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West Balkan, East Balkan, Central Balkan types
In his studies of South Slavic ethnography, expounded since the turn of the century but synthesized during his wartime exile in France (1918), Cvijic devised a "Central Type", dissimilar at the same time to the "Dinaric Type" (the principal "Serb" ethnographic variant representative of the South Slavs south of the Isonzo-Krka-Sava-Danube line and west of the more or less straight line that could be drawn from the mouth of the Timok to the mouth of the Drin) and the "East Balkan Type" (representing the subdanubian Balkans from the influx of the Iskr into the Danube to the mouth of the Mesta on the Aegean Sea, that is, eastern Bulgaria, Dobrudza, and Thrace, excluding not just Macedonia but even the region of Sofia, Bulgaria's capital). The true Bulgars belonged only to the "East Balkan Type," especially to the ethnovariant of the Lower Danubian basin, between the Danube and the Balkan Mountains. They were a mixture of Slavs, three "Turanian" groups (Bulgars, Patzinaks-Cumans, and Ottoman Turks), ancient Thracians, and Vlachs, and, as such, were "different from the other South Slavs in their ethnic composition." [10] More important, their national character was decidedly un-Slavic. Bulgars were industrious and coarse. Their demeanor was grave, cheerless, and sullen and their life purely materialistic: "Where the western South Slavs are more or less cheerful at meanest work and in the worst circumstances, and where their magnanimity and even warmth of manner characterize their relationships, the Bulgars have none of that and consider such things as 'Serb business.' On the contrary, their cold egoism, their restless and constant thirst for profit and acquisition of material goods, niggardliness, and total absence of magnanimity are termed the 'Bulgar way' by the Serbs." [11]
The caricature of Bulgars permitted their clear differentiation from the "Central Type," within which Cvijic included Macedonians, western Bulgars (Shops), and Serbs of the Prizren-Timok (Torlak) dialects, a type that was eminently Slavic and therefore non-Bulgar. Dr. Tihomil Djordjevic, a leading Serbian folklorist, strengthened Cvijic's descriptions by stressing the typically Slavic tribalism of Macedonians, divided as they were among modern ethnic groups (Brsjaci, Mrvaci, Shopovi/Shops, Polivaci, Babuni, Keckari, Mijaci). [12] By constrast, Djordjevic's Bulgars were a grim horde who respected only force: "The spirit of insatiable plunder that the Bulgars brought to the Balkan peninsula is maintained among their Slavicized descendents with the only difference that, where the Turanian Bulgars constituted an intrepid warrior horde, the Slavicized Bulgars do not appear greedy and insatiable for plunder, except in the case when the gain of plunder can be realized at the minimum of risks." [13] They were a people without imagination and therefore necessarily without art and culture. In Cvijic's words, it followed that in Macedonia, "which the Bulgars and Serbs ruled alternately, there are no monuments or monasteries save of Serbian or Byzantine provenance." [14]
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Originally Posted by Stearsolina
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