rifle factory. Originally the M95 was developed as a long infantry rifle for the Austro-Hungarian army, but during the First World War the army command recognized the great disadvantage of these ...

  A report from Skopje in the Bavarian press dating from 1844. The article describes atrocities committed by Albanians in the Skopje region. Turkey - A correspondence of the Times from Constantinople on March 27 assures that the Russian envoy had in the note which he handed over in relation to the atrocities perpetrated by Albanians against Christians in the district of Skopia or Uskub (Sanjak in Vilayet Rumili) most emphatic words demanded that the same should explain what means it was inclined to use in order from now on to protect its Christian subjects from the iniquities of the Mohammedan mob. If the answer is unsatisfactory, Russia threatens armed intervention. The same Russian note is said to have made further demands "in favor of the Christian Raja", namely that the office of the ecumenical patriarch of the Greeks in Constantinople should no longer be conferred by the Porte, but made hereditary. (The English correspondent is not very satisfied with this request, as it...

A reader of the NY Times wrote a letter to the editor of the paper.  New York Times,  A Free Macedonia,  April 19, 1919 To the Editor of The New York Times: I beg your indulgence to insert a few remarks in the columns of your paper in connection with your editorial article of last Thursdays Times on "A Macedonian solution." Those of us, Macedonians, whose families have been scattered to the four winds as a result of the political unrest in the country are quite convinced that the Macedonian question has not been presented to the American public in the light of an untainted justice. Should Macedonia be subjected to another pre-war re'gime, it will be a bitter disappointment to hundreds of us who donned the khaki to defend the honor of the United States and her broad principles which the Allies ultimately adopted. May I not, then, present some gleanings which I have gathered at the feet of my professors here at Harvard, some of whom have gone to Par...

With its foundations almost two meters underground, the church dedicated to the Emperor Constantine and the Empress Helena in the Delcevo village of Razlovci, eastern Macedonia, nowadays is still proudly telling its story about the courageous rebels. Surrounded by a beautiful grassy yard, the church is emitting its uniqueness and triggers off the curiosity of guests to enter the church and feel the spirit of ktetors, to see with their eyes almost closed the shadows of the rebels and to hear their voice calling to fight for liberation against the Ottoman Empire. And, the heavy ancient wooden door is separating the interior of the church from its entire mystical world from the outside world. Church doors can be still opened with a 200-year-old key  The secret of the old church lies in a unique key, made two centuries ago by one of the ktetors of the church, Stoill Kovach. The key can open the old wooden door even today and it is carefully being handled by grandma Ele...

This thesis started as an attempt to answer the question, “what does the so-called ‘name issue’ mean to Macedonians?” It went on to analyze and portray the political, historical, legal and human rights aspects of the “name issue” between Greece and Macedonia and to depict its effects on the citizens of the Republic of Macedonia, as well as on Macedonians in Greece and beyond.  Along the way, it became a collection of the testimonies of the witnesses and victims of the root causes of the “name issue” and the repercussions thereof. It ended as a story about a people’s struggle for the right to their identity and language in the international political world order, as citizens of their own sovereign country – the Republic of Macedonia – and of that same people’s struggle for the right to their identity and language as a minority in neighboring Greece.  As such, this thesis is also an inquiry into the aspects of (or lack of) cultural rights and the right to an ident...

Macedonia prepares to celebrate August 2nd or Ilinden - the feast of St. Elijah - which marks two major historic events of national liberation - the 1903 Ilinden Uprising against the Ottoman Empire and the 1944 ASNOM assembly which set the foundation for Macedonian statehood. And 114 years after the first event, the debate continues on the decision to order the uprising, and whether it was ordered too soon, before the national forces were ready to mobilize. The uprising was smothered by Turkish forces, who captured the free city of Krusevo after 10 days. Historian Vanco Gjorgjiev says that the leaders of the VMRO organization were divided over the proposal. Dame Gruev believed it is time for a large scale confrontation with the Ottoman Empire, in a set piece battle, while Goce Delcev favored continued guerrilla warfare, away from the civilian centers, knowing that a failed uprising will lead to massacres of civilians. In Gjorgjiev's opinion, the order was simply inevitable...

The Hellenic army is burning all slavophonic villages and kills all slavophones it captures! It can be seen from the letters by Greek soldiers sent from the front the horror that the Macedonian population in the towns and villages under Greek occupation faced. The bloody collection of about hundred letters should have been delivered to the addresses through the Greek Army’s military post office, but after it was captured by the Bulgarian Army in Razlog on 14 July 1913, the letters were made public. It is a fearsome collection of authentic testimonies that were taken to the State Archives in Sofia in 1913, as Ljubomir Miletic PhD claims. In those letters, the Greek soldiers bragged to their relatives and friends that they hadn’t left a single Slavophone alive wherever they went, that they had raped all the Slavic Macedonian women and that they had burned all the Slavophonic villages. One hundred years ago After the Ottoman army left Macedonia, Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks wante...

It is interesting that in 1988 when it became certain that a new Macedonian State was about to be declared, from the collapse of the Yugoslav Federation, the name “Macedonia” became very popular in Greece. Greece failed in its attempts to extinguish the name of Macedonia for seventy-six years, the Greek State reversed its policy and made ‘Macedonia’ a very popular word in the Greek vocabulary. It even renamed its northern province (Greek occupied Macedonia) to Macedonia, claiming for historical reasons that it was the only authentic Macedonia which belonged to Greece. Also after all the years of claiming that only Greeks lived in Macedonia, Greek authorities almost overnight “invented” a new ethnicity called “Greek Macedonians”. This new ethnicity, it appears, is Macedonian but of Greek origin, descendants from the ancient Macedonians and rightful heirs to the Macedonian heritage. The present-day population of Greek occupied Macedonia is roughly 2 million people. App...

Macedonia marks 114 years since the death of Goce Delcev, the main leader of the Macedonian national liberation movement VMRO. Delcev was betrayed in the period ahead of the August 1903 Ilinden Uprising, while he was staying with his personal guard unit in the village of Banica near his native city of Kukush. After a battle with the Ottoman Turkish forces, Delcev ordered his men out of the village to spare the civilians, and was killed in combat. Born in 1872, he studied in Solun (Thessaloniki) and at the Sofia Military Academy, before becoming a leading organizer of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO). He lobbied tirelessly for domestic and international support to create an independent state on the territory of the Ottoman province of Macedonia, at a time when other provinces of the Empire were also becoming independent or joining the newly established Balkan countries. It is believed that arguments over the decision whether to start a large uprisin...

Macedonians - The contested majority By Nick Anastasovski BROAD CATEGORIES OF identification were commonplace in the Ottoman Balkans. A popular nineteenth–century term to describe Islamicised Macedonians was ‘Turks’. Adhering to the Ottoman concept of religion equating nationality the Ottomans increased the number of ‘Turks’ in Macedonia (in their own population data) to justify their continued rule. Similarly, labels were also broadly used when it came to the Christian population, and Christian Macedonians were also categorized as being a part of other ethnic groups. The central dispute in Macedonia at the end of the nineteenth century concerned the national identity of the Christian Macedonian ethnic element. Typically inhabiting countryside villages, they engaged in an agricultural lifestyle. Regarded by the bulk of commentators as constituting the majority of the population, Macedonians were identified by a number of differing labels. Living within a contested territo...