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Novi Pazar
08-20-2012, 08:43 AM
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TERM “BULGAR”



It is in the light of these historical facts that one should examine the significance of the term “Bulgar,” which, both by the Greeks and, later, by numerous travellers through Macedonia during the nineteenth century, was used to designate the Orthodox Slav population, which did not know Greek and therefore could not be called Greek. For the most part, it was not called Serbian on account of the fairly firmly established error that the Serbian state of the time embraced all Serbs except those in Bosnia. When a part of the Serbian people, albeit very small, acquired its political freedom and gathered itself into a little state separate from Turkey, under the name of ‘Serbian state,’ the Turks identified the name Serb, which was hateful to them, with the subjects of Serbia; thus, they did not tolerate that anyone in their state should call himself a Serb,....and the unliberated population did not dare to call itself by a name enjoying such an evil reputation in Turkey. The people in Macedonia and Old Serbia (Kosovo and Metohija) now call themselves Bulgars is entirely due to the enforced desire of the Turks, who more readily hear the name of the peaceful and submissive Bulgar than that of the ever rebellious Serb.

The Macedonian population, constantly in a state of uncertainty and fear for its very life, was reluctant to give any definite answer to foreigners’ questions on their national feelings. “I asked,” says James Baker, “some Bulgarian peasants in Macedonia about their nationality, and they immediately replied ‘rum,’ which, indeed, is the name peculiar to the Greek population of Asia Minor. They insisted that they were Greeks. ‘If that is so,’ I told them, ‘why do you speak Bulgarian at home?’ ‘Because our forefathers did so,’ was their reply. ‘We have had to suffer a great deal for being called Bulgars, although we are Greeks.’” At about the same period, Karl Braun-Wiesbaden was passing through these districts. He also noticed this submissive outlook among the Slavic population of southern Macedonia and southern Bosnia. “Here in Macedonia and southern Bosnia,” he says, “the Bulgar makes no claim to speak his mother tongue, let alone understand any other. When he meets some ‘effendi’ (whether a Turk or an unknown foreigner, for the Frank is always an ‘effendi’ here), he greets him in Greek with ‘kal hora’ or ‘kal himera.’” “Fifteen years ago,” wrote Milojko Veselinovic, “I was in Turkey [i.e., in the southern areas of Serbia, then under Turkish rule] and had the opportunity to converse at some lengths with many people, especially with peasants from the districts of Vranje, Leskovac, Nis, Turnovo, Kriva Palanka, Kumanovo, Skopje and elsewhere, and l noticed that they mostly refer to themselves as ‘risjani,’ ‘kavuri’ or ‘raya,’ When a Turk asks them, ‘Say, what are you, raya?’ they reply, ‘I am a kavurin aga.’ But when a Christian asks them, they say ‘I am a risjanin.’”

Milojko Veselinovic (in 1888), Jovan Dragasevic (in 1890) and Stojan Protic attempted to fix more or less precisely the meaning of the term “Bulgar” (in Serbian “bugarin” and in Bulgarian “bulgarin”). “Under no circumstance,” wrote Veselinovic, “will an inhabitant of Macedonia or Southern Old Serbia call himself a ‘bolgarin’ or ‘bulgarin,’ but only (and then out of necessity) ‘bugarin,’ which is a sign that a Serb is speaking, since lu becomes u in the pronunciation of a Serb alone and of no one else.” As distinct from Protic, who, writing on “Macedonia and the Macedonians” in Odjek, asserted that Macedonian Slavs took the name name “Bulgar” from the Latin “vulgaris,” Veselinovic claimed that it was derived from the Greek “vulgaros.” Dragasevic, who, as an ethnographer, was a member of the Serbian delegation to the Berlin Congress, held more or

Novi Pazar
08-20-2012, 08:45 AM
less the same view on the origin of the term “Bulgar” as Veselinovic. His derivation is from the Greek Boulgaroi, which means the common people. He goes on to say that the word Bolgaroi, which was applied to the Bulgars proper, “signifies a definite nation,” while Boulgaroi indicates only the cultural level of the people. Later, the Greeks confused the two expressions, “particularly as the Byzantines could not regard even those in the east as being civilized, and also both these peoples [in the eastern and western halves of the empire], although differing from one another, were related. Subsequently, the uninitiated took these expressions as meaning the same thing, i.e., as being the name of a nation.” Bolgar and Boulgar,” he continues, “are two quite different expressions: the former, in Latin Bulgar and Slav bolgar and bugar, is the name of a nation that never crossed the Rhodope Mountains and Despotova Gora, which separated it quite naturally and inevitably from the peoples to the west of these mountains.....Boulgar designates the people, or plebs; it is the equivalent of the Latin Vulgar, and means the ‘lower class’ of the people in a country.” Dragasevic also agrees that fear of the Turks was the reason why the Serbs in Macedonia called themselves Bulgars: they followed the whim of their masters, while “many used this alien name instead of their own in their dealings with citizens on whom they were economically dependant.” “During the Turkish regime,” says Cvijic, “the name ‘Bulgar’ as applied to the raya spread beyond Bulgarian districts [ and came to be applied] to serfs and peasants farming land on a tenant basis. The area controlled by this extremely oppressive regime extended to Skopje and beyond......Applied, as it was, in this sense in the Vardar districts, the name ‘Bulgar began to penetrate as far as Kosovo and Metohija, while one Russian traveller in the seventeenth century applies the name even to Serbian peasant farmers in the area of Sarajevo, in Bosnia. In the extreme west of the Balkan Peninsula, in Dalmatia and Croatia, the name ‘Bulgar’ signified ill breeding, and probably for this reason the inhabitants of these areas called their simple folk poems ‘bugarstice.’” Vatroslav Oblak confirms the view of Veselinovic that in Macedonia and west Bulgarian dialects vocalic l is replaced by u, particularly in those areas where Bulgarian comes into contact with Serbian, while the same phenomenon cannot be found in the east and south of the areas over Bulgarian is spoken. “Both by its geographic extent and by its sporadic appearances, this u shows that we are here concerned with Serbianisms. Indeed, in almost all dialects characterized by u instead of l, we find other traces of Serbian influence, as, for example, u for a. Particular mention should be made of the name bugarin with all its variations, which one finds throughout almost the whole of Macedonia (except, perhaps, some southern and southeastern districts) in the form bugarin.”

Veselinovic, against whom loud protests were raised at one time, was right when he pointed out that the name “Bulgar” began especially to be used by the local population when the agitation for a Bulgarian exarchate first assumed a large scale. “Since,” he says, “the people had lost its Serbian bishops in the previous century, it did not care for alien ones, but mechanically supported the Bulgarian bishops, thinking that they would at least read the church services in Slav, which would bbe better, in its opinion than Greek. This was taken advantage of by its Bulgarophiles, who collected signatures from the people by virtue of which the people renounced the Patriarchate and joined the Bulgarian Exarchate. As soon as anyone signed, he had from that moment on to call himself a Bulgar, since otherwise that ‘majority’ would not be obtained that was essential if they were to have a Bulgarian bishop and Slavic services in church. Finally, the people agreed, but being unable to say ‘bulgarin,’ used the Serbian pronunciation ‘bugarin.’”

Quite apart from the proverbial ignorance of the state of affairs in the Balkans which frequently obtained, this helps to explain why foreign travellers in the nineteenth century called all

Novi Pazar
08-20-2012, 08:45 AM
Orthodox Slavs in Macedonia “Bulgars,” frequently without having the least idea of where to draw the borderline between Serbs and Bulgars. Referring to the district between Salonica and Voden (Edessa), August Griesebach wrote in 1839: “The Bulgarian language covers the southern and eastern, and Serbian the northern and western parts of the area, although the borderline between these two daughters of the Slavic tribe has proved impossible to define precisely; it is said that this line, by a gradual confusion of words, merges, so to speak, into a transitional zone.” Despite this assertion, Griesebach calls the districts around Skopje, Tetovo and Sar-Planina Bulgarian since, he says, they are inhabited by Bulgars, and says that the inscriptions on the walls of the monastery of St. Atanasije are written in Bulgarian (i.e., in Old Slavonic) and Greek. “There are,” he says, “several Bulgarian monasteries in Upper Albania-that is, one large monastery is apparently, according to the map, situated near Debar.” As we have seen, Braun-Wiesbaden found Bulgars (he himself puts this word in quotation marks) in 1878 in Macedonia and Bosnia. His scepticism with regard to this term is evident: referring to the Slavophile propaganda of the time which all Orthodox Slavs on Turkish territory out to be Bulgars, he says: “Anyone who has been on the spot and lived there can only find ridiculous current Russian assertions that these people are all ‘Bulgars’ and that the land from Vardar to the Aegean-including Ser, where a well known Greek teachers’ college in flourishing-must be given to Bulgaria. One would have to be as ignorant as a diplomat to believe such a lie.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Southern and Old Serbia were studied, among others, by Dr. Karl Oestreich. His observations are of particular interest since by that time relations in Southern Serbia had become crystallized. Although he commits a number of erroes in respect of the ethnic character of this region, nevertheless his judgement is more sober and objective than that of other writers. Referring to the population around Skopje, which Griesebach out of sheer ignorance described as Bulgarian, he says: “The city’s population consists of all possible elements. The great majority are Serbs-some of whom have come out in favour of the Bulgarian Exarchate and call themselves ‘Bulgars’- and Albanians, or Mohammedanized Serbs. Although it is situated south of Sar-planina, Skopje is the chief city of Old Serbia.....The rural population, although it is Serbian in origin, has for the most part given its support to the Exarchate, since a Bulgarian bishop is for them more acceptable than a Greek bishop of the Ecumenical Church to which they formerly belonged. This is how the rural population around Skopje has today come to be mostly Bulgarian; the same is true of the purely Serbian Tetovo.”

How the Serbian population of Southern Serbia came to decide in favour of the Exarchate and what precisely this decision meant, Dr. Oestreich sets forth in his extensive study entitled “Die Bevolkerung von Makedonien.” Here he points out that the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate provoked a serious schism among the Slavic masses in the Balkans, who were appealed to by both the Patriarchate and the Exarchate, since the rest of the population was already orientated by virtue of its very national identity and, moreover, in comparison with the Slavs, constituted a negligible minority. On the question who are these “Bulgars” were in Southern Serbia, Oestreich says: “The ‘Bulgars’ were Slavs, and the so-called ‘Greeks’ were also Slavs. The ‘Bulgars’ were simply Macedonians Slavs who had joined the Bulgarian Church, which had been brought to them by the inhabitants of the [Bulgarian] Principality and which had been anathematized by the Patriarchate. They might be Bulgars or Serbs. The ‘Greeks’ were also Slavs who, on account of opposition towards the Bulgars and their Turkophile policy, had remained in the Greek Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarchial Church, which, as far as its membership is concerned, was also Slav.” A considerable part of the rural population, although it then felt itself to be Serbian, seized the first opportunity of obtaining Slavic

Novi Pazar
08-20-2012, 08:46 AM
priests and so declared itself to be Bulgarian....Whoever joined the Bulgarian Exarchate was registered in the Turkish population records as “bulgari-milet” and to the world at large was a Bulgar.

To what extent the inhabitants of Southern Serbia were disturbed by the conflict between Patriarchate and Exarchate may be seen from an episode described by Veselinovic. The older peasants from a village near Pcinja said: “Heaven alone knowns what will become of our people. We were all brothers and on friendly terms, but since the quarrel over the bishop began, some have been crying, ‘We are Bulgars, for we are on the Bulgarian side,’ while others on the Patriarch’s side said, ‘We know who we are, even if they do call us Grecophiles.’ Cursed be he who started this quarrel!”

Although, for the most part, agreeing with V. Gregorovic wrote on the ethnic affinities of the Slavic population of Macedonia (Gregorovic assigned them to the Bulgars), N. P. Kondakov was nevertheless unable to exclude entirely the possibility that there were Serbs in this region. Generally speaking, he saw in the Macedonian Slavs “an indefinite national group which clearly approximates to the population of Bulgaria proper.” However, he adds that in Ohrid, “ ‘Serbophiles’ or ‘Patriarchists,’ as the Bulgars call them, are living in very small numbers, and in the city at that.’ Further, Kondakov states that in the vicinity of Skopje there were a number of Serbian settlements and large villages, while in the city itself there were fifty Serbian houses without a church. In general, he is of the opinion that there were never any Serbs in Skopje, but that they were nevertheless at that time the leading cultural element. “But,” he goes on, “if there were no [Serbian] cities, villages of tremendous size had survived by whose means extremely beautiful churches had been erected and, although this district is purely Bulgarian with a few Serbian villages thrown in, it may nevertheless be described, from the cultural standpoint, as a corner of Old Serbia.” In Mladi Nagoricani, Kondakov found Serbian villages in which the Bulgars had bbegun to found settlements of their own. In his Memoirs, Djorce Petrov recalls that there were “Serbophile” villages in the area of Bitolj, near Smilevo, and that, when they began to organize the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, they were undecided whether to include the “Serbophiles” in their organization or not. “We decided,” he says, “to accept them with freat caution and reserve for fear they might betray the cause to the Greek bishop.”

Not without interest, in this connection, are observations made on the spot by Professor Franz Doflein, who was engaged in geological research. Like many others before him, he was biased in favour of the Bulgars, but nevertheless observed that the peoplehe came across did not speak Bulgarian. “So far,” he says, “the linguistic frontiers between Serbian and Bulgarian have bbeen constantly shifting in the Balkans, especially in Macedonia. The result is that it is difficult to say whether, in the north, on the Danube frontier, the dialect spoken in a village, let us say, near Pirot, is Serbian tinged with Bulgarian or Bulgarian tinged with Serbian. The borderline is similarly indistinct and confused in northern Macedonia.” Doflein noticed that the urban population of Skopje spoke a dialect seemed to him to be nearest to Bulgarian. “When,” he says, “one is farther away, in the villages north of Skopje, it becomes increasingly difficult to make oneself understood with those few words of Bulgarian that Germans normally have at their disposal. The probability of meeting Serbs becomes progressively greater. In Skopje also, many inhabitants are Serbs, which is not surprising in a communications center that is so near Serbia.”

Novi Pazar
08-20-2012, 08:48 AM
One of the more prominent foreigners who travelled through the Serbian lands was J. G. Von Hahn. In 1868, he found “Bulgarian Christians” in many places, and “Serbian Christians” only in Prokuplje and Kursumlija. All the rest of the Slavic population south of the Serbo-Turkish frontier, which at that time was two hours’ walk from Aleksinac, he described as “Bulgarian peasants.” In Leskovac he found two thousand four hundred, in Vranje one thousand and in Kumanovo three hundred and fifty belonging to “Bulgarian Christians,” in the vicinity of Kumanovo ninety Bulgarian villages and in Giljane one thousand five hundred homes of “Bulgarian Christians.” Long before Hahn, Ami Boue, in 1847, designated the Crni Drin as the western frontier of Bulgaria. According to him, Bulgars are to be found in Bulgaria, Upper and Lower Moesia and Macedonia. Of the Bulgars of Upper Moesia and Macedonia, he says that they have many folk poems in common with the Serbs. As far as he could ascertain, the Bulgars at that time did not sing any poems about Marko Kraljevic. He further noted folk poems were not sung in Bulgaria in the same manner as in Serbia, especially in Bosnia and Hercegovina, and observed that the Bulgars did not have the gusle.

Four years later, Cyprian Robert offered almost identical information on the population of Macedonia. According to him, the Bulgars made up the “essence of the Macedonian population.” Speaking in greater detail of the country, he says that the chief town of Bulgarian Macedonia is Serez. He adds that this part of the country should bbe distinguished from the northwestern districts inhabited by Serbs. “For the rest, the Serbian pastoral tribes are separated from the Bulgarian agrarian population of Macedonia by the Greeks, who inhabit the central and coastal regions of this great land.”

From the foregoing, the true meaning of the expression “Bulgar” should be clear, both as applied by the people to itself and as comprehened by foreign travellers. It designated, not an ethnic group, but the common people, the working masses, who spoke Slav. The most menial tasks, which neither Greeks nor Turks were willing to undertake, were known as “Bulgarian work.” The fact that foreign travellers referred to the Slavic population as Bulgars was due to ignorance and to wrong information obtained from Greeks and from other sources. Of all such travellers, with vewry few exceptions, Tihomir Georgevitch is merely stating the truth when he says that they knew neither the history, nor the language, nor the customs, nor the mutual relationships of the peoples they were describing. “Only a small number of books on Macedonia,” he says, “has been written with a real knowledge of the subject, truthfully, independently and without bias.”

How foreigners gathered their information on the inhabitants of the areas through which they passed may be seen from two examples. The French consul Pouqueville, who journeyed through Greece and parts of Turkey and Macedonia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was accompanied by a young Greek who simply called all Slavs Bulgars. Franz Bradaska says of Hahn that he was insufficiently acquainted with the ethnic relationships of the areas through which he travelled, and did not even know Serbian. “I am not at all surprised,” says Bradaska, “that he was unable to obtain detailed information about everything: in the first place, his journey was too hasty; in the second place, his servants and escorts were Albanians; and in the third place, he knew no Slav language. In particular, this ignorance of Slav explains his inability to distinguish between Bulgars and Serbs and the fact that, relying on his Albanian guides, he copied down inaccurately several Slav names which had been written quite correctly on the attached sketch of the terrain by major Zah.”

Archduke
08-20-2012, 08:54 AM
Signifiance of the term Bulgar, Deconstruction of the term Bulgar...

Man, you are obviously obessed with us.

PS Nobody will read your shitty posts. :D

Novi Pazar
08-20-2012, 08:57 AM
Hopefully readers you will be educated!

Novi Pazar
08-20-2012, 08:59 AM
Signifiance of the term Bulgar, Deconstruction of the term Bulgar...

Man, you are obviously obessed with us.

PS Nobody will read your shitty posts. :D

I'm not forcing nobody to read, its your choice. Its as simple, if you can't stand to know the truth then don't read!

Archduke
08-20-2012, 09:01 AM
I'm not forcing nobody to read, its your choice. Its as simple, if you can't stand to know the truth then don't read!

i mean, nobody will want to read post full with lies and propaganda.

Novi Pazar
08-20-2012, 09:11 AM
^ Its loaded with prominent historians and commentators. Just read and you will find the truth Armani.

morski
08-20-2012, 10:52 AM
:bored: