Archive for the ‘macedonia’ Category
In the 1881 census for England, a five year old girl named Flora is to be found residing with three sisters, her mother Sophia and her father, the curate, Samuel Dickson Sandes, at The Rectory in Monewden, Suffolk. The living for the rural parish of St Mary’s was valued at £265 in 1868. The National Archives’ handy currency converter tells us that this sum would be worth about £12,110 in today’s money – not much but then it was a small and obscure parish. By the time of the 1891 census, the family has moved a little cross-county to The Rectory in Marlesford.
At the next decennial census in 1901, the family is living in suburbia, at St Paul’s Road, Thornton Heath, Surrey. Rev Sandes, now 78, is recorded as “living on own means”, so one assumes that he has retired from the curacy of Anglican souls. Flora is still at home, a 25 year old spinster, described, like her sister Fanny, as a correspondent. In 1911, the most recent census of England & Wales currently publicly available, the family is still at St Paul’s Road. By this date the Rev Sandes, aged 88, is describing himself as a “retired parson and barrister”. He may have become curmudgeonly with age, or perhaps was registering a minor objection to the exclusion of women from the franchise (in tune with the “No Vote, No Census” protest): either way, the census return, which is neatly completed in most respects, records against the Ages of Females simply “full” against his daughter Flora and the other women in the house (excepting his wife Sophia, who is an acknowledged 78). The census enumerator, one William Warman, has pencilled in the remarks “will not give ages” and “refuses to give ages and any further information”, his irritation almost audible.
And as for Flora herself, the column Personal Occupation says: None. Yet five years later Flora Sandes was a Captain in the Serbian Army.
Flora volunteered for overseas service immediately upon the outbreak of WW1 in August 1914. She was rejected by the Volunteer Aid Detachment but got in to the American Mabel Grujić’s Red Cross Unit on a temporary three-month stint and headed to Serbia. She then returned home to fund-raise before returning in 1915 to join the Serbian Red Cross. She served in Niš, caught typhus in Valjevo, was attached to the Serbian Second Army, and worked as a medical orderly in Salonica and Monastir before making the transition from nurse to soldier. Commissioned as an army officer, she fought at Kajmakčalan before accompanying the retreating Serbs on their long winter march across Albania to safety in Corfu and Bizerte (Tunisia).
After the War, Flora Sandes lived in Yugoslavia and married a White Russian officer named Judenič (later imprisoned and killed by the Nazis), before returning to England in her sixties.
Flora Sandes was one of hundreds of British women who volunteered and served as nurses in Serbia during WW1, at places such as Kragujevac, Mladenovac and Valjevo. Some served under the aegis of the Red Cross, others as part of the independent Scottish Women’s Hospital for Foreign Service. Most came from relatively comfortable and privileged backgrounds and the contrast between their early life experiences and those of the war must have been acute and unimaginable.
For those researching an ancestor or family member who was one of those women, there is a significant collection of records in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London.
Montenegro, or Crna Gora, is named after its “black mountain”. Mountain ranges bearing this name are of course common worldwide and in the former Yugoslavia there is another crna gora, being the Skopska Crna Gora of Macedonia.
Skopska Crna Gora is located north and north-east of the capital, Skopje, stretching up towards the Macedonian border with Kosovo. Its villages tend to be in the valleys of the fast-flowing mountain streams running south to the river Vardar. The villagers were peasant smallholders, growing the usual types of crop, including grape vines, suited to the climate and soil and, in some households, additionally grazing sheep in the mountain pastures.
Traditionally, the villages regarded themselves as being of either Serbian or Macedonian nationality. For example, Banjane, Čučer, Gornjane and Kučevište were Serb villages, while Gluvo, Ljubanci and Ljuboten were Macedonian. The differences – of language rather than culture – were exaggerated by the villagers, while the similarities between them were downplayed: for example, Serbs might jokingly refer to the Macedonians of the neighbouring village as “Bulgarians”.
The villagers were, of course, Orthodox. They celebrated a family slava, being the saint’s day specific to the male line of the family. In all Skopska Crna Gora villages, residence is patrilocal, meaning that upon marriage women move into the household of the man’s family. Generally, village society strongly favoured marriage to a partner from the same village, and certainly of the same nationality, but a bride might well find that she must make allegiance to a new household slava.
Both Serbs and Macedonians also celebrated their village slava. For example, the Serbs of the largest Crna Gora village, Kučevište, observed the village slava on Spasovden, being the feast day of Sveti Spas at Ascension, which is a movable feast taking place 40 days after Easter. Similarly, the Macedonian settlement of Gluvo celebrated the slava of Sveti Nikola annually on 22nd May. The churches in these two villages were dedicated respectively to Sveti Spas and Sveti Nikola, who effectively are their “patron saints”.
Some of the larger villages had a minor chapel as well as the main parish church. These chapels also had their special slava each year: for example, Kučevište has a second slava dedicated to Sveti Atanas each 31st January.
For more on the traditions of the Skopska Crna Gora, please refer to D B Rheubottom’s article “The Saint’s Feast and Skopska Crna Goran Social Structure” in the March 1976 issue of the anthropological journal Man.
During the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, Macedonia – the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Salonika – was a region experiencing great tension and flux. There was only a finite quantity of cultivable land, creating unemployment and under-employment and a movement of the landless to the towns. At the same time there was growing social unrest. Competing nationalist movements sought the allegiance of the population. Violence flared up, especially after Ilinden in 1903, and villages were razed and their inhabitants killed or made homeless.
Against this background, emigration became an increasingly attractive option. This was particularly so as the rural population of Macedonia already had a well-established tradition of seasonal migration: migrant workers, usually younger men, worked elsewhere within the Ottoman Empire, usually over the summer, and then returned to their home villages each year. Therefore, emigration to America was seen as a logical extension of a customary practice.
The numbers of emigrants taking the American option rose in the 1900s as push-factors in Macedonia increased. From modest beginnings – for example, 1,529 in 1903 – the number of emigrants to USA rose rapidly, peaking at 20,769 in 1907 and then, after a temporary drop caused by official attempts to stem the flow, increasing again to 18,405 in 1910. USA received a total of 108,323 immigrants from Turkey-in-Europe over the period from 1903 to 1912. Most of these headed to work in mines and factories in places such as St Louis.
However, the term “immigrants” is slightly misleading. Many of the Macedonians heading to the US regarded themselves as temporary migrants, working and saving for maybe three years in America and then returning home to Macedonia. Moreover, many of the immigrants counted in the official figures given above were repeat migrants. In other words, they travelled to USA, returned to Macedonia, and then returned for a second spell in USA. Of course, a significant number of Macedonians did not return to Europe at all, or returned to Europe but them emigrated permanently to settle in US, or had intended to return home but never did due to the outbreak of WW1.
This explains why it is not unusual for an American family historian with Macedonian roots to find their ancestor on incoming passenger lists arriving at East Coast ports on two or more occasions.
Examining the passenger lists, the family historian will also notice that, as likely as not, the immigrant ancestor did not sail from a port such as Piraeus or Salonika (Thessalonika) close to home. International shipping firms such as the British Cunard Line opened branches in Florina, Koritsa (Korçë), Monastir (Bitola), Resen and other towns, which in turn operated through a network of local agents (often money-lenders providing tickets on credit), selling a passage from ports such as Southampton in England, Le Havre in France, Antwerp in Belgium, and Hamburg and Bremerhaven in Germany. The migrants usually reached these departure ports by rail, crossing the continent, often in groups of relatives and friends from the same or neighbouring villages. Just as a majority of the traditional seasonal migrants were young men, so the typical Macedonian immigrant in USA was a single man in his twenties or thirties, with a rural background; very few travelled with wives and fewer still with children. Perhaps three quarters or more of the immigrants from Ottoman Macedonia were Slavic (that is to say, Macedonian or Bulgarian: national affiliations were not necessarily fully formed at that date), the remainder being ethnic Albanians, Greeks, Jews, Vlachs and others.
For the English-speaking family historian with roots in an Eastern European country, reading English-language travelogues from the past is one way to develop a better understanding of the old country. True, travelogues view a country from a single perspective only, that of the privileged outsider who, on his or her travels, is unlikely to see or experience the country as a native does. Nevertheless, I believe there is much to be gained from historical travel writing and particular from reading a number of books so as to seek a more rounded composite picture of how a place seemed.
Unfortunately, with some exceptions, more recent travel writers rarely seem to be successful in capturing a country. They may be too self-regarding, or unconsciously supercilious, or concerned to avoid seriousness, so that they fall into the category of the ephemeral and lightweight.
There is only a modest literature in English on the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, so I approached Christopher Deliso’s “Hidden Macedonia: The Mystic Lakes of Ohrid and Prespa” (Haus, 2007) with some excitement. Deliso is an American living in Skopje, married to a Macedonian; his travelogue covers his clockwise trip around the lakes of Prespa and Ohrid, through Greece, Albania and of course Macedonia itself.
It is probably accurate to say that I was disappointed by the book but, also, that I understood it and found it interesting despite itself. There are facets of the book which are not pleasing: the casual jibes at poor Albanians and their recent history, seemingly in the hope of raising an easy laugh; the over-intrusive self of the author; the way the book loses momentum midway and starts to peter out in an uncertainty as to its purpose and its audience. The author is described as having read Byzantine Studies at Oxford; it is right that a writer wears his or her learning lightly, but little learning makes it through to this book, which is a shame.
But still, the book catches something of the truth of the place. I can say this with confidence, even without having visited Macedonia. I have travelled in neighbouring Serbia and Bulgaria and I have seen equivalents of some of the things Deliso describes. More than anything else I think I can sense and respect Deliso’s feeling for Macedonia. There is something compelling about the Balkans, something very attractive; and something not at all what you would think if you relied solely on the media’s perennial accounts of the region (a subject superbly dismantled by Maria Todorova in “Imagining the Balkans”), in fact, quite the opposite. It is the humanity of the people and their way of life. To which one should add the roughness and variety of the natural settings of the Balkans, and the beauty of the Orthodox monasteries and churches, and mosques, in that setting. Finally, of course, countries such as Macedonia have yet to be smothered by the blandness of corporate capitalism and the homogenising spirit of the European Union. For the next 10 or 25 years, they will preserve that particularity which makes them fascinating to someone like Deliso or, for example, Alan Grant, whose Balkanology website better illustrates the compelling draw of the region than anything I could write. I am conscious that, if you are from Western Europe, part of this power is the otherness of the Balkans and that this exoticising of the Balkans is something Todorova also addresses in her work; but it also seems to me that the otherness is real and that recognising and valuing it is a valid experience for a person born and raised somewhere in Australia, Britain or North America.
So read Deliso’s book if you can, accept its limitations, and, if you have roots in this particular corner of the Balkans, try to get out there to see it for yourself.
A family historian in the English-speaking world searching speculatively for the marriage of an ancestor on an unknown date does not usually consider seasonality; that is, they have no preconceptions as to whether a wedding would or would not have taken place at any particular time of year. Furthermore, one rarely comes across any especially noticeable peaks or troughs in the frequency of marriages across the calendar year. Couples get married all year round, perhaps in the post-WW2 world showing a preference for summer weddings.
In contrast, in most rural societies across Eastern Europe before WW2 and certainly before WW1 when traditional ways of life were still very much intact, there was marked seasonality of marriage. This is reflected in the pages of any volume of a parish marriage register.
One of the two chief factors was the agricultural year. Throughout the growing season and especially during the harvest, farmers, smallholders and peasants were joined in the fields and in the processing of harvested crops by just about every available hand – villagers of both sexes and all ages would be involved and frequently laboured both long days and by moonlight. During this period, there was generally no time for marriage.
The second factor was the religious calendar. In particular, fasting created marriage seasonality. Especially in Eastern Orthodox communities, marriage was an occasion of extended feasting and therefore incompatible with the fasts, during which meat, dairy produce, rich oils and so on were eschewed. There are various individual feast days during the Orthodox calendar, upon which it would be unthinkable for a wedding to be celebrated. But more to the point there were two fasts of great length.
The first fast was the great or holy fast of the seven weeks of Lent. For instance, in the Serbian Orthodox calendar, traditionally the Church celebrated no marriages between Bele Poklade (a moveable feast, “white Shrovetide”, the last Sunday before Lent) and Đurđevdan (St George’s Day, 6th May).
The second fast took place over the 40 days leading up to Christmas. Again, for the Serbian Orthodox calendar, this is the Božićni Post period from 28th November up to Božić, the Orthodox Christmas itself, on 7th January.
Marriages therefore tended to cluster between these two extended feasts. Factoring in the principal months of agricultural activity, this produced a spate of weddings from mid-January to early March, and again from October to late November.
Of course, for other Orthodox societies, the harvest might move a few weeks according to latitude, altitude, climate and other factors. Similarly, fasting at Lent might well take place over fewer weeks. However, the pattern itself remains largely true and produces the same seasonal peaks in marriage.
The Ottomans conceptualised the population of their empire as three basic communities: the Muslims, the non-Muslim inhabitants and the foreigners (or Franks). In turn, the non-Muslims were divided by religion into the millets.
This view of the population informed the arrangements made to measure and monitor the people. Only Muslims could serve in the army. Their Christian and Jewish neighbours instead had to pay a kind of poll tax called the cizye or jizye, later replaced by the bedelât-ı askeriye, literally a tax in lieu of military service. The early 19th century Ottoman censuses were designed primarily to capture the necessary information to enable the state to conscript Muslim men into the army and to levy taxes upon the non-Muslims. Over the course of the century, the Ottomans endeavoured periodically to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their data, so as to boost army and reserve sizes and to maximise tax revenues.
Only males were counted in the census before reforms in 1878, as only males were liable to military service and taxation.
The Ottoman censuses were not defined regular (for instance, decennial) events taking place over a single night or weekend, unlike most of those in places like Britain and America. Rather, they tended to extend over two years and frequently longer. In due course, the census and civil registration functions merged into a single continuous ongoing recording of the population – the basis of this can be said to have been largely achieved by the mid- or late 1880s. This system was also joined up with the military, so that the army had a continuous feed of information for conscripting men into active service, the reserve and the local militia.
From the late 1850s, the census was also used to produce the equivalent of ID cards. The earliest of these was the vergi nüfus tezkeresi or population tax certificate issued to males, which recorded the holder’s obligations to the state, such as their tax liability.
From about 1878, this was replaced by nüfus tezkeresi or population certificate. This served for ID and had to be used in all interactions with the state and for travel purposes. The information on this population certificate was an extract from the sicil-ı nüfus, or nüfus defter, being the actual population registers created and maintained by the state. Muslims and non-Muslims were enumerated in separate registers. The registers included women for the first time. The register included name, age, place of birth, marital condition, religion, occupation, address and military status. Nickname and, in case of adult males, style of beard or moustache were also recorded for purposes of identification. Along side the population registers, a system of notifying and registering births, marriages, divorces, deaths and change of address was also implemented.
Between 1878 and 1885, the new system was gradually rolled out across much of the Empire. Provinces in Turkey-in-Europe which were not immediately covered included the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Shkodër, plus Bosnia, Bulgaria, Crete, Cyprus, Hercegovina and the autonomous Eastern Rumelia. However, the Aegean, Constantinople, Danube, Edirne, Janina and Salonica provinces were covered, plus Ionia and all of western and central Asia Minor.
Finally, new regulations came into force between 1900 and 1902 that mandated the requirement to carry and present one’s population certificate. In due course, this was documenting so much information about the bearer that it became an ID booklet rather than card, known as the nüfus hüviyet cüzdanı or simply nüfus cüzdanı and still used in Turkey today.
Of course, an increasing numbers of Ottoman-born subjects of empire acquired, for protection or advantage, European passports. For instance, the Greek state was happy to assign Greek citizenship to all Greeks living beyond its borders who applied.
The Aromanians are one of the most fascinating of the various transnational minority groups in the Balkans. In the context of the region known as Macedonia and now subdivided between the nation states of Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, this people tends to be called the Vlachs or Koutsovlachs but they are known by, and call themselves by, a number of different names, many geographically determined.
One reason for this is the nature of their traditional way of life, which was transhumance. Transhumant shepherds would migrate seasonally between summer and winter grazing lands, often significant distances apart, following the same droving routes between highland and lowland each year. They paid little regard to political boundaries, unless forced, and therefore the geographical space they occupied was greater than their numerical population might suggest (even though it is thought that there could well have been 500,000 Aromanians across the Balkans on the eve of the First World War).
Individual branches of Aromanians tended to be known by the names of the mountain ranges where they grazed their flocks in summer. For example, on the territory of modern Greece, those Aromanians frequenting the pastures of the Gramos mountain range in summer were known as the Gramostani and those on the Pindus Mountains as the Pindusteani.
By no means all Aromanians in this region practised transhumance. Many in fact were merchants and, indeed, part of the local elite in towns and larger villages, for example in what is now Florina prefecture in northern Greece abutting the border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The whole geographical region of Macedonia was ethnically mixed and polyglot and therefore the Aromanians, whether shepherds or merchants, were likely to speak one or more of the local Slavic vernaculars and/or Greek and Turkish as well as Aromanian. Certainly, the urban Aromanians were Greek-speaking and of the Orthodox religion and increasingly identified themselves with the Greek nation state, although those who did not – and there were not a few of these – emigrated to Romania (particularly to Dobruja) and beyond to Australia and North America.
Despite the processes of assimilation, there are still 20,000 or more Aromanians in Greece, with typical Vlach villages including Nymfaio (known as Nevesca in Aromanian) in Florina prefecture and Perivoli and Pisoderi in Grevena prefecture.
Researching Aromanian family history is likely to be challenging, at least beyond 1913 (when Epirus and Macedonia were incorporated into Greece). Many families were mobile across what are now international frontiers and many adjusted their surnames to suit the prevailing winds of politics (for instance, commonly changing the suffix at the end of their name from -ović to -ov to -ovski). However, with these caveats, Bluebird Research would be delighted to assist you with genealogical research into Vlach ancestors in northern Greece. Please contact us for a free assessment.
Towards the close of the nineteenth century, Bosnia and Hercegovina were theoretically Ottoman territories administered by the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, which effectively annexed and occupied them in 1878.
A contemporary traveller wrote of the region as follows:
“The population consists of Mohammedan Beys, being Servians [Serbians] who adopted Islam to acquire or preserve a privileged position, and a Christian peasantry, almost exclusively Orthodox in Bosnia, but partly Catholic in the Herzegovina. Sometimes a family divided itself between Christianity and Islam so as to have friends on the right side whatever happened. In such case the members of the family recognise each other as relatives but generally use different names for the two branches conveying the same meaning in Slavonic [Serbo-Croat] and Turkish respectively – e.g. Raikovich and Jenetich (Rai and Jennet meaning “paradise”), Sokolich and Shahinagich (Sokol and Shahin both meaning “falcon”).”
(Odysseus, Turkey in Europe, Edward Arnold, 1900)
He then added in a footnote:
“It is often curious to observe the genesis of family names among the Southern Slavs. Most of them are very recent. Thus in one case the grandfather kept a tavern and was known by the Turks simply as Sharabji, “the wine man”. The son thought that the rising fortunes of the house required a family name and by adding a Slavonic affix to the Turkish designation became Sharabjieff or Šarabdžiev. The grandson who lived in days when Turkish words were considered barbaric and unpatriotic substituted for Sharabji the Bulgarian equivalent Vinar and became Vinarov. In many parts of Bulgaria a man and his wife still use different family names.”
Of course, these observations were made by an English-speaking Western traveller trying to understand the alien local societies and cultures with only the most limited language, reading and experience available to him. Nevertheless, it is always good to be reminded that family history research in South-Eastern Europe has such complexities, both so as to manage one’s own expectations and to remain alert to the need to be agile in one’s thinking when approaching research problems.
When undertaking Serbian family history research, it is important to understand two facts: that the current and historical borders of Serbia do not coincide and that Serbs have always lived outside the country. Therefore, you should not assume that your Serbian ancestors always lived on the territory of modern Serbia.
During the period within which most Serbian genealogists can hope to make decent progress in their family history research – approximately 1800 to date – the northern boundary of Serbia was formed by the Dunav (or Danube) and the city of Belgrade was therefore a border town. On the other side of the Dunav was Vojvodina, which was part of Austro-Hungary until WW1. Many Serbs, along with peoples of other nationalities, lived in the Vojvodina; they were known as prečani (“across the river”), sometimes translated as the transriparian Serbs. Vojvodina itself was divided into three segments: the Srem, between the Sava and the Dunav rivers; the Bačka between the Dunav and the Tisa rivers; and the Banat, the largest and most populated region which today extends across Serbia and neighbouring Romania.
Serbs also lived along the military border, the Krajina, established by the Habsburgs as a bulwark against Ottoman expansion. The existence of the Krajina explains the historic arc of Serbian settlement across northern Bosnia, Slavonia and the western Croatian-Bosnian border. Serbs have always lived elsewhere across Bosnia and Hercegovina (where they constituted between a third and a half of the population at different times throughout the 19th century) and, of course, also in Kosovo (“Old Serbia”) and northern Macedonia.
Serbia achieved limited autonomy from the Ottomans in 1815 and effective independence in 1830. The new state immediately attracted Serbs from the surrounding and still Ottoman regions of Bosnia, Hercegovina and Macedonia. New waves of immigrants arrived in Serbia periodically, for example in 1875 following an uprising in Hercegovina and in 1910 following the suppression by the Ottomans of an Albanian revolt in Kosovo. Serbs living in Austro-Hungary, such as those in the Krajina, were also drawn abroad – up to 300,000 Serbs and Croats are thought to have emigrated to USA from Krajina in the decade leading up to WW1. On American passenger lists, immigration papers and census returns, they may be described as Austrians or Hungarians after their citizenship in Europe. Their Orthodox religion, if recorded, will help mark them out as Serbs.
The history of the Serbs, even in modern times, is complicated by the kinds of factors mentioned above. It should be noted that in some areas many records of value to family historians were destroyed, deliberately or inadvertently, during, for example, the Balkan Wars in 1912/13, in WW1 and WW2, or during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As a result, success cannot be guaranteed.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research in Serbia and across Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia; research may also be possible in Kosovo and parts of Macedonia, depending upon the quality and detail of the background information available. We would be delighted to provide advice and guidance, as well as genealogical research services, and welcome all enquiries.
“I was talking to a wealthy peasant who came in from a neighbouring village to Monastir market. He spoke Greek well, but hardly like a native. “Is your village Greek”, I asked him, “or Bulgarian?” “Well”, he replied, “it is Bulgarian now, but four years ago it was Greek”. The answer seemed to him entirely natural and commonplace. “How”, I asked in some bewilderment, “did that miracle come about?” Why”, said he, “we are all poor men, but we want to have our own school and a priest who will look after us properly. We used to have a Greek teacher… but we had no priest of our own. We shared a priest with several other villages, but he was very unpunctual and remiss. We went to the Greek Bishop to complain, but he refused to do anything for us. The Bulgarians heard of this and they came and made us an offer. They said they would give us a priest who would live in the village and a teacher to whom we need pay nothing. Well, sir, ours is a poor village, and so of course we became Bulgarian”.”
from HN Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and their Future, Methuen & Co, 1906
Monastir, or Manastir, is today known as Bitola and is the second city of the Republic of Macedonia. It is situated in the far south of the country; Albania is not far off and Greece closer still.
When Brailsford was writing, in 1905, Macedonia was not a state but an ill-defined region of ailing Turkey-in-Europe increasingly contested by different national movements. It is true that some of its peoples, such as the Albanians in the west and the Greeks in parts of the south, possessed clear national affiliations but for many others personal identity was properly a matter of religion, to which all else was secondary. The people had been accustomed to being defined by faith community (millet) by the Ottomans for as long as the collective memory could recall. Since the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Serbs, all of whom had an eye on at least part of Macedonia, were all Orthodox, this meant that the majority population of Macedonia found itself on a kind of three-way spectrum along which they could slide, or be slid, as the case may be, as illustrated by Brailsford’s anecdote. The longer-term result of this was that the emerging separate Macedonian identity developed in contradistinction to those surrounding nation states.
For the family historian with antecedents from Macedonia, the advice is to tread with great care and to be prepared for a difficult way ahead. It is vital to know the exact place of origin of the family in order to conduct any meaningful genealogical research. Knowing the family religion is important, too, nationality or ethnicity perhaps less so. Many villages would have just the one church, and/or just the one mosque, and in that respect it might matter little whether the villagers thought of themselves as Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Serb or Vlach (Aromanian or Wallachian) on the one hand, or as Albanian, Bosnian, Pomack or Turkish on the other. Note also that some Albanians in Macedonia were Roman Catholic and, indeed, Orthodox; and that the Gypsies, who tended to live in discrete communities on the outskirts of towns and villages, were usually Muslim but occasionally Orthodox.
Macedonia was contested politically and militarily for too long, with significant and bloody revolts at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, long before the two Balkan Wars of 1912/13 and the destruction of the Great War. Brailsford worked in the vilâyet of Manastir on behalf of an NGO called the British Relief Fund during the winter of 1903/04, following the 1903 uprising and its savage Turkish suppression and reprisals. In that vilâyet alone, he calculated that 119 villages were wholly or partly burned and over 8,400 homes destroyed, displacing at least 60,000 civilian non-combatants. Some families went back to re-build their villages once peace returned but others re-settled elsewhere or went abroad; the subsequent upheavals and conflicts after 1903 created a pattern of repeated displacement and migration and the impact of this, too, must not be under-estimated when attempting family history research in Macedonia.
At the time of Rebecca West’s visit to Macedonia in 1936/37, recounted in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, she reckoned that “not one in a million Englishmen has been to Ochrid” and it is not likely that that ratio has changed since. It was surprising to see, therefore, in the 30th January 2010 Travel section of the Guardian newspaper, a two-page spread devoted to Ohrid: the consciousness of British travel journalists, or perhaps their commissioning editors’, seldom alights on Macedonia or, for that matter, its neighbours Albania and Serbia. However, I then saw the name Kapka Kassabova in the by-line. Kapka is a Bulgarian writer who writes in English and now resides in Scotland; her Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria is highly recommended for anyone interested in everyday life in communist era Bulgaria.
Kapka’s grandmother was from Ohrid and identified herself as Bulgarian. However, follow history one or two or three generations further back and the matter might not have been so clear for her. Macedonia needs to be understood primarily as a large and never well-defined region; today, it is divided between the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece. Its population has always been mixed; hence the Italians’ use of macedonia for a colourful fruit salad. Until the mid 19th century, many inhabitants of Macedonia were more likely to think of themselves in terms of their religion (say, as a Muslim, as a Catholic, or as an Eastern Orthodox Christian) or simply as Macedonians without this connoting race or ethnicity. However, by the late 19th century, Macedonia was the site of emerging and competing nationalisms laying claim to different and often identical sections of the population. Regional identification became less tenable and the growth of national movements encouraged and sometimes compelled individuals and communities to affiliate with one national group or another. Certainly, this seems to have been true of the Albanians, the Greeks and the Slavs, whether Serb, Bulgarian or indeed Macedonian. Outside these contested peoples remained others such as the Gypsies and the Aromanians.
The Guardian piece is illustrated with a half-page photograph of the view across the lake from above the Orthodox Church of Sveti Jovan Kaneo. Rebecca West wrote of the “old town of Ochrid on its hill [that it] is stuck as thickly with churches as a pomander with cloves, and there are several churches in the new town that lies flat on the lake shore”. In fact, the town had so many churches and chapels – allegedly an improbable 365, one for each day of the year – that it was known as the Slavic Jerusalem.
Of its population, West comments that “nothing is… more unsettling than… its numbers of immensely aged people. They must be old, though probably not as old as they say, but still very old, because one finds them living in the same house with five generations of their descendants”. She also remarks that the people – by that date living in Yugoslavia – “preferred harmony to disharmony, and were capable of sacrificing their immediate impulses to this preference”. Such people were less likely to be drawn into the schisms hewn in communities by nationalist politics, more likely to focus on the pleasures and necessities of day-to-day life and getting on with their neighbours whatever their ethnicity or faith. Claudio Magris’s Danube relates the story of a certain Mr Omerić which, he suggests, sums up “the Macedonian question”:
“Omerić, who was so called under the Jugoslav monarchy, became Omerov during the Bulgarian occupation in the Second World War and then Omerski for the Republic of Macedonia, which is part of the Jugoslav federation. His original name, Omer, was Turkish”.