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Yugoslavia Macedonia
In its earliest history, Macedonia was ruled by the Bulgars
and the Byzantines, who began a long tradition of rivalry over
that territory. Slavs invaded and settled Byzantine Macedonia
late in the sixth century, and in A.D. 679 the Bulgars, a Turkic
steppe people, crossed into the Balkans and directly encountered
the Byzantine Empire. The Bulgars commingled with the more
numerous Slavs and eventually abandoned their Turkic mother
tongue in favor of the Slavic language. The Byzantines and
Bulgars ruled Macedonia alternately from the ninth to the
fourteenth century, when Stefan Dusan of Serbia conquered it and
made Skopje his capital. A local noble, Vukasin, called himself
king of Macedonia after the death of Dusan, but the Turks
annihilated Vukasin's forces in 1371 and assumed control of
Macedonia.
The beginning of Turkish rule meant centuries of subjugation
and cultural deprivation in Macedonia. The Turks destroyed the
Macedonian aristocracy, enserfed the Christian peasants, and
eventually amassed large estates and subjected the Slavic clergy
to the Greek patriarch of Constantinople. The living conditions
of the Macedonian Christians deteriorated in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries as Turkish power declined. Greek influence
increased, the Slavic liturgy was banned, and schools and
monasteries taught Greek language and culture. In 1777 the
Ottoman Empire eliminated the autocephalous Bulgarian Orthodox
Church and the archbishopric of Ohrid. Because of such actions,
the Slavic Macedonians began to despise Greek ecclesiastical
domination as much as Turkish political oppression.
In the nineteenth century, the Bulgars achieved renewed
national self-awareness, which influenced events in Macedonia.
The sultan granted the Bulgars ecclesiastical autonomy in 1870,
creating an independent Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Nationalist
Bulgarian clergymen and teachers soon founded schools in
Macedonia. Bulgarian activities in Macedonia alarmed the Serbian
and Greek governments and churches, and a bitter rivalry arose
over Macedonia among church factions and advocates of a Greater
Bulgaria, Greater Serbia, and Greater Greece. The 1878 RussoTurkish War drove the Turks from Bulgarian-populated lands, and
the Treaty of San Stefano (1878) created a large autonomous
Bulgaria that included Macedonia. The subsequent Treaty of Berlin
(1878), however, restored Macedonia to Turkey, and left the
embittered Bulgars with a much-diminished state.
The Bulgarian-Greek-Serbian rivalry for Macedonia escalated
in the 1890s, and nationalistic secret societies proliferated.
Macedonian refugees in Bulgaria founded the Supreme Committee for
Liberation of Macedonia, which favored Bulgarian annexation and
recruited its own military force to confront Turkish units and
rival nationalist groups in Macedonia. In 1896 Macedonians
founded the International Macedonian Revolutionary Organization
(IMRO), whose two main factions divided the region into military
districts, collected taxes, drafted recruits, and used tactics of
propaganda and terrorism.
A 1902 uprising in Macedonia provoked Turkish reprisals, and
in 1903 IMRO launched a widespread rebellion that the Turks could
not suppress for several months. After that event, the sultan
agreed to a Russian and Austrian reform scheme that divided
Macedonia into five zones and assigned British, French, Italian,
Austrian, and Russian troops to police them. Pro-Bulgarian and
pro-Greek groups continued to clash, while the Serbs intensified
their efforts in northern Macedonia. In 1908 the Young Turks, a
faction of Turkish officers who promised liberation and equality,
deposed the sultan. The Europeans withdrew their troops when
Serbs and Bulgars established friendly relations with the zealous
Turks. But the nationalist Young Turks began imposing centralized
rule and cultural restrictions, exacerbating Christian-Muslim
friction. Serbia and Bulgaria ended their differences in 1912 by
a treaty that defined their respective claims in Macedonia. A
month later, Bulgaria and Greece signed a similar agreement.
Data as of December 1990
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