2.4 Macedonia in the Ottoman and the early Modern periods, the name returns to its old home

By the end of the 14^th century Byzantine authority was disappearing from the Balkan Peninsula for the last time. In fact, already by the mid 14^th century, the land of the Byzantine theme Macedonia was in the hands of the Serbian king and emperor Dushan. When the Ottomans entered Thrace and the valley of the Maritza in the 1370’s, they didn’t face the Byzantines but the feudal lords, king Volkashin and king Uglesha, the latter controlling most of the former Byzantine theme. By this time period, the name Macedonia finally disappears from the political and administrative maps of the region. After conquering the former themes of Thrace, Macedonia, Strymonia, Thessalonica and Bulgaria; the Ottomans created a large administrative area called the Rumelian Eyalet or in literal translation, the Roman Eyalet. To the new Asian conquerors of this part of the Balkans, the name Macedon had little more than vague, legendary connotations. In the five centuries long Ottoman reign, the name Macedonia never appeared in official records, neither referring to an administrative unit, nor designating a geographic region.

However, as a historical name and a symbol, Macedon was remembered throughout the long period of Ottoman reign. In particular, the Eastern Orthodox Church proved to be particularly conservative in keeping the memory of the old administrative units. The arch-bishops of Ohrid who were particularly powerful figures in the first two centuries of Ottoman rule, sometimes mention the name Macedon in their official titles³² . The name also survived in the oral tradition, among the common people. After the Austro-Ottoman war of the late 17^th century, large masses of Christian population who supported the Austrians fled beyond the Danube, either into the service of the Hapsburgs or in Russia. Some of them were organized into separate military units who were to fight along side the Russian and the Austrians to free their homeland from the “infidel Ottomans”. In the written sources of the time, some of them are rather surprisingly referred to as “Macedonian units”³³. Some of these units even had banners with the name Macedon! It is difficult to explain how this tradition came into being, after such a long eclipse during the entire Medieval Period. Moreover, these fugitives were partly from the area of the Medieval Serbian Kingdom, to the north of ancient Macedon. The name Macedonia is also witnessed in folk songs, some of them recorded in the early 19^th century.

On the other hand, the memory of the name Macedon also survived in the Hellenic parts of the Ottoman Empire. Many of the influential Greeks in Constantinople boasted a Macedonian descent, similar to the Byzantine Emperors of the 9^th and the 10^th century. As previously mentioned, the name Macedon was still in use in the official records of the Eastern Orthodox Church; it was among the lands that were first under the jurisdiction of the Ohrid Archbishop, and after the mid-18^th century, came directly under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch in Constantinople. Thus, the name Macedon came to survive as a historical symbol both among the Slavic and the Hellenic speaking populations, despite the fact it has been out of official use for over 5 centuries.

However, the real revival of the name Macedonia came with the slow arrival of modernity, under the influence of learnt western European travelers and ambassadors. During the 19^th century, a number of western researchers came to travel and explore the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire. This was the period of Romanticism in western European art and culture. One of its main features was a great fascination and interest in the ancient past, and particularly that of Classical Greece. The first modern studies of ancient writings appear, and travelers such as the French consul in Thessalonica, Th. Desdevisses Du-Dessert, E. Coussinery, W. Leake, von Hahn and others attempted to locate some of the ancient toponyms or people mentioned in the ancient sources. In fact, in scholarly circles the memory of ancient Macedon was most likely never lost, for one sees the name Macedonia on maps dating prior to the spread of the Romanticist movement in Western Europe. On a map dated as early as 1715, the boundaries of the land called Macedonia roughly overlap with the borders of ancient Macedonia, not with those of the Byzantine theme Macedonia³⁴. This revival of the ancient traditions was firstly of interest to narrower scholarly circles, and was primarily of historical and historical geographical significance. But in the following decades it had a profound influence on the creation of modern national identities in the region.

By the middle of the 19^th centuries, the newly formed Greek nation-state was completely turned to the glorious past of Classical Greece as an inspiration for the new Greek national identity, though the Byzantine heritage remained to play an important role through the Orthodox Church. For the Greek nationalist thinkers, ancient Macedonia was part of the Hellenic cultural and historical heritage. Ironically to the present day situation, it was the early Greek nationalist who promoted the idea of ancient Macedonia among the Slav and Hellenic speaking population that lived on the land to the north of the Greek Kingdom. By the 1850’s, scholars from present day Macedonia were calling the land of their compatriots Macedonia, and some even attempted to draw the ancient limits of Upper and Lower Macedonia. Thus, by the second half of the 19^th century, Macedonia appears on most maps roughly on its present day location. For the greater part it follows the borders of the ancient Roman province, except for the northern part where it was extended to cover the land known as Old Serbia, or the regions of Skopje, Kumanovo and Tetovo, the three northernmost cities of present-day Republic of Macedonia, and the upper valley of the Strymon in present day Bulgaria. When in the second half of the 19^th century there developed a national liberation movement in Macedonia, it took the name of Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.

Thus, a modern revival of an ancient geographical name played a very important role in the appearance of modern nationalist movement in what is now the Republic of Macedonia. It is greatly thanks to this development that there appeared a separate Slavic Macedonian identity, different from the Graeco-Macedonian identity, and the Serbian or Bulgarian national identities. On the other hand, the name issue also played its part in the formation of the modern Greek national identity.

The focus of the present discussion was not the development of modern Macedonian nationalism. Besides the name as a primarily historical symbol, there are doubtlessly a number of other important factors. Our point is to emphasize the importance of the name as an element in the formation of modern Greek and Macedonian national identities, and the dramatic history of the usage of the term Macedonia as a name of a political entity, a provincial and a geographical region. As far as the name is concerned, we have the appearance of two parallel historical and geographical traditions: one mostly (heraldic instead of) popular and oral, confined to the Slavic speaking population of the southern and central Balkans, the other Hellenic, mostly related to the ecclesiastic circles in Constantinople, but also to the rich class of Greek merchants. Nevertheless, it was only under the influence of modern, western European scholarship in the 19^th century that the name Macedonia was re-introduced bringing the two divergent traditions into a conflict that lasts until the present day.

32 I. Snegaroff, History of the Ochrid Arch-bishopric, Sophia 1923; J. Shea. Macedonia and Greece: the struggle to define a new Balkan nation, 1997. Back

33 A. Matkovski, Macedonia’s coats of arms: a contribution to the Macedonian heraldic, 1970. Back

34 http://www.raremaps.com/gallery/enlarge/28032 . Back

Back to the sections

Top of the page