Macedonians (Bulgarians)

Macedonians or Macedonian Bulgarians (Bulgarian: Македонски българи or Mакедонци), sometimes also referred to as Macedono-Bulgarians or Macedo-Bulgarians is a regional, ethnographic group of ethnic Bulgarians, inhabiting or originating from the region of Macedonia. Today, the larger part of this population is concentrated in Blagoevgrad Province but much is spread across the whole of Bulgaria and the diaspora.

The Slavic-speaking majority in the Region of Macedonia had been referred to (both, by themselves and outsiders) as Bulgarians, and that is how they were predominantly seen since 10th, up until the early 20th century. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, at the beginning of the 20th century the Macedonian Bulgarians constituted the majority of the population in the whole region of Macedonia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. The functioning of the Bulgarian Exarchate then aimed specifically at differentiating the Bulgarian from the Greek and Serbian populations on an ethnic and linguistic basis, providing the open assertion of a Bulgarian national identity. However one basic distinction between the political agendas of local intelligentsias was clear. The Macedonian Greeks and Serbs followed, in general, the directives coming from their respective centers of national agitation, while by the Bulgarians the term Macedonian was acquiring the significance of a certain political loyalty, that progressively constructed a particular spirit of regional identity. The Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and World War I (1914–1918) left Ottoman Macedonia divided between Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Albania and resulted in significant changes in its ethnic composition. The immediate effect of the partition of Ottoman Macedonia were the nationalistic campaigns in areas under Serbian and Greek administration, which expelled Bulgarian churchmen and teachers and closed Bulgarian schools and churches. As a consequence a sizable part of the Slavic population of Greek and Serbian Macedonia fled to Bulgaria or was resettled there by virtue of a population exchange agreements. The Bulgarian population in Vardar Banovina was regarded as "Southern Serbs" and a policy of Serbianization was implemented. Within Greece, the Southern Macedonians were designated "Slavophone Greeks".

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Wikipedia