1

PREPRINT. To appear in Kamusella, Tomasz & Nomachi, Motoki & Gibson,

Catherine (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and

Borders.

Conflicting Nationalist Discourses

in the Balkan Slavic Language Area Jouko Lindstedt (University of Helsinki)

The Balkan Slavic language area forms the south-eastern part of the

South Slavic dialect continuum. This area consists of the Bulgarian and

Macedonian languages and the south-eastern dialects of Serbian (the

Torlak or Prizren-Timok dialects). As all the Balkan Slavic dialects are part

of the Balkan linguistic area,1 the external boundaries of the Balkan Slavic

area can be defined in terms of certain structural features, which are

referred to as Balkanisms. The important Balkanisms in Balkan Slavic are

the loss of the infinitive, the loss of case declension, and the use of

enclitic definite articles. In addition to the Balkan Slavic languages, the

Balkan linguistic area encompasses the Balkan Romance languages,

Greek, Albanian, and the Vlax and Balkan dialects of Romani. (Asenova

2002; Lindstedt 2000)

The external boundary of Balkan Slavic is not clearly delineated; as

is usual in linguistic geography, there are transitional dialects between the

Torlak and other Serbian dialects. (Miloradović and Greenberg 2001)

However, more problematic is the internal division of Balkan Slavic into

different languages. This division is a matter of social convention that was

established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which remains

a point of contention among the different nationalist discourses. In this

debate, linguistic arguments are routinely proposed. However, choosing

among the different structural features that are used to characterise

languages, and the weight that is assigned to such features, invariably

1 A linguistic area or Sprachbund (‘linguistic league’) was first defined by Trubetzkoy (1928). The term refers to a group of at least three contiguous languages that have common convergent features in their grammar and phonology that are due to their prolonged contact, but not to their possible genetic relation.

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involves a rather arbitrary decision that tends to be motivated by

nationalist agendas. This chapter presents a discussion of the conflicting

linguistic discourses in the Balkan Slavic area, their historical and

nationalist backgrounds, and some possible ways of dismantling them.

The Discourses of Domestic Nationalism and Cross-Border

Nationalism

In relation to a nation-state, nationalism comes in two varieties. The first

is domestic nationalism, which aims at creating an ethnically and

linguistically homogenous state by either the voluntary or forced

assimilation of various minorities. The second is cross-border nationalism,

which declares that the nation-state should have a special interest in

some of the regions and people across its borders owing to their ethnic

and historical connections with the state-forming ethnic group. The

strongest form of cross-border nationalism is irredentism. This demands

the outright annexation of some regions of a neighbouring state based on

factors that are ethnic, linguistic, or historic. For instance, Greek domestic

nationalism may be reflected in the relations of the Greek state or its

majority population to the Slavic, Turkish, Romani, or Aromanian

minorities of the country. In contrast, Greek cross-border nationalism

may concern the Greek minority in Albania, or the Greek-speaking

Sarakatsani2 in Bulgaria and Macedonia.

Cross-border nationalism is common in the Balkans. I have heard

people from more than one Balkan country claim, ‘ours is the sole country

in the Balkans that is surrounded only by people of the same nationality

everywhere across its borders.’ Various linguistic versions of cross-border

nationalism also manifest themselves in the Balkan Slavic area. The

prevailing opinion among scholars and non-academics in Bulgaria is that

all of Balkan Slavic is linguistically only Bulgarian. This means that there

2 A Greek-speaking pastoral ethnic group (also known as karakachani in some Slavic languages) living in several Balkan countries. (Wardle 2003)

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is no Macedonian language. Furthermore, what Serbian dialectologists

consider to be south-eastern Serbian dialects are also at least structurally

Bulgarian, although there is some vagueness regarding the present ethnic

affiliation of the speakers of those dialects in Serbia. In addition, the

Macedonian standard language is referred to as ‘a regional standard of

Bulgarian’ and is compared to the literary language of the small Catholic

Bulgarian minority (Paulicians) living in Banat and Transylvania.

By identifying Balkan Slavic with the Bulgarian language, Bulgarian

scholars clearly hold a minority position in Slavic studies. This is evident

graphically on the pages of the multi-volume Slavic Linguistic Atlas, a

major international project that has been in progress for nearly half a

century. (OLA 2014) This Atlas does not delimit languages – because it is

not necessary in dialectology – but during the initial stage of the project,

Bulgarian scholars could not agree with their Macedonian colleagues as to

which dialects each of the two teams should investigate (among the

Slavic minority of northern Greece, for instance). As a result, Bulgaria

withdrew from the project and on all the first maps of the Atlas, Bulgaria

appears as a completely white area. It was only at the Kraków meeting in

2005 that the Bulgarians returned to the International Commission of the

Atlas. (Protokol 2005)

Despite renewed contacts with the Slavic Linguistic Atlas, official

Bulgarian dialectology has not changed its position on the Bulgarian

language area. For instance, the most recent general dialect atlas of

Bulgarian, Bŭlgarski dialekten atlas (BDA 2002), still covers the whole

Republic of Macedonia and parts of Serbia (to the west of Niš), Albania,

Greece, Turkey, and Romania. While there is no doubt that Slavic dialects

are either currently spoken, or have been spoken in the recent past in all

these areas, it is highly controversial to label them all as indistinctively

‘Bulgarian.’ The area of Bulgarian in the atlas is delimited by ten

structural features. (BDA 2002: 55) This is a quasi-objective approach

that does not address the question of how the features have been

selected nor why it is precisely these features that can be used as ethnic

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markers. As a matter of fact, the features chosen are predominantly

typical Balkanisms, so they are bound to equate Bulgarian with all of

Balkan Slavic.

Of course, the definition of what is ‘Bulgarian’ originates from

outside linguistics and the dialect maps merely follow this preconceived

notion. But this definition has a cost in terms of scientific accuracy. What

the first dialect map in the atlas (BDA 2002: 55) seems to claim is that

the isoglosses of these ten defining structural features coincide

completely. In other words, only one outer boundary of the Bulgarian

language area is found on the map, and no separate maps exist for any of

these language-defining features. Such a compact bundle of ten

isoglosses would be truly sensational in linguistic geography, but it seems

highly unlikely that this bundle reflects the actual dialect data.

As for Macedonian dialectology, it does not lay claim to any Serbian

territory, but it considers the dialects of south-western Bulgaria to be

Macedonian, despite the lack of any widespread Macedonian national

consciousness in that area. The standard map is provided by Vidoeski.

(1998: 32) It would be futile to tell an ordinary citizen of the Macedonian

capital, Skopje, that they do not realise that they are actually speaking

Bulgarian. It would be equally pointless to tell citizens of the south-

western Bulgarian town of Blagoevgrad that they (or at least their

compatriots in the surrounding countryside) do not ‘really’ speak

Bulgarian, but Macedonian. In other words, regardless of the structural

and linguistic arguments put forth by a majority of Bulgarian

dialectologists, as well as by their Macedonian counterparts, they are

ignoring one, essential fact – that the present linguistic identities of the

speakers themselves in various regions do not always correspond to the

prevailing nationalist discourses.

5

The Legacy of the Exarchate

If Bulgarian dialectologists follow a pre-established notion of the outer

boundaries of ‘Bulgarianness,’ where does this presupposition come from?

As argued by Hranova, (2005: 307ff) the boundaries of the ‘Bulgarian

nation’ are often defined in Bulgarian history textbooks as the farthest

borders of the medieval Bulgarian state. According to this historical

narrative, it was the conquests of the most powerful Bulgarian rulers that

separated the Bulgarians from the massive, indefinite ‘Slavic sea’ of

people, so that ‘a Bulgarian’ came to refer to ‘a Slav from the Balkan

Peninsula.’

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman

Empire had no administrative unit that could have defined the borders of

the emerging Bulgarian nation. As a consequence, the activists of the

Bulgarian national revival shifted their attention to medieval history to

defend their cause. Nevertheless, the borders of those medieval tsardoms

had already been shifting and were therefore unreliable as an actual basis

for the exact definition of the boundaries of ‘Bulgarianness.’

According to Benedict Anderson, (2006: 163 ff) nations are defined

by three institutions: the census, map, and museum. I maintain that the

historical turning point in the Bulgarian case was the founding of the

Bulgarian Exarchate. This was established by Sultan Abdülaziz of the

Ottoman Empire in 1870 as a Bulgarian church organisation, breaking

with the old administrative practice of having all Orthodox Christians of

the Empire in the same millet (confessional community) led by the

Patriarch of Constantinople. The Exarchate was the first modern Bulgarian

national institution that could be placed on a map, and it assumed the

roles of both the ‘map’ and ‘census’. (The first genuine museums were

established only in independent Bulgaria approximately twenty years

later.) Local communities (obshtini) were partly allowed to decide for

themselves whether to join the Exarchate or to remain in the Patriarch-

led church. This resembled a collective census that distinguished those

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that espoused nascent Bulgarian national consciousness from other

Orthodox Christians. (Nikov 1971: 222–254; Istoriia 2004: 651) In this

process, the boundaries of the Bulgarian language and ethnicity were

defined, and they have not essentially changed thereafter in the popular

consciousness, although an independent country with such wide borders

never came into existence.

It is instructive to compare the maps and territorial definitions of

the Exarchate (IB6: 158–159) with modern dialect maps. The main link

between the Exarchate borders and the Bulgarian dialectological tradition

of today is the map of the Bulgarian language area in Stefan Mladenov’s

fundamental work, Geschichte der bulgarischen Sprache (1929).

Mladenov’s map is still adopted as the point of departure in most work on

Bulgarian dialects. (Todor Boiadzhiev, p.c.) A closer reading of Mladenov’s

text (1929: 1–10) reveals, however, that he constantly vacillated

between the national essentialism that was required by politics and the

relativism that was taught by the best traditions of linguistic geography.

The establishment of a Bulgarian national church organisation in 1870–

1872 soon caused a schism in the Orthodox Church, because the

Patriarch-led church administration did not accept the secession of the

Bulgarian Exarchate. Macedonia especially witnessed a particularly bitter

strife between the ‘patriarchists’ and the ‘exarchists,’ and the dividing line

did not always follow the ethnic or linguistic identity of the faithful. As

pointed out by Lory, (2005: 181) this schism alienated a part of the

Macedonian Slavs from the Bulgarian national movement. In addition,

some of the educated Slavs preferred the Romaic3 identity – that is to

say, they wanted to remain part of the Greek-speaking civilisation without

necessarily adopting a Greek ethnic identity. (Detrez 2008; Lindstedt

2012)

3 In the Byzantine Empire, and later in the Ottoman Empire before the rise of the Greek national movement, Orthodox Christians with Greek as their cultural (but not necessarily native) language referred to themselves as ‘Romans.’ The ethnic ‘Hellenic’ identity was a later construct.

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During this time, there was also one very visible linguistic difference

between Bulgaria and part of Macedonia: the South Macedonian Slavs,

even the priests, were no longer familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet, but

resorted instead to using Greek letters when writing in their mother

tongue. (Lindstedt 2008b: 395–396) As an example, several Slavic

Gospel translations that were written in Greek letters in Macedonia have

been preserved. The oldest of them is the Konikovo Gospel, dating back

to the late eighteenth or to the early nineteenth century. This manuscript

contains parallel Sunday Gospel texts both in the Greek vernacular and in

the Macedonian Slavic vernacular. (Lindstedt et al 2008)

Current Bulgarian public discourse rarely explicitly invokes the

territorial dimension of the Exarchate; instead, the term used to refer to

the notion of a Greater Bulgaria is ‘San Stefano Bulgaria’ (sanstefanska

Bŭlgariia). Nonetheless, the geographical extension is approximately the

same. According to the Preliminary Treaty of San Stefano, which ended

the Russo-Turkish War in 1878, the new Principality of Bulgaria was to

acquire the territory of the Exarchate. The main exception was the

Morava Valley with the towns of Niš and Leskovac, which was to be ceded

to Serbia as a form of compensation for its war efforts. (Rajchevski 2008:

50–51) However, at the Berlin Congress of the same year, a much

smaller Bulgaria was created. (IB6: 468–469; Magocsi 2002: map 26b)

One important political figure supported both the Exarchate and the San

Stefano borders, Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignat’ev (1832–1908), who

served as the Russian ambassador to Istanbul from 1864 to 1877. As a

representative of the greatest Slavic and Orthodox state of that time,

Ignat’ev lobbied the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman government) to

establish a Bulgarian national church in the Ottoman Empire. He also

worked for the international recognition of the Exarchate borders as

ethnic boundaries in the Istanbul Conference of diplomats in 1876–1877.4

4 The Istanbul Conference in 1876–1877 was an attempt by both British and Russian diplomats to persuade Sultan Abdülhamid II to grant autonomy to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria. (Hupchick 2002: 260–262)

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Later, Ignat’ev was instrumental in negotiating the San Stefano Treaty on

the basis of the Exarchate borders – but with the aforementioned

concession to Serbia in the Morava Valley. (IB6: 428–431; Istoriia 2004:

651–663, 717–718)

Although a San Stefano Bulgaria was never established, the

territory of the Exarchate remained the mental map of the Bulgarian

nation for decades to come, and it is still reproduced in modern dialect

maps. It is important to note that in the Morava Valley, those maps follow

the Exarchate borders, not the San Stefano borders. When Bulgaria

gained autonomy in 1878 and full independence three decades later, a

long dispute arose between Serbian and Bulgarian scholars over the

linguistic status of the dialects on both sides of the state border, between

the rivers Iskŭr, Timok, and Morava. The famous Serbian dialectologist

Aleksandar Belić (1905, e.g. pp LXXXIV–LXXXV) explained that the

common Balkanisms of the easternmost Serbian dialects and Bulgarian

were not essential to defining which language they represented. This was

because Balkanisms were due to external influences on Slavic and did not

represent the authentic internal development of these dialects. Bulgarian

scholars countered with other arguments. Needless to say, no objective

linguistic arguments could be found for this region, either; the language

boundary was to be defined by the political boundary.

According to the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine (1919), which marked

the end of World War I for Bulgaria, the country had to cede some of its

western regions to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (after

1929, Yugoslavia). Those South Slavs in the Morava Valley who had been

made Serbian citizens after the Berlin Congress of 1878 had become

ethnic Serbs, but those who were made Serbian citizens now in 1919

were to become the Bulgarian minority of Serbia that exists today. This

means that approximately forty years were sufficient to construct a

completely new ethnic boundary. It was only after World War II that the

father of modern Bulgarian dialectology, Stojko Stojkov, formulated the

principle of the relative character of the Serbian/Bulgarian boundary as

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well as other similar boundaries in the Slavic world. (Stojkov 2002

[1968]: 76–77) Stojkov used the state boundary in his dialectological

studies. This was a pragmatic move that was not approved by all of his

followers.

The main external goal of newly independent Bulgaria was to

acquire Macedonia. This was depicted as re-acquiring Macedonia, because

it had been included within the chimerical San Stefano borders that

resurrected the lost grandeur of the mediaeval Bulgarian Empire.

(Hranova 2005: 309) In all wars of the twentieth century – the Balkan

Wars of 1912–13, World Wars I and II – Bulgaria’s goal was to annex

Macedonia, and all these wars ended in disaster for Bulgaria.

The part of Macedonia acquired by Serbia in the Balkan Wars

(Vardar Macedonia) became one of the republics of Yugoslavia after World

War II, when Yugoslavia was reconstituted as a federal state. The

Macedonian standard language, which had a history of advocates dating

back to the late nineteenth century, finally acquired an official status in

1944. Before the split between Tito and Stalin in 1948, this new standard

language was also taught for one school year (1947–1948) in the schools

of the Pirin region of Bulgaria. This was in preparation for a future

Communist South Slav Federation where all parts of Macedonia were to

be united. The new Macedonian standard was not widely adopted by the

local population, which had been using the Bulgarian standard for several

genarations. (Marinov 2009: 481–492; Istoriia 2009: 381–387) As a

consequence, the recognition of a Macedonian minority in Bulgaria came

to be associated with Stalinism, not with liberal politics.

The Locked Linguistic Conflict

After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria was the first country to

recognise the independence of Macedonia in 1991. However, officially

Bulgaria has yet to acknowledge the Macedonian ethnic and linguistic

identity. In fact, post-Communist politicians have accused their

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Communist predecessors not of alienating Macedonians from Bulgarians

with their nationalism, but on the contrary, of ‘national nihilism,’ meaning

harbouring complacency toward Macedonian identity-building. In short,

what is at stake is excessive national symbolism and common history. As

recently noted by the historian Raymond Detrez (2009), ‘in relation to

Macedonia, Bulgarians still have a hangover.’

One of the reasons for the intransigence of Bulgaria’s official

attitude is the prestige of Old Church Slavonic, the Slavs’ first written

language created by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius in the ninth century

CE. This is the starting point of Slavic literary culture and the classical

language of Slavic studies. The official Bulgarian position is that this

language should properly be called ‘Old Bulgarian’ because Cyril and

Methodius based it primarily upon the Slavic dialects around the city of

Thessaloniki, and because it first acquired official status in the Tsardom of

Bulgaria (which Cyril and Methodius themselves never visited, as far as

we know). The problem is that the Slavic dialects around Thessaloniki, as

well as those in the literary centre of Ohrid in the south-western part of

the Tsardom, would currently be regarded as Macedonian rather than

Bulgarian. However, for Cyril and Methodius, neither Bulgarian nor

Macedonian were considered to be separate languages. Recognising

Macedonian as a separate language might therefore mean that Bulgarian

linguists would also have to abandon ‘Old Bulgarian’ as a term – with all

the scholarly prestige associated with it.

The majority of Bulgarian linguists define the Macedonian standard

language as a ‘regional standard’ of Bulgarian, having a status similar to

the written language of the Catholic Bulgarian minority in Romanian

Banat. (for example, see Georgiev & al., eds., 1986: 307–315) This

definition implies that the Macedonian standard has a lower status than

the Bulgarian standard, which is never defined as ‘regional’ but rather as

‘national.’ Moreover, even the definition of Macedonian as a ‘regional

standard’ is not observed in Bulgarian linguistic practice. For instance,

learning the structure of the Macedonian standard is not part of the

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curriculum of the students of Bulgarian language at Bulgarian universities,

though one could suppose that a specialist in a language should know

something about all of its codifications. Widely known Macedonian words

that occur in the Bulgarian scholarly editions of the nineteenth-century

authors from Macedonia are always labelled as ‘dialectal’ and

consequently non-standard.

It is interesting that in the Bŭlgarski dialekten atlas (Bulgarian

Dialect Atlas) that has been criticised above, the first real isogloss map,

namely that of the reflexes of the Common Slavic strong back yer5 sound,

could easily be used to delimit the historical area of the Macedonian

language from Bulgarian, if that delimitation were politically possible.

(BDA 2002: 59) The isogloss in question is actually older than the ones

that are cited as defining the Bulgarian language in the atlas. Even Stefan

Mladenov (1929: 101–102) noted that Bulgarian is the only Slavic

language divided internally by the back yer isogloss. Of course, he did not

conclude from this that what he referred to as Bulgarian could, in fact, be

considered to be two distinct languages.

The Bulgarian linguists are aware of the fact that the yer isogloss

could be used, and is used, to delimit Macedonian from Bulgarian on

structural grounds. Their standard answer is that this isogloss does not

fully coincide with the proposed language boundary. (Georgiev & al., eds.

1986: 311–312) However, the requirement that an important isogloss

should precisely coincide with a proposed language boundary would make

it impossible to draw boundaries with closely related languages in

general, not only in the Slavic group, but also in other genealogically

defined language groups. Although Bulgarian linguists consider the unity

of the Bulgarian language to be a ‘genuine scientific truth,’ (op.cit.: 310)

5 In Slavic historical linguistics, the two yers are the Proto-Slavic reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European short /i/ vowel (the front yer) and the short /u/ vowel (the back yer). In a ‘weak position,’ the yers disappeared in all Slavic languages, whereas those standing in a ‘strong position’ (called the strong yers) became other vowels – but different vowels depending on the language.

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the only truth in these types of questions is in fact the relativity and social

character of any proposed criteria.

The Minorities Caught Between

Several linguistic minorities who speak Balkan Slavic have been

particularly targeted by the nationalist discourses of Bulgaria and

Macedonia. For example, the Macedonian minority in Bulgaria is

supported by the cross-border nationalism of Macedonia, whereas the

domestic nationalism of Bulgaria denies its existence. For the Bulgarian

minority in Macedonia, the reverse is true: Macedonian domestic

nationalism does not accept the existence of this minority, whereas

Bulgarian cross-border nationalism strongly supports it. Finally, as for the

speakers of the Balkan Slavic dialects in other Balkan countries, both

Bulgarian and Macedonian cross-border nationalist discourses lay claim to

most of these minorities.

The main political organisation of the Macedonians in Bulgaria is the

United Macedonian Organisation OMO ‘Ilinden’ – PIRIN.6 (OMO 2014;

Narodna volja 2014) This organisation has succeeded in attracting the

support of only a small number of the inhabitants of Pirin Macedonia in

south-western Bulgaria. Declaring a Macedonian identity offers few, if

any, benefits in Bulgaria, but is met with ridicule or overt hostility in the

dominant public discourse. Because the OMO ‘Ilinden’ – PIRIN

organisation is allegedly a separatist group, the Bulgarian authorities have

repeatedly denied it an official registration under various pretexts. On 21

October 2005, and again on 18 October 2011, the European Court of

Human Rights convicted Bulgaria of violating the freedom of assembly

6 The acronym OMO stands for Obedinena makedonska organizatsiia, the ‘United Macedonian Organisation’; ‘Ilinden’ refers to the Macedonian Ilinden (Elijah’s day) uprising against the Ottomans in 1903; PIRIN refers to the Pirin Mountains, but is also an acronym for Partiia za ikonomicheskoto razvitie i integratsiia na naselenieto ‘Party for the Economic Development and Integration of the Population.’

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and association with respect to the Macedonians’ organisation. (ECHR

2011a; see also BHC 2005)

On the other side of the state border, the Macedonian ‘citizens with

Bulgarian national consciousness’ founded an association called RADKO

(RADKO 2014). The name of this association, though always written in

capital letters, is derived from the nom de guerre ‘Radko’ of Ivan Mihajlov

(1896–1990), a leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary

Organisation (IMRO). Under Mihajlov’s leadership in the 1920s and 1930s,

IMRO became a terrorist organisation that fought against the Serbian

administration in Vardar Macedonia. (Micheva 2009) In 2009, the

European Court of Human Rights convicted the Republic of Macedonia of

violating the freedom of assembly and association, because its

Constitutional Court had banned the RADKO organisation in 2001. (ECHR

2011b)

Bulgaria and Macedonia have thus both been convicted of banning

an organisation of citizens that declares an ethnic identity that is linked to

the other country, and both states continue to defy the verdicts of the

European Court of Human Rights in this respect. However, regarding the

arguments used, these two cases are not fully symmetrical. The dominant

Bulgarian discourse maintains that a Macedonian ethnicity simply does

not exist as distinct from Bulgarian, anywhere in the world, and thus the

OMO ‘Ilinden’ – PIRIN cannot represent a Macedonian minority in

Bulgaria.7 In contrast, the dominant discourse in the Republic of

Macedonia merely maintains that no Bulgarian minority exists in

Macedonia. Finally, the members of RADKO maintain that all Macedonians

are Bulgarians and that they should recognise this reality.

Several endangered or even moribund Balkan Slavic dialects are

spoken in other Balkan countries: Albania, Kosovo, Greece, Serbia, and 7 Article 11 (4) of the Bulgarian Constitution stipulates that ‘there shall be no political parties on ethnic, racial or religious lines,’ but it is difficult for the Bulgarian authorities to enforce this prohibition with respect to the OMO. First, ‘Macedonian’ is not officially acknowledged as an ethnic designation; second, one major Bulgarian party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, has not been banned, even though it is generally seen as representing the Turkish minority in the country.

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Romania. (Asenova et al 2007) In some regions, identifying their

speakers as Bulgarians or Macedonians is quite straightforward; in others,

the speakers face several alternatives, such as identifying themselves as

being either Bulgarian or Macedonian or, regardless of their native

languages, as members of the main nationality of their country. For

Muslim Slavs, an additional alternative is to consider their primary identity

to be defined in terms of local religious and linguistic designations (such

as Goran, Torbesh, or Pomak).

The Slavs of Greek Macedonia have been variously labelled as

‘Bulgarians,’ ‘Macedonians,’ ‘Slavo-Macedonians,’ and ‘Slavophone

Greeks.’ These Slavs have no official minority status in Greece, and it is

difficult to assess their number. (Karakasidou 1997; 2002) They have a

political party of their own, called ‘Rainbow’ (Mac. Vinožito, Gr. Ouránio

Tóxo). (Rainbow 2014; Nova zora 2014). This political party promotes a

Slavic Macedonian identity, which now seems to prevail among this

minority.

In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights convicted Greece of

violating the freedom of assembly and association with respect to the

Rainbow party. This occurred because the local authorities of Florina,

where the party headquarters is situated, had ‘contributed through their

conduct to arousing the hostile sentiment of a section of the population’

against the party, and the local police had refused to protect the party

members when a mob demolished the party headquarters. (ECHR 2011c)

Yet unlike its counterpart in Bulgaria, the Rainbow party has not been

denied official registration and it has been able to participate in elections,

resulting in a turnout of approximately 5,000 votes. (Rainbow (political

party) 2014)

Greek Thrace has a Slavic-speaking Muslim minority called the

Pomaks. The Thracian Muslims are an officially recognised religious

minority in Greece, but ethnically and linguistically, this minority includes

Turks, Pomaks, and Roma. The Pomaks’ confessional solidarity with the

Turks seems to be stronger than any cross-border linguistic solidarity with

15

the Bulgarians. Moreover, attempts to create a local Pomak standard

language that is written in Greek letters have not been very successful.

(Steinke 2007; Voss 2007) The Pomaks live in a trilingual situation in

which both Greek and Turkish are more prestigious than their native

language. (Adamou 2012)

The Slavic minority in the regions of Mala Prespa in Albania had a

recognised minority status in Communist Albania, although they had little

contact with the neighbouring Republic of Macedonia in Yugoslavia. The

Macedonian standard language was, and still is, taught in some primary

schools in Mala Prespa, and the contact with Macedonia is currently

intense. (Steinke & Ylli 2007; Macedonian Alliance 2014) The Muslim

Slavs who live in Golo Brdo (Golloborda) in Albania did not have, and still

do not have, a recognised minority status. They are reported by Novik

(2013) to not possess a well-defined ethnic identity that would closely

connect them to the Macedonians, nor to the Bulgarians (see also Steinke

& Ylli 2008). All the Slavic minorities in Albania are targeted by Bulgarian

cross-border nationalism, although Bulgaria and Albania do not share a

border. It is interesting to note that the English Wikipedia articles entitled

‘Macedonians of Albania’ and ‘Bulgarians in Albania’ in fact refer to the

very same people. (Macedonians of Albania 2014; Bulgarians in Albania

2014) As a member of the European Union, Bulgaria can offer these

minorities more benefits than the less affluent Macedonia. (Novik 2013:

179)

A Slavic-speaking Muslim minority living in the Gora region is

divided among three countries: Albania, (Steinke & Ylli 2010) Kosovo, and

Macedonia. One of the six stars in the flag of Kosovo represents these

Gorani (the other five stars stand for the Albanians, Serbs, Turks, Roma –

including the Ashkali and ‘Egyptians’ – and Bosniaks). As for their

language, the Gorani have been claimed to be Serbs (Torlak dialect

speakers), Macedonians, or Bulgarians. Their self-designations include

gorani or goranci ‘the inhabitants of Gora (Highland)’ and našinci ‘our

people.’ Sometimes they are also included in the group of Torbeshi, which

16

is a general name for Macedonian-speaking Muslims, whereas the

Bulgarian Wikipedia oddly characterises this minority as Pomaks,

apparently because that would link them to the Bulgarian-speaking

Muslims in Bulgaria. (Pomatsi 2014)

There are many Gorani websites on the internet; some present their

own Islamic traditions and connect these to the Bosnian Islam, while

others link the traditions to Serbian folk culture. There are also pages that

identify the Gorani with the Bulgarians. Most of these web addresses can

be found in the English Wikipedia article entitled ‘Gorani people’. (Gorani

people 2014)

The interest that Bulgaria takes in Gora may seem surprising, given

the fact that Bulgaria does not border on the region and is not a

predominantly Islamic country. One example of this interest is the

valuable 1,384-page dictionary of the ‘goranski (nashinski) language’ by

Nazif Dokle (2007), published by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. This

dictionary is written in the Albanian orthography and the headwords are

explained in Albanian. But the dictionary presents the dialect as belonging

to the Bulgarian language, which seems to have been a sufficient reason

for the Academy to finance the publication. This can be interpreted as

being a type of scholarly pincer movement. In other words, if the dialect

spoken by the Gorani is Bulgarian, it follows that all Macedonian dialects

that are spoken between Bulgaria and Gora must likewise be Bulgarian.

The Gorani are consequently a target of both Great Bulgarian and Great

Serbian aspirations, although this occurs only on the level of language

and folklore.

Analysing and Dismantling Nationalist Discourses

The first of Benedict Anderson’s ‘three paradoxes of nationalism’ is ‘[t]he

objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective

antiquity in the eyes of nationalists.’ (2006: 5) Bulgarian historians

readily mention the recentness of any clear manifestations of a distinct

17

Slavic Macedonian ethnic identity. Their Macedonian counterparts must

significantly strain their historical narrative to distinguish the Macedonians

in the Middle Ages, when no distinction was made between Macedonians

and Bulgarians. (Brunnbauer 2005) On the other hand, however, another

constructed historical narrative is a direct line from the mediaeval

tsardoms to the Bulgaria of today.

Sampimon’s (2006) monograph, Becoming Bulgarian, reveals how

the Bulgarian national identity was consciously constructed in the course

of the nineteenth century, which was a process that was slower than the

forming of the Serbian, Romanian, and Greek (or Hellenic, as opposed to

Romaic [cf Detrez 2008]) identities. If we date the initial stage of the

construction of the Bulgarian national identity to the late eighteenth

century, and that of the Macedonian identity to the late nineteenth

century,8 we cannot assume this difference of one hundred years to be a

distinction between a ‘real’ and a ‘false’ identity. It is of course easy to

imagine a past in which the Macedonians would have adopted the

Bulgarian identity, especially if the San Stefano borders would have been

established. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the actual history was

of the wrong type, as the dominant discourse in Bulgaria maintains.

A peculiar feature of the Bulgarian cross-border linguistic

nationalism is that the overwhelming majority of its targets do not define

themselves as Bulgarians, but as Macedonians, Slavophone Greeks,

Pomaks, Torbeshi, Gorani, Serbs, etc. To a lesser extent, a similar

argument applies to the Macedonian cross-border nationalism in Pirin

Macedonia, which is the Blagoevgrad region in Bulgaria, where a vast

majority of the inhabitants identify themselves as being Bulgarians, not

Macedonians.

8 See Friedman (2003: 261–264). It is difficult to acquire an overview of what the representatives of the emerging Macedonian intelligentsia actually thought and wrote about the Macedonian identity in the nineteenth century. This is probably because any declarations of Macedonian identity at that time would have occurred too early for those Bulgarian historians who would now want to present Macedonia as Tito’s creation, and too late for those Macedonian historians who would want to construct a significantly longer past for their nation.

18

One important question is how possible it is to maintain a discourse

in which a large group of people is attributed a specific identity even when

they themselves deny it. I propose that this is made possible by three

distinct fallacies: the essentialist fallacy, the primordialist fallacy, and the

fallacy of objective language boundaries.

Firstly, the essentialist fallacy assumes that an identity is based on

the objectively observable properties of people, and can therefore be

contrary to what they say and think themselves. In reality, ethnolinguistic

identities are social constructs and, at the boundaries that are ethnic,

linguistic or cultural, these identities are even a matter of choice. This is

not to deny that people’s identities are restricted by the objective social

context and by other circumstances. For example, having been born in

Finland, I cannot simply decide to become Japanese.9 But my Finnish

identity is a social construct that I and my fellow citizens support, and it

would be absurd to claim that we Finns would somehow represent some

other identity that we ourselves are not aware of. Nevertheless, this is

precisely the type of claim that is told to the Macedonians. Social

constructs (such as the value of money) exist because people are aware

of them and support them in their behaviour (for example, the exchange

of goods for money).

Secondly, the primordialist fallacy is linked to Anderson’s first

paradox of nationalism that was mentioned above. Primordialism

considers that for a nation to exist, a long historical continuity and

distinctness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition. Assuming it to

be a sufficient condition, the prevailing Bulgarian discourse assumes that

because Bulgarians and Macedonians once formed a single ethnic group

for centuries, they must continue to be a single group. On the other hand,

assuming a long historical continuity as a necessary condition, many

Macedonian historians have attempted to construct a distinct Macedonian

9 Nonetheless, in principle this road is not closed for me, as is demonstrated by the example of the Finnish-born Marutei Tsurunen (in Finnish: Martti Turunen), a member of the Diet of Japan, who consciously decided to become Japanese having arrived in the country at the age of 27. (Marutei Tsurunen 2014)

19

identity that existed prior to the Middle Ages. We can therefore conclude

that the Bulgarian nationalist discourse has problems with the present,

while its Macedonian counterpart has problems with the past, but they are

both erroneous to assume that present-day national and linguistic

identities can be, and must be, projected into the past. (Brunnbauer

2005; Detrez 2009; Hranova 2005; Lory 2005)

It is interesting to note that Blaže Koneski (1921–1993), who was

the key figure in establishing the Modern Macedonian standard language

after World War II, and who was also instrumental in creating its

belletristic tradition, seems not to have been a pure primordialist. In his

essay, ‘The Macedonian Language in the Context of the Development of

Slavic Literary Languages,’ (1968) Koneski discusses the ‘historical rights’

of the Macedonians to the mediaeval Ohrid Literary School, but he does

not hesitate to refer to Macedonians as a ‘young nation.’ (Koneski 1968:

34) What he defends, however, is their right to envision a long historical

tradition as culminating in the establishment of the Macedonian nation.

Perhaps this development was unavoidable in Koneski’s view, but it does

not necessarily involve a long, continuing existence of that nation as an

unchanging historical entity.

Thirdly, and finally, the fallacy of objective language boundaries

assumes that every language is defined by an objective set of features

that are shared by all of its dialects. For this reason, the ‘unity of

language X in all of its dialects’ is an expression that can be found in the

dialectological studies of more than one Slavic language. As a

consequence, certain Balkan Slavic linguistic features are seen as

objectively defining the boundaries of the Bulgarian language, even

though the choice of particular features is always subjective.

Furthermore, presenting those features as a compact bundle of isoglosses

may distort the actual linguistic evidence on the ground. To return to

Koneski, he again seems to have been more realistic when he stated, ‘the

M[acedonian] dialects have been a part of a continuum with the

20

S[er]b[ian] and B[ul]g[arian] dialects for so long, that today it is not

possible to draw distinct boundaries between them.’ (1983: 2)

Even for a foreign linguist, the questions of language boundaries

and linguistic identities may become a question of research ethics.

(Lindstedt 2008a) Nonetheless, a linguist should become aware that

conflicts among nationalist discourses cannot be resolved by linguistic

arguments alone, but must also take into account the self-identification of

the speakers. Moreover, the myth of the objectivity of structural and

dialectological features and isoglosses should be dismantled.

Bulgaria and Macedonia also compete on symbolic levels other than

that of language. In Sofia, the University is named after St Clement of

Ohrid, and the National Library after St Cyril and St Methodius. In the

Macedonian capital of Skopje, the reverse occurs: the city has a ‘Sts Cyril

and Methodius’ University and ‘St Clement of Ohrid’ National and

University Library. The Macedonians do not approve of the Bulgarians’

claiming St Clement as a Bulgarian saint and writer. In contrast, the

Bulgarians reject the Macedonians’ opinion that the saint was not

Bulgarian (and Clement of Ohrid himself would not have comprehended

that question).

A pertinent question is why common history and linguistic closeness

poses a problem. A linguistic example may be found in Scandinavia: the

closeness of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish does not fuel attempts to

deny the existence of any one of these languages, although mutual

intelligibility, for instance, between standard Swedish and standard

Norwegian is better than between some of the extreme dialects of

Swedish. Instead, the shared Scandinavian heritage is seen as a unifying

symbol, not grounds for disagreement. The difference may lie in the fact

that contrary to Scandinavia, where the statehoods of Denmark, Norway,

and Sweden have continuity since the Middle Ages, the nation-forming

processes in the Balkans are historically still relatively young (despite

their claim of mediaeval roots), and therefore the need for self-affirmation

is strong.

21

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