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This article is about the Slavic ethnic group. For information on the unrelated, ancient Macedonian civilisation see Macedon and for the greater modern region of Macedonia, see Macedonia (region).

The Macedonian Slavs (also often referred to as Macedonian Slavs, a name strongly resented by the Macedonians themselves) are a South Slavic ethnic group forming about 64.18% of the population of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and about a third of the population of the geographical region of Macedonia in southeastern Europe. They speak the Slavic Macedonian language and are generally associated with the Macedonian Orthodox Church. The Macedonians are primarily the descendants of the Slavic tribes which settled Macedonia during the Middle Ages, but it is likely that their ancestry includes an element of autochthonous groups such as the Thracians and Illyrians and of later invaders, such as the Bulgars.

Areas of settlement

The vast majority of this ethnic group live in the valley of the river Vardar, the central region of the Former Republic of Macedonia. Smaller numbers live in eastern Albania, south-western Bulgaria, northern Greece, and southern Serbia and Montenegro, mostly abutting the border areas of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Major Populations of Macedonians by country

• Former YugoslavRepublic of Macedonia: 1,297,981 (2002 census)
• Serbia and Montenegro: 25,847 (2002 2002 census)
• Bulgaria: 5,071 (2001 census)
• Albania: 5,000 (1989 census)
• Greece: Unknown - Ethnologue lists 180,180 speakers of Slavic in Greece, but makes no claims as to their ethnic affiliation, nor to the methods used to obtain that figure - Greece has not conducted a census on the question of mother tongue since 1951, when 41,017 speakers of the Slavic language were recorded. In fact, only a small minority of Slav-speakers in Greece identify ethnically as (non-Greek) "Macedonians", as evidenced by the degree of electoral support for the Rainbow Party, which obtained precisely 6,176 votes throughout Greece at the last European Parliament elections in 2004, less than half of which (2,955) were cast in the region of Macedonia itself.

Origins and identities

The geographical region of Macedonia, which is divided between Bulgaria, Greece and the Republic of Macedonia, is inhabited by a variety of other peoples including Albanians, Bulgarians, Jews, Turks, Serbs, Roma (Gypsies), Greeks and Vlachs.

Historians generally date the arrival of the Slavs in Macedonia and the Balkans to the 6th or 7th centuries AD. The question of whether the Macedonians constitute a distinct ethnic group is controversial, as many Bulgarians and Greeks believe that they are merely a subset of another people, usually the Bulgarians. Linguistically and culturally, there is not a great distinction between Slav Macedonians and Bulgarians, but due to political and historic circumstances, the Slav Macedonians have come to consider themselves a separate people from the Bulgarians.

The Macedonians had little or no political and national identity of their own until the 20th century. Medieval sources traditionally describe them as Bulgarians, a definition which survived well into the period of Ottoman rule as attested by the Ottoman archives and by descriptions of historians and travellers, for example Evliya Celebi and his Book of Travels.

19th century ethnographers and travellers were also generally united in identifying them as Bulgarians until the period between 1878 and 1912 when the rival propaganda machines of Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria succeeded in effectively splitting the Slavophone population of Macedonia into three distinct parties, a pro-Serbian, pro-Greek and pro-Bulgarian one.

The key events in the formation of a distinctive "Macedonian" identity thus came during the first half of the 20th century in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and especially following the Second World War.

Origin of the name

The Slav Macedonians were traditionally described as Bulgarians by external observers until 1878 when an opinion on a Serbian origin of the Macedonians gradually started to gain popularity. The Serbian push to the south was preconditioned by the clauses of the Congress of Berlin of the same year, which denied them Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Sandjak of Novi Pazar, as well as by the pro-Austrian policy of Serbian king Milan Obrenovich IV. In 1881, Serbia relinquished all claims to the two regions in a secret treaty with Austria-Hungary, which, in its turn, vowed not to obstruct the expansion of Serbia into the valley of Vardar.

As from the beginning of the 1880s, Serbia launched a wide-scale propaganda effort in Macedonia and abroad to prove the Serbian character of the region. Greece and Bulgaria soon launched similar campaigns, the Greeks claiming that the Slavs living in Macedonia were Slavophone Greeks and the Bulgarians maintaining that they were nothing but Bulgarians. As the three-sided propaganda efforts escalated in the 1890s, the name "Macedonians Slavs" came into being as a way to designate all Slavs inhabiting Macedonia regardless of their national affiliations.

The first scholar to use the designation with a specific meaning was Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijic in 1906. In an attempt to put Serbian claims in Macedonia on an equal footing with Bulgarian ones, Cvijic argued that Macedonia south of Debar, Kichevo and Skopje and west of the present border between Bulgaria and the Republic of Macedonia was inhabited by "Macedonian Slavs", an amorphous Slavic mass without definite national affiliations and culture. The Macedonian Slavs according to Cvijic oscillated between the Bulgarians and the Serbs both politically and culturally and could turn out either Bulgarian or Serbian if the respective people were to rule the region. In the years to the Balkan Wars Cvijic pushed the northern limit of the Macedonian Slavs twice more to the south thus almost doubling the portion which the Serbs, according to him, occupied in Macedonia. The view of Cvijic gained little recognition outside Serbia until Bulgaria's entry into World War I on th