What are the rights and wrongs in the case? Has the Peace Conference simply perpetuated a great injustice, repeated the mistake of the Congress of Berlin, deprived the Bulgarians of a province which is theirs by right of nationality and without which they can never rest?
The Macedonian question has been before the world a sufficiently long time to have thoroughly wearied most people of it, perhaps, but not long enough to produce a clear understanding or any real unanimity of opinion about it. It presents, on the one hand, such a medley of jarring races, long-standing animosities, and ever-recurring atrocities, and, on the other hand, such a jumble of ethnographic riddles, philological controversies, psychological uncertainties, unreliable statistics, assertions and counter-assertions flatly contradictory on every point, that one almost despairs of an idea as to how it ought to be settled, or of the hope of ever seeing it settled at all.
Macedonia contained in 1910—nobody knows what it contains now, after the last three wars—over two million people, including about 1,300,000 Slavs, 300,000 Greeks, and scattered minorities of Turks, Albanians, Vlachs, Jews, and Gypsies. The Greeks predominate in the south and southeast, and can make out a very good claim on ethnographic grounds to most of that part of Macedonia which they acquired in 1913. The dispute turns much more upon central and northern Macedonia, where the Slavs predominate, and upon the question whether these Slavs ought to be considered as mainly Bulgarians or Serbs.
For the elucidation of this question, it is necessary to go very far afield. When the Southern Slavs first settled in the Balkans, they formed a great, undifferentiated mass, stretching from the Alps and the Adriatic to the Aegean and the Black Sea—a mass of ethnographic raw material out of which almost any number of ‘nations’ and ‘languages’ might have been developed in accordance with the accidents of history. As it turned out, two centres of political crystallization arose—a northeastern centre, in the region between the Balkan Mountains and the Danube, where a Turanian people called Bulgars organized the Slavs into a state to which they—the original Bulgars—contributed little except the name and the ruling class; and a northwestern centre of crystallization in Serbia and Montenegro. The modern Serb and the modern Bulgarian nations are closely akin in language and in blood, although the Bulgars have a certain Turanian strain in them, while the Serbs boast of being ‘pure Slavs.’ Sprung from substantially the same stock, the two nations have throughout their history vied with each other in trying to draw to themselves as large as possible a part of their kinsmen; and it is not surprising if the Macedonian Slavs, lying midway between the two centres of gravitation, have been attracted, now to the one and now to the other, without ever apparently taking on completely the imprint of either.
In the Middle Ages, when frontiers in the Balkans were, if possible, even more fluid than they have been in recent times, Macedonia was most frequently under the rule of the Greeks. It was, however, held by Bulgaria from about 860 to 1018 and again for some years in the thirteenth century; and from about 1260 down to the Turkish conquest in 1389 it belonged to the Serbian empire. From these rather brief periods of tenure both nations draw their claims to ‘historic rights’ over Macedonia today, and a fund of proud historic memories which lend warmth and passion to those claims. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria promoted himself to be ‘Tsar’ in imitation of the Bulgarian tsars of the Middle Ages who ruled over Macedonia. The Prince Regent of Serbia today addresses the Macedonians as “sons of Stephen Dushan,” in allusion to the great Serbian emperor of the fourteenth century whose capital was Üsküb in Macedonia. It seems undeniable that the period of Serbian rule made a much deeper impression on the country than did the Bulgarian. Not only is Macedonia strewn with churches, monasteries, and works of art recalling the great days of Serbia, while similar Bulgarian monuments are almost totally lacking; but the wonderfully rich ballad literature, through which alone the Macedonian Slavs express whatever historic memories they have, dwells exclusively upon the heroes of the Serbian past, with never the mention of a Bulgarian.
At any rate, the ensuing five hundred years of stagnation and isolation under Turkish rule afforded the Macedonians ample time to forget which of their kinsmen they preferred to be associated with, and to lose whatever national consciousness they had possessed. When the Serb and Bulgarian national revivals began in the early nineteenth century, Macedonia was more or less no-man’s-land; and either movement might sweep the field, provided it got started early enough. Fortune seemed for a while to be with the Bulgarians. For many years all of Russia’s powerful influence was cast in their favor, since Russia regarded the Serbs as Austria’s protégés. The Turks also thought it very clever to favor the Bulgarians, who seldom or never revolted, against the Serbs who never did anything else but rebel. Hence the Bulgarians got the start, and for some decades they could conduct religious, educational, and nationalist work in Macedonia, while Serb influences were in the main barred out. What particularly helped the process of Bulgarization was the formation in 1870 of the independent Bulgarian (or Exarchist) church, a body which could offer the Macedonian Slavs the things which they seem to have craved above all others at that time: emancipation from the Greek clergy, and the church service in a tongue which they could understand. Hence a general stampede to the Exarchist church, restrained only by the calculation that it was materially more expensive to get christened, married, or buried by that businesslike body than by the old Patriarchist or Greek church. Once inside the Exarchist fold, you were regarded by the authorities as a Bulgarian and taught by your religious superiors that you must feel yourself one.
After the formation of the new Bulgarian state in 1878, the Bulgarian nationalist propaganda in Macedonia went forward with redoubled vigor. It was carried on from Sofia and from the seat of the Exarchate at Constantinople with all the means and by all the devices that the government and the church could bring to bear. Meanwhile the Turks, somewhat disillusioned as to the harmlessness of their Bulgarian protégés and always experts at the art of playing the Christians off against each other, determined to open the door to rival influences. Hence in the late ’80s and the ’90s the Serbs could at last rush in and strive to make up for lost time by organizing a rival propaganda, with all the paraphernalia of Serbian bishops, churches, schools, etc. As the Greeks were also busily engaged in the same kind of work, the Macedonian question then entered that acute phase which so delighted the Turks and wore out the nerves of Europe—that desperate and sanguinary mêlée, in which the three rival races strove to spread their ‘national culture,’ not only by furiously proselytizing the unfortunate Macedonians, but by exterminating each other. It must be admitted that in both forms of activity the Bulgarians came out ahead. Not only did their komitadjis dominate the blood-stained field, but they had a network of schools and churches quite surpassing either of their rivals. Refugees from Macedonia also seem to have fled to Bulgaria in larger numbers than to Serbia or Greece; and indeed they formed a very active and influential element at Sofia, which did not permit the Bulgarian government to forget the Macedonian question for a moment.
On the eve of the Balkan Wars, the situation might be summarized by saying that a section of the Macedonian Slavs had more or less warmly adopted the Bulgarian cause, and another, probably smaller, section, the Serbian cause, and—it seems to me—the great mass of this population was still lying inert and undecided, untouched by any schools, chiefly concerned about peace and its daily bread, prepared to go with either party that should prove the stronger. So much for the sentiments of the population.
Both sides have also appealed to other arguments to prove that all Slavic Macedonia ought to belong to them. Endless controversy has raged over the question whether its people speak Bulgarian or Serbian. It has been triumphantly demonstrated, on the one hand, that the Macedonians are Bulgars because they use a definite article and do not inflect their nouns; but it has also been conclusively shown that they are Serbs by all the laws of morphology and phonetics. In fact, the best philological judgment seems to be that these people speak a series of dialects intermediate between Bulgarian and Serbian, gradually shading off from one into the other; and that they can without much difficulty understand either language.
Equally inconclusive are the arguments based on popular customs. Although it has been attempted, one will never solve the Macedonian question by proving that marriage, burial, and saint’s day customs in this region are strikingly Serbian, or that the female costumes and the embroidery worn by the ladies are unmistakably Bulgarian. In customs as in language, this is simply a transitional area with affinities with both its neighbors.