Macedonian Links > Bulgaria

Macedonia has been a land populated by Bulgarians ever since the formation of the Bulgarian nation in the early Middle Ages. During the times of Prince Boris I the Macedonian cities were hearths and centers of Bulgarian culture; the bishop of the city of Ohrid, St. Kliment, invented the Cyrillic alphabet, which was first adopted by the Bulgarians and much later - by other nations.

During the times of Tsar Samuil Macedonia was the only part of Bulgaria yet unconquered by Byzantium; the Tsars Samuil, Gavril-Radomir and Ivan-Vladislav were all titled "Tsar of all Bulgarians" and stated that their parents were Bulgarian. Macedonia was the center of the Bulgarians' church struggles against the Greek clergy during the times of Ottoman yoke and a main component of the newly established Bulgarian Exharcate.

After the Congress of Berlin in 1878 Macedonia was torn away from the other Bulgarian lands and submitted to Ottoman rule, replaced by Serbian and Greek rule after the Balkan wars. That is when the Bulgarian population in Macedonia was subjected to a forced de-Bulgarization and assimilation, a policy which reached its culmination in 1945, when Communist Yugoslavia "recognized" a separate "Macedonian nation".

Since 1945 the Bulgarian language and alphabet in Macedonia have been actively Serbicized, while the Bulgarian populace has been subjected to mass Macedonization, whose goal is to sever and denounce its ties to Bulgaria and the Bulgarian nation, culture, and history.

Macedonian Links

• Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) En Bg
• Bulgarian Macedonia En Bg
• Macedonia - a newspaper reflecting the Bulgarian point of view En Bg