Shopi

Shopi, (South Slavic languages: Шопи, Šopi) is a regional term, used by a group of people in the Balkans, self-identifying as Bulgarians, Macedonians and Serbs. The areas traditionally inhabited by the Shopi is called Shopluk (Шоплук, Shopluk/srb. Šopluk), a mesoregion, roughly where Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia meet. In 2011 census in Serbia they are registered as separate ethnicity and 142 persons declared themselves as belonging to this ethnicity.

According to Institute for Balkan Studies, the Shopluk was the mountainous area on the borders of Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia, of which boundaries are quite vague, in Serbia the term Šop has always denoted highlanders.Shopluk was used by Bulgarians to refer to the borderlands of Bulgaria, the inhabitants were called Shopi. In Bulgaria, the Shopi designation is currently attributed to villagers around Sofia.

Most of the area traditionally inhabited by the Shopi, as well as the population within this area is in Bulgaria. The majority of the Shopi (those in Bulgaria, as well the territories which were part of Bulgaria before 1919) identify as Bulgarian, while those in the pre-1919 territory of Serbia identify as Serbian and those in Macedonia identify as Macedonian.

The noting of Shopi as a "group" began in the 19th-century migrational waves of poor workers from the so-called Shopluk, poor areas (villages) beyond Sofia.

The Bulgarian scholars put Shopi as a subgroup of the Bulgarian ethnos. As with every ethnographic group, the Bulgarian Academy notes, the Shopi in Bulgaria consider themselves the true and most pure of the Bulgarians, just as the mountaineers around Turnovo claim their land as true Bulgaria from time immemorial, etc.

Many Yugoslav and Serbian scholars put the Šopi (also known as Šopovi) as a subgroup of the Serb ethnos, claiming that the group is closer to Serbs than Bulgarians culturally and linguistically, calling it a Serb population in a foreign (Bulgarian) area, at the Serbo-Bulgarian border. The Šopi left of the Pčinja river down to the Vardar called their own language Serbian. The nationalist In 1919, Serbian ethnographer Jovan Cvijić, at the Peace Conference in Paris, presented a study in which he had divided the Shopluk into three groups: Serbs, mixed population, and a group closer to Bulgarians. He also claimed that the Serb tradition of Slava was celebrated in the region, this according to him being an important cultural marker.

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