[Ricardo Reis]

A stamp showing the map of Yugoslavia with the Southern province called 'Vardarska' as it was before the red partisan take over of Yugoslavia and the creation of the 'Socialist Republic of Macedonia' at the end of WW2




Artificial ethnogenosis - an ideology in the minority and its struggle to materialise


This quote from the 1950s after 5 years of Yugoslav Communist rule gives an idea of the ground still needed to be gained:
"In regard to their own national feelings, all that can safely be said is that during the last eighty years many more Slav Macedonians seem to have considered themselves Bulgarian, or closely linked to Bulgaria, than have considered themselves Serbian, or closely linked to Serbia (or Yugoslavia). Only the people of the Skoplje region, in the north west, have ever shown much tendency to regard themselves as Serbs. The feeling of being Macedonians, and nothig but Macedonians, seems to be a sentiment of fairly recent growth, and even today is not very deep-rooted."
Elisabeth Barker, "Macedonia, its place in Balkan power politics", (originally published in 1950 by the Royal Institute of International Affairs), p.10




"Since they were closely related to both Bulgars and Serbs and had, moreover, in the past been usually incorporated in either the Bulgar or Serb state, they inevitably became the object of both Bulgar and Serb aspirations and an apple of discord between these rival nationalities. As an oppressed people on an exceedingly primitive level, the Macedonian Slavs had as late as the congress of Berlin exhibited no perceptible national consciousness of their own. It was therefore impossible to foretell in what direction they would lean when their awakening came; in fact, so indeterminate was the situation that under favorable circumstances they might even develop ther own peculiar Macedonian consciousness."
[Ferdinand Schevill, "A History of the Balkans", p.432]